CounterPunch, February 4, 2022 Your celebration is a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. -Frederick Douglass, 1850 Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from [...]
CounterPunch, 2.3.2022 Joe “Never Called me Boy” Biden is now poised to fulfill his campaign promise to “put a Black woman on the US Supreme Court.” Biden will do so with undeniable symbolic justice and the white nationalist right will wage neofascistic culture war against his nominee. It’ll be both disgusting and amusing to watch [...]
Counterpunch, 1.28.2022 The End of Bourgeois Democracy This is a communist intervention. It’s time to pull our heads out of our asses. Along with an ongoing fascisation process, capitalism-imperialism has brought the related and ever more imminent collapse of livable ecology and thus all prospects for a decent future. It is clear now that there [...]
Counterpunch, 1.21.2022 To speak of “fascism” in American political discourse has long been one of the great taboos of political life – the wise opinion-leaders ritually insisting that this nefarious reference, like dictatorship, tyranny, and totalitarianism, is relevant exclusively to other countries. * Carl Boggs, 2018 In my writing and interviews, I have consistently referred [...]
Counterpunch, 1.14.2022 Great nations don’t bury the truth, they face up to it. We are a great nation. * Joe Biden, January 6, 2022 “It’s Wrong. It’s Undemocratic” On January 6, 2022, United States President Joe Biden marked the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempted fascist coup with remarks that combined some decent if obvious observations with a [...]
Counterpunch, 1.7.2022 Trump won. No, not the 2020 presidential election, the aftermath and the year since his predicted putsch bid on January 6, 2021. So what if he tried to overthrow constitutional rule of law and what’s left of civil decency and democracy? The white nationalist GOP is his Republifascist baby. It’s still the Amerikaner [...]
Counterpunch, 1.5.2022 I’ve been thinking about how some social and political analogies work to some degree and then don’t. Here are some reflections on four political analogies that have been advanced to me in recent weeks. Kyle Rittenhouse and the Grizzly Bear Exhibit It can be useful I suppose to analogize Kyle Rittenhouse to a [...]
Counterpunch, 12.24.2021 Warnings of the Nightmare and Coup to Come Thanks in no small part to the investigation being carried out by the US House January 6 Commission, we will continue to learn new details about the specifics of the Capitol Riot that Donald Trump and his cronies instigated in a last-ditch effort to prevent the [...]
Counterpunch, 12.22.2021 Fellow US-Americans, do you have the strange sensation of still being in the fascistic Donald Trump era during the neoliberal Joe Biden administration? You are not crazy. Yes, the president is still Sleepy Time Joe, a Democrat who announced his 2020 campaign with a video (softly) linking Trump to the rise of Nazism [...]
Counterpunch, 12.17.2021 From “We’re Trying to Win Elections” to “Civil War” The Democratic political strategist Don Calloway does not strike me as a street-fighting warrior. Last October, he went on MSNBC to explain why it was politically futile for congressional Democrats and the Justice Department to enforce subpoenas against Steve Bannon and other January 6th organizers defying the [...]