What Lies Behind Trump Threats to Venezuela and Overall Foreign Policy?

Some Thoughts and a Letter

I’ve been thinking about and trying to figure out what explains the Trump regime’s  attacks on boats in the Caribbean which have now killed 87 people in 22 strikes. And further, its larger threats of war on Venezuela and its foreign policy in general. Below are some thoughts and questions and a letter a friend wrote to me when I posed the questions below.  

Some in Congress, even some in the GOP, have raised questions after a report came out that Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on an alleged “drug boat” in the Caribbean to “kill everyone” on board. The strike blew apart two sailors in the water clinging to the boat which had already been destroyed, 9 occupants killed, in the first strike.

The regime and the direct commander of the operation Admiral Bradley denied a direct order by Hegseth, but have absurdly tried to justify the second strike by claiming the survivors were trying to contact a “mother ship” to continue their effort to smuggle drugs, threatening American lives. . Head of the Senate Intelligence committee Tom Cotton took the murderous absurdity to another level, claiming video of the strike shown to select Congresspeople showed  the two survivors “trying to flip a boat” (which was destroyed and on fire),  and “load it with drugs” before they were killed.

The strike is clearly illegal, even by military law and code. Any neutral observer would see it as clear and unjustified murder.

Beyond this, the entire operation is either a war crime or simply just mass murder. Not a single shred of evidence has been produced by the regime that any of the boats destroyed or people killed were actually narco-traffickers, or even if so, that they were headed for the U.S. Or, for that matter, that anything links them somehow to causing the eventual deaths of people anywhere.  

Blowing up of boats in international waters that pose no risk to the U.S. would be a war crime under circumstances of actual war, but is just plain murder when done not in context of a war. No matter the claims of war by the regime, a war is only a war if both sides are fighting one, and no stretch of the imagination would lead to a conclusion that Venezuela is waging war on the U.S.

I’ve been reading different views on what is the U.S. current imperial policy related to Venezuela and beyond. One sees the threats of U.S. war on Venezuela as attempts to destabilize or remove Maduro in order to shore up the U.S. position in South America, back other fascist governments there,  and threaten social democratic governments and the people of the region. 

Another piece I read from I think Foreign Relations said there is an imperial agenda related to destabilizing and getting rid of Maduro and seizing Venezuelan oil perhaps as a goal, which Trump has mentioned.

A  Truthout piece by Jonathan Ng on NATO and Trump analyzes that the U.S. has reasserted it’s control and leadership within NATO-demanding they pay more for arms and more or less brought them in line with U.S. hegemony. This seems at odds with a view I was tending to- that Trump has only succeeded in destroying U.S. alliances. Instead, this view is that under him the regime is somewhat succeeding in bullying alliances under terms more favorable to itself.

The above on imperial concerns seems in contradiction to what I’d come to think that the U.S. is less concerned with global empire at least as a strategy and more concerned with yes, an extension of fascist power, but more as a way to demonstrate power and strength as well as personal aggrandizement and corrupt profiteering by interests aligned with the regime. Obviously, there is a backing of fascist ‘birds of a feather” in Argentina, Russia, Hungary and elsewhere, an ideological unity and approach to rule held in common. But is this deriving from a thought-out position of U.S. global hegemony and a plan to achieve it similar to previous thought in U.S. ruling circles?

Heather Cox Richardson has a Facebook post on many of the problems the regime is having both internationally and domestically in relation to cracks in their base, the Epstein case, defection among some GOP Congresspeople, declining support in population. She also analyzes some international moves re. Ukraine, and what Trump is out to do. Selected snippets below.

“On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas. Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.

Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.

It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.

Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, ‘a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network’.”

So what is guiding Trumpian foreign policy, how is it best understood? How is it an extension of former U.S. imperialist policy and how a change of emphasis, or divergence or break with it?

I posed some of the above to a friend and received this letter in response which I found insightful and helpful. 

“Yes, I think it’s a pretty complicated situation.  There seems to be much perplexed speculation about US goals around the confrontation with Venezuela.  Some say it’s the oil, noting that Venezuela has the largest know oil reserves in the world (news to me!).  Others that it’s not the oil because the oil is “dirty oil”, requires large investment for refining, there’s an oil glut now (although that could change if Russian and Iranian oil suddenly isn’t available) and at this time Venezuela’s oil production represents only 1% of the world’s production and it would take much time and money to expand it’s decrepit oil drilling capacity. 

Another motivation fits in well with a long-term strategic hostility, across all political parties, presidencies and media towards the Chavez/Maduro defiance of US hegemony.  A particular aspect of that is that “taking down” Venezuela will weaken Cuba and fulfill another long-held goal of bringing down that regime.  It’s said that Cuba, already economically stressed, will implode because it’s extremely dependent on Venezuela’s oil.  Other widely held reasons for “regime change” in Venezuela is that it will weaken Columbia, which along with Brazil and Chile has some level of resistance to US hegemony.

 And in the background, there’s always and everywhere the specter of China’s ever-increasing economic power, influence, and rivalry with US.  So overall, there’s a pretty broad consensus that regime change in Venezuela is the final goal here.

  On the other hand, there’s much dismay and worry among politicians and foreign policy pundits over the Trumpers’ strategy and tactics: concerns about “overreach”,  heavy-handedness, more “forever wars”, driving Latin American countries into China’s arms, etc.  Where does the hysteria and aggressiveness of the Trumpers come from?  Blowing up the “drug boats” of course fits well with the macho, “warrior ethos”, i.e. with the fascist chest thumping that’s intended to impress the public.  But more than that, the hysteria over “terrorist attacks by drug cartels” fits in well with frightening the public and then saving them, “saving American lives” which would otherwise be lost to drug overdose. 

