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. 

Ruere in Servitium

 Almost a year into the second Trump administration, the mad rush of the nation's rich and powerful to demonstrate craven submission, self-degrading fealty, and "anticipatory obedience" to Trump continues apace. If we hear less about it now than we used to, it's not because it has become less common—but rather, that it has become so common as to be unremarkable. 

Any given week, the news headlines will furnish you with fresh examples. This or that major university just cut a deal with Trump and agreed to install a regime of MAGA censorship to ensure that its curriculum will henceforth be compatible with this administration's white nationalist priorities. This or that major corporation has turned another humiliating moral somersault in order to please its masters on the Potomac. 

The Teacher of Crime

 You can always count on Trump to exploit any tragedy as an excuse to smear and stigmatize a vulnerable group. In the wake of the shooting in D.C. of two national guard members, Trump of course wasted no time in blaming Afghani nationals collectively, and calling for a halt to all further migration from that war-torn nation (even though U.S. intervention over decades is a large part of what made it so war-torn). 

Now, on Thanksgiving weekend, Trump has broadened his attack to include immigrants of every nationality and legal status. Borrowing a term from European white nationalists, Trump called openly on social media for "reverse migration"—a term that in Europe is generally understood to refer to a call for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the continent, regardless of their citizenship status. 

Bloody Faith

 A decade or two ago, the values of liberal democracy seemed so securely entrenched in a hegemonic position in world thought, that many on the Left believed they could thumb their noses at them with impunity. Many of us thought that—in a world where seemingly every available shade of opinion in the mainstream parties fell somewhere within the liberal-democratic axis—the biggest threats to left-wing values could only come from "neoliberalism" and "neoconservatism." 

This led many of us to make common cause with post-liberal conservatives, "communitarians," and "trad cons"—since they seemed, for the moment, to share the same enemies. This was the era when you could see Norman Mailer getting interviewed in the pages of the American Conservative, say, and think nothing of it. They both opposed the Iraq War—right? So what was there for them to disagree about? 

The Tribute That Vice Pays to Virtue

 The most insufferable thing about neoconservatism—back in its heyday—was always its rank hypocrisy. The neoconservatives of the Bush era supported war; they supported militarism; they supported torture and surveillance and indefinite detention and other cruel abuses of executive power. But all the time, they dressed it up in sanctimony. They said: we are doing these things because we are more in favor of democracy and human rights than you are. We are doing it because we want to see liberal democracy triumph everywhere. 

In short—even when they were bombing civilians and sending people to CIA black sites—they still declared it was all in the name of universal values. (Which is why Harold Pinter ironically entitled his poem about the Bush administration's chauvinism and aggression "Democracy," for instance.)

The Spoon River Clarion

 In recent days, the Intercept reported on a federal case in Texas in which a young man has been indicted literally just for possessing and transporting anarchist zines. There is no question that the material in these magazines is First Amendment–protected. So, how could moving them around be a crime? 

The feds' theory of the case is that he was deliberately moving these magazines in order to hide evidence that could incriminate his girlfriend. But there is nothing at all incriminating about these materials. All they could reveal, if investigators found them, was that his girlfriend had an interest in anarchism as an ideology—or, at the very least, was reading about it. 

Which—again—is not a crime. 

A Menace Which Was Worse

 Trump's recent ultimatum to Ukraine to accept a Russia-friendly "peace" deal before Thanksgiving amounts to a pretty obvious case of appeasement. But people on both the left and the right have tried to muddy the moral clarity of the issue by portraying the Ukrainian government as just as flawed as Putin. 

Everyone knows that Putin is a dictator. But the "America First" brigade can also point to Ukraine's lack of wartime elections (permitted under the Ukrainian Constitution) to say: "but see, Zelensky is an unelected dictator too."