The Invisible Future

 Those of us who mostly know about Alexander Herzen from the works of Isaiah Berlin—which is probably just about everyone in the English-speaking world who has heard of him at all—probably have a clear image in their mind of who he was, and what he stood for. Among the various Russian socialists and revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, we know, Herzen stood out as the proto-liberal; the anti-totalitarian. When others dreamed of sacrificing whole generations and civilizations on the altar of Revolution, Herzen stood apart and begged for reason, temperance, and empirical methods. 

It's the image of Herzen that found its way, for instance, into Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia—itself based on Berlin's works. Those of us who have read Berlin's Russian Thinkers will recognize this version of Herzen easily: it's the reason he became one of our liberal heroes and archetypes before we'd even read him. 

A Tale of Two Nativities

 Our ever-repulsive Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has time and again sought to join her colleagues in the administration in a race to the bottom to see who can post the cruelest and most morally ugly meme on social media. 

Time and again, high-level figures in the government—plus the official social media accounts of U.S. executive departments—have attempted to make light of the human suffering caused by their own policies—rendering images of crying immigrants in handcuffs into the style of "Studio Ghibli" anime; crafting "jokey" names for immigration detention camps; bragging about locking people up in torturous conditions while riffing on Sabrina Carpenter lyrics, etc. 

A Complacent Gesture of Freedom

 There was some long-overdue good news yesterday in the Abrego Garcia case. A federal judge ordered him released from ICE detention, and the government now has no immediate prospect, at least, of following through on their attempts to deport him to Liberia, or Uganda, or any of the other improbable locations they have floated as ultimate destinations, purely in order to retaliate against him for daring to assert his legal and human rights. 

All of this is surely good news. And yet: he still has to check in periodically with ICE agents. The administration has vowed meanwhile to fight "tooth and nail" to appeal Judge Xinis's order and somehow re-deport him or separate him from his family.

An Afghanistan Picture Show

 In the wake of the recent attack on two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., there has been a depressingly predictable wave of anti-Afghan scapegoating and stigmatizing—much of it fanned directly, of course, by our scapegoater-in-chief, Donald Trump. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, he froze all asylum hearings and banned travel for Afghan refugees (many of whom were already subject to his earlier xenophobic travel restrictions anyway). 

When the Wall Street Journal op-ed page—of all people—condemned this (correctly) as an unfair form of "collective punishment," Trump's top lieutenant Stephen Miller fired back on social media to publicly promote the idea of collectively condemning whole societies—including future generations—on the basis of the actions of one individual. "At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands," he wrote.

Burn Me!

 Based on a leaked DOJ memo exclusively reported over on Ken Klippenstein's Substack, it sounds like the administration really is going to follow through on their threats to investigate political dissidents as alleged "domestic terrorists." 

To get the ball rolling, the FBI has reportedly been tasked with compiling a list of individuals and organizations with alleged ties to "Antifa" (a quasi-fictional entity)—and who are "engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism." Warning signs  supposedly include holding certain proscribed beliefs, such as "opposition to [...] immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; [...] radical gender ideology [;] anti-capitalism," etc. 

Slander the Murdered

 The scrutiny on Capitol Hill this week of the alleged "double-tap" drone strike on a boat in the Caribbean has revealed something profoundly disturbing: namely, the large number of our elected officials, both in Congress and the executive branch, who now just officially and publicly support the extrajudicial execution of anyone suspected of transporting drugs. 

Which—as a friend of mine pointed out the other week—places our government on the same moral level as former Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte—currently under arrest in the Hague for killing criminal suspects without charge or trial. That's what our supposedly democratic government has been reduced to in just eleven months of Trump's rule. 

Infernal Sadism

 So let me get this straight. In the past several months, the Trump administration has deliberately murdered more than 80 civilians in drone strikes at sea—because it claims these people were transporting drugs. 

Most of them appear to have been poor fishermen. If some of them were in fact transporting drugs (and we have nothing but the administration's say-so to believe it), they were likely trying to pick up a tempting pay-out for their families by moving a few kilos of cocaine alongside their usual catch. They were not traveling with the far deadlier fentanyl, which is trafficked over land routes—making a mockery of the administration's purported rationale for the attacks, even if it wasn't so patently spurious on its face already.