 So there are two different approaches but one shared goal: preservation of US political and economic hegemony.  Neither approach is driven primarily by immediate US economic or financial needs. 

It’s true that Trump’s greed and megalomania are on full display here and at times motivate particular actions and policies which can undermine US strategy, but I think there’s a much more fundamental motivation.  The Trumpers gain their strength directly from the crisis of neoliberalism, particularly the 2008 financial meltdown, the consequent recession, the relative impoverishment of many and the rise of the tea party movement.  On the other hand, the Obama presidency responded to the crisis with business-as-usual policies: bail out the banks and corporations, allow homeowners to lose their homes, respond slowly, if at all, to increased unemployment and stagnation of real wage incomes.  In short, stay the course of neoliberalism.   For their part, the tea-partiers and want-to-be fascists responded with acknowledgement of the crisis but misrepresented it as a crisis of “western civilization”, “you’re losing your country”, pushing paranoid conspiracy theories, demonization of “other” races and cultures, etc. – the whole nine yards.

  To many people, the fascist reaction seems irrational, illogical, without foundation in reality. But if one looks at the severity of the crisis of neo-liberalism then continuing with that neo-liberal strategy seems equally irrational.    In the short term, another strategy that might seem viable is that of progressivism and social-democracy but these will clearly exacerbate the political crisis; their redistributionist goals are unacceptable to capital as are its democratizing political tendencies.  So fascism for all its craziness is at some point the last best hope for US hegemony. Its level of desperation is matched only by the level of risk to which the entire world is exposed.

  What are the moneyed interests to do in such a situation?  Primarily, ally with one strategy or the other, preserve their political options, engage politically when advantageous, and continue to make money.”

Food for thought.

Trump Regime’s USDA refuses to Fund Emergency Food Assistance for SNAP

https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snaps-contingency-reserve-is-available-for-regular-snap-benefits-as-usda

So the regime is refusing to use funds available for food assistance to the poorest people while holding firm on slashing health care for tens of millions. Meanwhile, they shift funds around to cover paying the military, continue murder of fishermen off the coast of ICE (while they lie about “drug-smuggling”), and making sure that ICE continues to get funds to build more prisons, sweep up our neighbors, attack protesters, and tear gas neighborhoods, even attacking a Halloween parade for kids gathered in Chicago.  (see also https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/immigration-agents-become-increasingly-aggressive-in-chicago )

Trump sends $20 billion to Argentina to bail out a dictator friend and $300 million for his golden ballroom built on the ruins of the  east wing of the White House as he reaps billions in corrupt expansion of crypto investments, trading favors for support, and pardoning crypto criminals. The gap and the sharpness of the contradiction between rich and poor and the corruption, profit-grabbing and destruction of any oversight or restraints to corruption get more clear. Hopefully, it is bringing home to even more people the reality of this sick, fascist capitalist regime.

Trump and Hegseth Unleash Military to War on “the Enemy Within”

I’m reposting here this summation by Glee Violette of Trump and Hegseth’s meeting with top military leaders. It is beyond concerning. It’s a call and plan for full-scale use of the military to suppress any protest, opposition or voices of those the regime finds a threat. And a threat to them is anyone who opposes them in any fashion. It’s a call to use the military against “the enemy within”, which means anyone in the U.S. who doesn’t submit to fascism. It’s a move to fully line up military leaders with this mission or to force them out.

This is a huge step in the consolidation of fascism which would mean a different, violent form of rule. A dictatorship where the rule of law is destroyed and there are no rights of assembly, due process or freedom of speech. A dictatorship where science, truth and logic are corrupted, turned inside out, and completely suppressed. A dictatorship where non-white peoples are subject to vicious and open racist assault and suppression and imprisonment, beyond even the worst of what has taken place previously. A dictatorship where transgender and LGBTQ folks are surrounded, suppressed and assaulted. And where humanity in the world as a whole are subject to ridicule and murder at the whim of Trump.

This is not just spectacle or “a distraction”. It’s the imposition of a new, vicious form of rule, dictatorship. This imposition has been in process since Trump 2.0 took office, but this is a huge leap to finalizing it and consolidating it as the established form of rule. And no, the 2026 elections will not save us. There will be no free and fair elections. Not even as “free” as previous ones even with their suppression of millions of voters and gerry mandering.

Our only hope is to gather in millions in the towns and public squares throughout the country, non-violently and not leave. Oct. 19 No Kings Day and Nov 5th Refuse Fascism Call for Washington D.C. are key nodal points but the response has to happen now.

-CJ

Glee Violette

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BREAKING: Before leaving the White House for his speech at the Quantico base on Tuesday, Trump told reporters, “I’m going to be meeting with generals and with admirals and with leaders, and if I don’t like somebody, I’m going to fire ‘em right on the spot.”

His message AT the assembly? That the US is fighting an “invasion from the enemy within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

Trump made VERY clear who he was referring to. He went on to single out large, Democratic-run cities as targets for a federal crackdown, naming Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as examples of places he deemed “very unsafe.” “We’re gonna straighten them out one by one. And this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” said Trump.

“I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. National Guard, but our military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”

No, a Democratic Governor.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And how do Trump and Hegseth plan to deal with “The Enemy” in this war going forward?

Hegseth made his NEW rules clear. “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country,” he declared. “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

And, again, WHO is “The Enemy”?

“It’s a war from within,” said Trump.

Neither Trump nor Hegseth referenced a war against any other people or nation. Only our own people, and our own nation.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hegseth started his address by making it clear only white males have a place in HIS military. He said that everyone, regardless of gender, will have to pass the SAME physical requirements.

DEI and “woke” regulations are banned.

He defended his firings of flag officers, which included the top U.S. general, who is Black, and the Navy’s top admiral, who is a woman. He said the officers he relieved were part of a “broken culture”.

“Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading and we lost our way. We became the ‘Woke Department,'” Hegseth said. “But not anymore,”

“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, you should do the honorable thing and resign,” he said.

“HONORABLE?” If something is making your “heart sink” it most definitely is NOT “honorable”.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But the MOST important thing, as far as Hegseth himself was concerned, was the policy change he is making for his OWN benefit.

He wants to “encourage risk-takers” by not making them accountable for their “mistakes”.

He said that by ending “equal opportunity programs” and overhauling the Inspector General’s office, he would end discrimination complaints and other “frivolous complaints.”

“No more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations,” he said. Personnel records will “allow leaders with forgivable, earnest, or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.”

Bloomberg News notes that, “Hegseth himself is the subject of a current investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General for leaking classified information in a Signal messaging chat that inadvertently included a journalist.”

Hegseth is now about to direct a war on our own soil against our own people. He is not planning to be accountable to ANYONE.

AND, he wants to make sure that the officers who obey his potentially illegal commands do not have to worry about being accountable, either.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Trump followed Hegseth by opening with, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

He made some short comments echoing his “War Secretary”, and said he “had their backs. 100%”. Even though he got a deferment when he was called to serve with them in Vietnam. But that’s OK. Now that he does not have to serve at all, he is committed to making the military stronger, faster and fiercer “than ever before.”

And then, of course, he launched into his usual rally-style rambling rant about himself.

Making the same false claims about ending more world conflicts than any other president, claiming personal credit for a rise in enlistments, claiming ALL the credit for “his” creation of the U.S. military’s Space Force and blaming Biden for the bad deal Trump himself made with Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders.

In fact, he made sure the military leaders knew that their allegiance should be ALL about politics. “The past administration — they did not treat you with respect. They’re Democrats. They never do,” said Trump.

“We won every swing state, we won the popular vote. We won everything. You have to take a look at the map. It’s almost entirely red except there’s a little blue line on each coast. And I think that’s gonna disappear, too,” said the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States of America.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It was a different message than the one Trump told Reuters he was going to give: “I want to tell the generals that we love them, they’re cherished leaders, to be strong, be tough and be smart and be compassionate,” Trump said in the Reuters interview on Sunday.

Compassionate??? While carrying weapons to confront our own citizens in our own cities, under Trump’s new authorization to use “FULL FORCE”.

Right.

In his first term, Trump wanted the military to shoot BLM protesters. General Milley refused.

Now Navy commanders are obeying his orders to blow up small boats and kill unknown people in international waters.

Will National Guard and Marine commanders obey his orders to shoot the same “Venezuelan Drug Runners” in our own cities?

Will they obey his orders to shoot ANY “illegal aliens” or “gang members” or “criminals”?

Will they obey his orders to shoot US?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Trump said today that “we are under an invasion from the enemy within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

Hegseth said, “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

This was a bald-faced open statement of not only supremacist rhetoric, but a statement of the intention to use violence to achieve their agenda.

Trump named Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as examples of places he deemed “very unsafe.” “We’re gonna straighten them out one by one. And this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” he said.

Oh. And Trump just ordered the National Guard into Chicago.

The Murder of Charlie Kirk-A Reichstag Moment for Trump


The Murder of Charlie Kirk-A Reichstag Moment for Trump

By: Curtis Johnson

We are not on a slippery slope to fascism, but instead on a speeding train headed for a one-way tunnel that will slam shut if the train gets through.

The murder of fascist Charlie Kirk comes at what would seem both a dangerous and thus opportune time for Trump. Things have been threatening to go south for him. Mass opposition and resistance has grown to his ICE kidnappings in LA and elsewhere. Large protests were held in D.C. and Chicago against his troop deployments building on earlier protests in the spring and summer.

The regime has been embroiled in a deepening crisis about their desperate efforts to shut down and cover-up the Epstein scandal, including Trump’s own role. This crisis escalated after powerful and heart-wrenching testimony by survivors on Capitol Hill of the sexual abuse committed by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Survivors alluded to the participation and complicity that reaches into high levels of the power structure.

Trump’s health and rationality has become a major question mark and sign of weakness,  as his pole numbers sink and dissatisfaction spreads. The economy is wobbling and the danger of Trump becoming the emperor without any clothes a viable threat.

 Kirk’s murder is a bad thing, and has nothing to do with non-violent protest and efforts by actual progressives, anti-fascists and millions of ordinary people to stop fascism. In fact, it is providing an opportunity the regime has seized to try to reverse their weaknesses and problems and repolarize the political situation.

In the wake of the murder, a pogromist atmosphere has been unleashed and fanned into the MAGA base and throughout society by Trump, his officials and fascist “influencers”.

For the regime, this is a “Reichstag moment”. This refers to the Nazi’s grabbing of centralized power after the burning down of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. The arson was blamed on a communist but was very probably carried out by the Nazis themselves.  Or else they simply seized the opportunity to turn it to their advantage. In either case, it became the justification for consolidating Hitler’s dictatorship

Trump and other top officials called for a broad and completely baseless assault on and dismantling of “the radical left” using all  the tools of the power structure. They do so based on manufacturing without evidence a connection of the shooter to the “organized radical left”. Whatever that is. In the process, everyone and every organization  left of the GOP is put on notice they could be next, and that they better shut up and get in line. Some on the right openly push for blood and war on “the enemy within”. What’s next? Outlawing of whole  organizations, targeting of individuals for arrest and terrorism charges despite any evidence? Mass detentions? Expanded judicial or extra judicial murder?

All of this amounts to an attempt to silence and purge society of opposition and a violent consolidation of fascist power.

We’ve seen over and over this regime provides no evidence for anything it claims, and does the most horrendous things anyway. The latest examples-the mass detention of immigrants who often have legal status and mostly face no charges,  while claiming to go after the “worst of the worst”. Or, the gleeful murder of Venezuelan fishermen while claiming without evidence they are gang narcotraffickers.  

Trump orders flags to half staff. NFL teams order a moment of silence for the racist Kirk.  Stephen Colbert previously and  now Jimmy Kimmel are forced off the air. Kimmel’s show is replaced with a Sinclair company prop-ed honoring Kirk’s life. A nationwide bending of the knee to racism and fascist dictate in Kirk’s honor is being spread and enforced throughout the culture.

This is, as Thom Hartman said a few days ago, the “Horst Wesseling” of America. Horst Wessel was a notorious Nazi brownshirt killed by communists in 1930 after Wessel had orchestrated an attack and assault on Communist Party headquarters. The Nazis turned Wessel into a national celebrity and martyr in their drive for fascist consolidation, the annihilation of the Jews,  and preparation for World War II

 Now in the U.S. after the Kirk murder, journalists, teachers, TV personalities,  and many others are targets of death threats and firings for either pointing out Kirk’s racist, anti-gay and anti-trans views or questioning the official story. Trump’s FCC assailed ABC who then fires Kimmel for questioning the regimes story about Kirk’s murderer and their motives. MSNBC fired Mathew Dowd for questioning the veracity of the regime’s argument. The last full time Washington Post Black columnist is fired for raising facts about Kirk’s actual views.

Trump sues the New York Times for stories he doesn’t like. Previously, he sued the Wall St. Journal for publishing a story on Trump’s disgusting “birthday card” to his buddy, rapist Jeffrey Epstein which his spokespeople alleged didn’t exist and he denied writing. Now of course, the card has been released and proven to exist, with his signature.  

Billionaire interests that back or acquiesce to fascism now have control of most of the major news outlets-CBS through Paramount who’s CEO is David Ellison-son of Oracle owner and billionaire Trump buddy Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison himself is now poised to take control of TikTok in the U.S.  X, owned by fascist Elon Musk.  Facebook and it’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg who has bent to Trump’s demands around abortion content and fact-checking, and appeared at his inauguration along with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.  ABC through Disney CEO Bob Iger who has increasingly bowed to Trump’s demands , including donating $15million to a future Trump foundation museum after a Trump lawsuit. Of course NPR was gutted of federal funding by Trump’s dissolving of the Corporation for Public Broadcast.

It’s readily apparent what all of  this suppression and capture of the press represents and where it goes. First the press is “the enemy of the people”- turned into the target of MAGA hate and sometimes open attack. Certain news media are cut off from access to the White House while right wing and fascist ones that have no credibility are brought in. Billionaires in concert with Trump buy up and force out any who would oppose him in the media. Others toe the line and shut up or join in the targeting of opposition voices.

Trump officials and spokespeople as a matter of course seek to performatively outdo each other to lambast and heap vitriole on the press for raising any questions about Trump’s polices. The goal, to force deference and submission and rule out of order anything that could be considered the least oppositional.

The MAGA base is encouraged to search for and identify oppositional voices in society and social media who can be accused of “celebrating” Kirk’s murder, often simply for noting what Kirk actually said in life. And now Trump calls for government agencies to move to silence and force off the air anyone who is critical of him. The next logical move could well be trying to outright criminalize criticism of him or his regime to silence and punish dissent.

All of these fascist moves now come of course on top of what the regime has already done or is in process of doing. Its mass kidnapping of immigrants for imprisonment and deportation without due process. Its arresting of citizens who are Black and brown especially, greenlit by the Supreme Court’s ethnic cleansing decision allowing this. Masked and unidentified federal agents roam major cities, farms, factories and rural areas grabbing brown people going to work, dropping off their children at school, working their jobs, attending immigration hearings. Concentration camps are built with plans for massive expansion,  and tens of billions are approved for this and to expand the army of ICE gestapo.

Trump has occupied the nation’s capital and second largest city with federal troops, setting up roadblocks, checkpoints, harassing and jailing Black youth and the homeless, and backing ICE arrests. He threatens more cities will follow.

Black figures in politics, entertainment and sports are slandered. Small steps after the George Floyd protests to incorporate DEI measures in government, corporation and NGOs are targeted and agencies continuing these practices face funding cuts. National Museums that tell the true history of America’s bloody history of slavery, Jim Crow and other oppression of Black people, genocide of native people, and women’s oppression are shut down or purged in favor of white supremacist fables of America’s greatness and power. Cultural institutions of enlightenment, creativity and expression are taken over to eliminate “wokeness”.

Government programs, departments and funding that help people survive health care crises, medical emergencies, combat diseases, that oversee food and health safety, that educate young people, are gutted and destroyed. Support for scientific and climate research is slashed. A campaign to slash funding for the war on cancer is directed by the regime, cutting funding 37%. The environment is targeted for massive destruction by logging of wild lands containing precious mature and old-growth forests,  and poisoning by greenhouse gases, pesticides and other pollution to fuel capitalist profiteering.

Open corruption and the buying of favors becomes the order of the day for Trump and his regime. Qatar gives Trump a new Air Force One. The U.S. agrees to sell rare AI chips to the U. A. E after a billionaire member of the royal family invests 2 billion in a Trump family cryptocurrency company. Personal “face time” at Presidential dinners  with Trump is traded for other investments in Trump or Trump family interests or other favors. Federal agencies overseeing corporate corruption and thievery are gutted by the thieves themselves and those who have interests in common.

Oppositional voices throughout the federal  government are silenced, fired or forced out, in some cases investigated for criminal charges. Former top officials, even of Trump’s first administration and former presidents are targeted for slander, investigation,  loss of secret service protection,  and possible charges. Democratic officials are arrested or assaulted for asking questions of Trump officials or trying to perform their legal oversight of immigration facilities.  

The atmosphere of obsequiousness, debasement,  and corruption seeps into every sphere of the federal government, throughout the GOP at every level and into society’s institutions. Universities, newspapers, media outlets and  law firms acquiesce to outrageous demands to bow to the Trump regime and perform service under threat of cuts to federal funds or other targeting. Student dissent and opposition on campus to Israeli genocide is targeted with help from the Democrats under the ridiculous banner of “anti-semitism” , even against Jewish organizations. The atmosphere on campus becomes one of fear to speak out and keeping ones head down.  

Now, the attempt is to roll everything up as regime officials sense if they don’t, it’s at least possible the wheels could come off. We must make sure they aren’t successful at carrying this out,  and that the reverse becomes reality.  Otherwise, the horrors we are already seeing are guaranteed to reach levels we can barely imagine. 

Massive, persistent, and courageous opposition to all of what is being attempted by Trump and his lackeys is absolutely essential if we are to have any hope at stopping fascist consolidation and turning this around. Protests to the firing of Kimmel and other figures, to federal troops, to ICE kidnappings,  to assaults on the press, to attempts to criminalize oppositional speech, to shut down and silence the media,  to attacks on progressive and leftist organizations and individuals-all of this must break  out and be built and fanned throughout the country.

National coordinated protests have to be called and grow and not let up or be one day affairs. No King’s Day Oct. 18th must be so widespread, large and disruptive it can’t be ignored. And people have to pour into D.C. Nov. 5th for Refuse Fascism’s call for beginning the non-violent and on-going protests of millions to shut down the Trump regime and force it from power.

It’s very possibly, now or never.

I’m reposting this piece by Henry Giroux from Truthout due to the danger of the moment. We must stand together against the fascist Trump regime’s attempts to outlaw opposition politics and the left in the wake of the Kirk Murder-CJ

Charlie Kirk’s Death Is a Symptom of a National Political Culture in Crisis

https://truthout.org/articles/charlie-kirks-death-is-a-symptom-of-a-national-political-culture-in-crisi

What we are witnessing is not an isolated act but the manifestation of a wider rot.

By Henry A. Giroux , Truthout

PublishedSeptember 12, 2025

Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk speaks on stage with Donald Trump at America Fest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024.
Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk speaks on stage with Donald Trump at America Fest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024.

The cruel and horrendous killing of Charlie Kirk was both reprehensible and indefensible. Political assassinations, regardless of the source, are an act of violence against all Americans. Such violence is on the rise, and it is not limited to one ideology: In recent months we have seen attacks against both Republicans and Democrats coming from people with a range of political identities.

A suspect in Kirk’s killing is now in custody in Utah. In a press conference, law enforcement announced that a rifle and bullets found near the scene of the killing were inscribed — some with anti-fascist slogans, and others with what seem to be references to internet memes. While we are still learning about the motivations of the suspect, we do know that the claims made by Trump and his supporters — that political violence is primarily the work of the left, are pure fabrications.

Blaming the left for all political violence is a smear that reproduces a rhetoric of desperation. It functions less as a serious argument than as a pretext for legitimizing state repression. This is quite evident in the fact that Trump and many in the MAGA movement are weaponizing the act of this isolated individual in order to openly call for violence against the left as a whole, seizing on Kirk’s death to peddle accusations that his killing was the work of progressives, as TIME reports. This kind of scapegoating reveals the larger strategy: any event, no matter how tenuous, will be weaponized to justify crackdowns on dissent. What this exposes is not concern for truth or justice but the naked readiness of the Trump regime to unleash violence against critics. This is fascism stripped of disguise, fascism on steroids.

In his address on Kirk’s death on September 10, Trump claimed that the “radical left” was to blame, insisting that rhetoric comparing “wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” The same narrative quickly spread across right-wing media and social platforms. Influential MAGA voices echoed Trump’s framing, stoking resentment toward the left and portraying Kirk’s killing as a call to arms. Far right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer declared, “The Left are terrorists,” warning that Kirk’s death was only the beginning of “more targeted assassination.” “You could be next,” she wrote, before demanding that “these lunatic leftists” be shut down “once and for all.”

Such rhetoric is part of a broader strategy: to weaponize Kirk’s death as proof that dissent from the left is itself a form of violence that justifies repression.

At this current moment in history, the greatest threat of violence and its normalization comes not only from far right extremists, but also from a government that uses the threat of violence as a tool of political power.

Mainstream media outlets are mostly focusing on Kirk’s death and in doing so rightly condemn his killing as a horrific act of violence. But at the same time, they are ignoring a deeper truth: violence is not an aberration in the United States; rather, it has become central to the politics of Donald Trump and his regime. Moreover, much of the coverage of Kirk reduces him to a sharp debater, a youth organizer, or a rising figure in the far right. What is largely ignored is the substance of his arguments, which helped normalize a culture of hate, white nationalism, authoritarianism, and violence itself.

Kirk’s record is clear. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful,” and labeled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake.” He claimed the racist “Great Replacement” theory is real, insisted that immigration is a deliberate strategy to erode the white population, and derided the very idea of white privilege as a fabrication. He “compared pandemic vaccine requirements to apartheid during a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson.” He argued that Israel was not starving Gazans,” in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He spread a vicious falsehood about Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five, wrongly insisting he had taken part in a gang rape, an attack that was not only defamatory but also part of a long pattern of baselessly criminalizing Black men as predators. Kirk smeared gay people and “encouraged students and parents to report professors whom they suspected of embracing … gender ideology.” He trafficked in antisemitic stereotypes, once claiming that “Jewish dollars” were funding Marxist ideas in education as well as policy that pushed for open borders.

Perhaps most chilling was his defense of mass gun violence. Kirk declared that some gun deaths, (assuming this includes children), are simply the price “of liberty” to protect the Second Amendment. At a time when classrooms have become sites of recurring carnage, such remarks treat murdered children as collateral damage, erasing the human cost of the U.S.’s obsession with guns and elevating ideology over life itself.

These are not isolated remarks; they form a worldview that dehumanizes, divides, and elevates cruelty into a political principle. To remember Kirk only for his debating skills or his reach among young conservatives is to miss the disturbing truth: he championed ideas that normalized hate and legitimized violence as a way of governing.

This kind of scapegoating reveals the larger strategy: any event, no matter how tenuous, will be weaponized to justify crackdowns on dissent.

Kirk’s murder — tragic and senseless — cannot be separated from the broader U.S. landscape in which violence has become the grammar of politics, hatred is given more weight than compassion, and truth itself is sacrificed at the altar of power. In this climate, the needs of ordinary people and the promise of the common good are not only neglected but treated with disdain. To confront this reality is not to deny grief, but to name honestly the world we now inhabit, one in which the struggle for justice and human dignity has never been more urgent. Kirk’s death is not an aberration but a grim marker in the U.S.’s descent, where violence has become the lifeblood of politics and hatred the currency of power. This is not simply a tragedy — it is the death rattle of democracy itself, a notice that the nation is being hollowed out from within by those who thrive on cruelty and contempt.

According to Reuters’ data, the United States is now in its most sustained stretch of political violence since the 1970s: more than 300 politically motivated attacks have erupted since January 6, 2021. In just the first half of 2025, nearly 150 such incidents have been recorded — almost double the number during the same period last year, according to University of Maryland researcher Michael Jensen. This is not simply a wave but a storm.

According to one study that has been referenced by the National Institute of Justice, between 1990 and 2020, the far right was responsible for 227 ideologically motivated attacks that resulted in 523 deaths, while the far left was linked to only 42 such attacks, causing 78 deaths. These figures almost certainly underestimate the extent of far right violence, since U.S. courts have often been reluctant to classify groups on the right as extremist and because law enforcement agencies have historically directed their surveillance and investigative resources toward the left, leaving right-wing violence less scrutinized.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration removed the reference to this study from the National Institute of Justice website, in addition to removing other data that sought to make sense of the numbers behind ideological violence, an erasure that can only be understood as a politically motivated attempt to downplay the threat posed by far right violence.

Soon after the anniversary of 9/11, it is worth recalling that what followed those attacks was not a defense of democracy but an endless reign of state violence: the devastating invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture programs and extraordinary renditions, secret CIA prisons, and the horror of Guantánamo. The lesson is unmistakable: the machinery of political and state violence has long been driven by those in power — not by the left.

This is the climate in which Kirk lived and spoke. To grieve his death honestly is to reckon with the country that made such violence thinkable. Warnings even in the liberal press have too often turned the assassination into a warning aimed not at Trump and his allies but at Democrats, liberals, and the left — cautioning them not to be too harsh in criticizing Kirk’s ideological position lest it fuel Trump’s threat to dismantle democracy. Even worse, some commentators have rushed to defend the abstract principle of free speech while ignoring the substance of Kirk’s far right beliefs and the culture of cruelty he helped to spread. The implicit suggestion is that if liberals and progressives provide “balance” and soften their rhetoric, the cycle of violence will somehow abate.

Such arguments miss the point. They deflect responsibility away from Trump, whose hateful rhetoric has both normalized and legitimized political violence, and place the burden instead on his critics. To imagine that silencing dissent or softening critique will stop the advance of authoritarian violence is not only naïve but dangerous. Trump does not need to weaponize Kirk’s death; he already thrives on scapegoating and making use of tragedy to deepen his culture of fear. The machinery of authoritarian power is already in motion: democracy and the rule of law have been steadily dismantled, the streets militarized, and mass detentions and deportations normalized against those marked by race, origin, or dissenting politics. At the same time, the regime tightens its grip by punishing local officials and judges who resist its illegal edicts. Cities are being militarized as tanks are now rolling through the streets of Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Los Angeles. What is unfolding is not a response to one tragic event but the consolidation of a politics of terror that has been years in the making.

Kirk’s killing is not merely the sorrowful loss of a single life; it stands as a foreboding emblem of a nation in decline. It signals that the atmosphere of U.S. democracy has grown toxic, choked by a politics of violence. What we are witnessing is not an isolated act but the symptom of a wider rot, the erosion of civic bonds, the elevation of cruelty into common sense, and the slow unravelling of a republic that once fashioned itself, however falsely, as a model of freedom. To treat this moment as nothing more than personal grief is to ignore its darker portent: it announces that the pillars of democracy are cracking, and the edifice itself is beginning to crumble.

The current collapse of democracy is neither accidental nor abstract. It has been fueled by Trump’s poisonous rhetoric, which has turned politics into a theatre of humiliation and cruelty. His demonization of opponents has moved from the fringes into the mainstream, shaping a culture where enemies are to be destroyed rather than debated. In this climate, the very air of public life grows toxic, turning grievance into license.

As Robert Pape warns, U.S. politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” When the culture itself becomes a breeding ground for violence — supercharged by the rampant acquisition of guns and the spectacle of cruelty — every killing echoes as more than personal loss. Kirk’s death is not just another entry in the ledger of political violence; it is an omen. It tells us that a republic drunk on resentment and hatred cannot breathe freely, that the poison that a politics of domination has released into the cultural bloodstream cannot be easily contained. If this moment is ignored, if it is seen only as the misfortune of one man rather than the symptom of a larger crisis, then the canary’s warning will have come too late.

The Acceleration of Fascism

By Curtis Johnson

This past week, Rachel Maddow warned in a way that feels increasingly brave given Trump’s attacks on the media, America today is a different country than before Trump 2.0 came to power. The reality is clear now, she said, America  has an authoritarian leader who is consolidating a dictatorship. She is right.

This is the case despite it being important to understand that Maddow’s perspective is hindered by belief in America and its “basic goodness” and “perfectibility”.  This includes basic support for its military, despite its role as a worldwide enforcer of brutal empire. The reality is, America both is, and is not a different country. Or better said, it IS, but this is based on a previous foundation and history of slavery, genocide, war and oppression.

 Nonetheless, the country is quickly being wrenched into a new form of consolidated fascist rule. A departure built on existing institutions of oppression. A rule where previous norms-formal democratic rights, due process, separation of powers including especially relative independence of the Department of Justice and FBI from the executive, and the rule of law in general-are being eviscerated and replaced with raw dictatorial power. Power that is concentrated in Trump above all, and his sycophantic minions and accomplices throughout the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, military and law enforcement.

Yes, Maddow says, people continue to live their lives, go to work, to shows and concerts, fall in love and out of love, in and out of faith, etc. But she says, we live in a different country with secret and unaccountable masked police, detention prisons, and destruction of due process. “The things we worried about and feared are here”.

To differ on one point however, Maddow says the U.S. has detention camps, but not death camps, say as Nazi Germany did. But it must be said, Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as death camps. But as the situation accelerated especially with invasion of the Soviet Union, they were turned into death camps, built on the logic of Nazi ideology and its hatred of Jews and belief in “Aryan” superiority. One should ask, can anyone argue that the ideology of the Trump regime just would never lead it to this in what it considered “an emergency situation?”

Maddow showed powerful testimony  by a woman in Lincoln Nebraska at a town hall meeting held by MAGA mouthpiece Congressperson Mike Flood. The woman demanded, with the millions being spent on concentration camps and for ICE to illegally detain people, “how much do the taxpayers need to spend for a fascist country?”

ICE -Fascism’s Battering Ram

Maddow highlighted again, as she has stood out for among mainstream media, protest around the country against Trump and ICE. She told the story of a young Korean woman, Yeonsoo Go. Yeonsoo came to the U.S. in 2021 with her mother, a priest in a famous Episcopal church in NYC. Despite being a person with legal status, no charges against her, and no history of illegality, (or maybe BECAUSE of this), ICE kidnapped her and sent her to a detention camp in Louisiana.

At the end of the show, it broke that ICE had been forced to release her after much protest by leading religious figures, which is wonderful.

But in general, there is no pullback by ICE, despite important and serious resistance in LA and elsewhere. Indeed, ICE raids continue and have escalated throughout the country. And now billions are becoming available by Trump’s ugly new fascist bill, to recruit tens of thousands more secret police and expand concentration camps countrywide. 

Under Trump, ICE is playing a key role as a Nazi-style Gestapo for the elimination of democratic rights and due process. Immigrants being the initial target for kidnapping, mass imprisonment in concentration camps, and suspension of legal rights.  Democratic representatives are arrested. Armed troops are sent into LA and MacArthur Park, a center of immigrant gathering. LA is targeted for “liberation” as “Ice Barbie” Kristi Noem puts it, from democratically elected officials. They’ve sent people to off-site gulags in El Salvador and elsewhere while Trump muses about “the homegrowns are next”. They’ve built Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp  in the Everglades with plans and money allocated for many more,  and are protested by Japanese Americans for plans to reopen a former concentration camp for the Japanese during World War II.

In LA and elsewhere, ICE Gestapo has targeted people based on appearance and skin color-including U.S. citizens who’ve been jailed, usually released as far as we know. And continued on until they were somewhat limited by a judge who had to almost unbelievably make a ruling that “no, you can’t target people based on appearance.  You must have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing”. Which the regime is appealing and aiming for the pro-fascist Supreme Court to rule on.

All these previous norms- supposedly the hallmark of U.S. “justice”-innocent until proven guilty, not being targeted because of your skin color or the way you look and given due process, etc.-now under conversion to, “we can do anything we want to anyone, as long as we can get away with it”.   (Of course the previous norms talk rings hollow for Black and other people of color, for whom law enforcement and the imprisonment system has always been a tool of oppression, including unrelenting murder by police.) But now the attempt is to do so openly, routinely, gleefully, and as a matter of official policy from the highest level, first aimed at the Latino population but to be extended as needed.

The state is locking up a great majority of people who have no charges against them and those that do are primarily minor charges. Many kidnapped even have legal status. It’s ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing as a means of establishing fascism. Ethnic cleansing to create a scapegoat who can be blamed and held responsible for all the problems the country faces. Ethnic cleansing to whip up the worst, most racist, backward and ignorant sentiments among primarily the white populace and appeal to their wanting to unleash their anger and resentment against an “enemy” who has nothing to do with causing their deteriorating conditions of life and emptiness of their existence.   Ethnic cleansing to intimidate and threaten any and all who would oppose fascism and racism. And to put in place the apparatus, means and norms for repression of the entire populace to eliminate opposition, protest and dissent.  And the majority of people aren’t for it.

The Daily Drumbeat

What we see from the fascist authorities are at least daily measures to establish new fascist norms throughout the institutions of power. They understand well, keeping up the momentum of fascist consolidation is key. Never openly backing down or apologizing, continuing to replace truth, science and logic, with lies and the “logic” of fascist power, is key.

Trump orders Texas republicans to redistrict congressional districts in a blatant power grab to ensure the GOP’s hold on Congress. No legal or legitimate reason is given to justify this and increasingly, the new norm is not even to offer any. This is to assert and demonstrate openly, that raw power is all that matters. Nothing else is required than, “we can, so we will”. In a sense, it is stunning, but perhaps shouldn’t be shocking, how easy it has been for fascists to take hold of the previous oppressive institutions and convert them fully, openly, unapologetically into tools of corruption and naked power.

Trump’s EPA announces their move to wipe out the endangerment finding under which greenhouse gases could be limited as they fuel the unfolding climate catastrophe. This, just one part of the Trumpian effort to do away with any limits to fossil fuel production or even the concept of study, concern or tracking of climate change.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes statistics for May jobs report, Trump fires the head of the department., demonstrating once again the campaign to replace facts, truth with fascist propaganda. This is not just standard “governmental lying” as always seen in class society, but part of a plan to convert truth and the standard of truth from one based on reality demonstrable with evidence to whatever the “leader” says is true. Trump never offers evidence and the press never demands it.

Trump moves nuclear submarines closer to Russia in a power move to threaten around settling with the U.S. over Ukraine and Putin says they no longer have any obligation to abide by previous nuclear treaties. So, danger of world war increases. Attorney General Pam Bondi directs DOJ to investigate Obama and former Obama officials for allegedly creating fake intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. So, the actual repressive moves against the opposition ratchet up. Even official ruling class figures, former presidents and heads of intelligence agencies now targeted!

And now, Trump has announced his regime will take over the Washington D.C. police  and send in the National Guard because of the threat from “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth.” Despite the fact, announced by D.C.’s Attorney General, that the crime rate in the city is at a 30-year low.

Fascism accelerating by Trump here is fueling and being fueled, by fascism and genocide by Israel in the Middle East. Twin fascisms pushing each other forward with mutual support. Odeh Hadalin, a contributor to the Oscar winning movie “No Other Land” is murdered by a Zionist settler who then is released and seen hanging out with the Israeli police and helping direct them to arrest other Palestinians in the West Bank. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visits the community where Odeh has just been murdered and declares,  “The mountains of Judea and Samaria are the rightful property of the Jewish people.”

As the world in the main, horrifically, stands by and watches, Palestinian people are starved to death. Images of children with flesh hanging off their bones flash worldwide and starvation stalks the entire population.  Netanyahu announces Israeli plans to annex all of Gaza and Trump says that’s up to them.  The U.S. who has funded, armed and given political support to Israel throughout the genocide, under Trump has teamed up with Israel to further starve the population by the elimination of 400 UN feeding stations to set up just four phony,  Israeli controlled stations where over 1000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli troops after being herded together like animals.

Again On the Language of Fascism

As fascism accelerates here now in the U.S., I keep returning to reading about the language and ideology of the Nazi Third Reich that comes out in study of Victor Klemperer’s diary of life in Germany. In particular his second volume, “To the Bitter End”. This relates to a piece I did previously in Counterpunch.

Klemperer’s diary, especially in 1944 and 45, constantly touches on speculation of the Jewish population and others more broadly, including himself, as Germany is increasingly being defeated in the Soviet Union and in the west after the invasion of Normandy, about “how long” the regime will last.

At this moment, Klemperer speaks of the general fear that even in defeat, the remaining Jews will be slaughtered, as so many others already have been. That in revenge, the rest will be mass murdered at “five minutes to midnight”. The fear is ultimate, suffocating in cases. Alternately it creates apathy and refusal to believe it will actually end, because believing and then having hopes dashed would be suicidal after all that has already been suffered. Living in slavery, as Klemperer calls it.

Even as Germany is losing on all fronts and allied troops enter Germany territory east and west, the Hitler regime continues to espouse the coming victory based on “Aryan superiority”, new weaponry, and the love for country and Fuhrer of the German population.

Klemperer writes in September 1944, “The NSDAP’s (Nazi Party’s) ‘word of the week’ (Dresdener Zeitung, 18th September) goes: ‘The coming victory will be the victory for us all. Today we must all accept responsibility for it, fanatically and unconditionally, Dr. Goebbels.’  (Always: Dr., their famous university man, always the worn out ‘fanatical’.) The headline above this text, which also sets the tone for the subsequent commentary. ‘The Creed of the National Community’. Final words of the commentary, ‘Now more than ever!’-This while there are battles on German soil, the English are twenty miles from Cologne and in Holland, they are air landing troops are on the right side of the Rhine delta! I ask myself again and again what kind of effect it has, whether it rouses people against the Allies or against the Nazis, whether it is the height of stupidity or the height of cleverness. Only success can answer that question. I believe by turns (changing my mind six times a day) that Germany must collapse in the next six weeks, and that Germany will stand its ground. And again and again: my reason hopes and believes but my heart doubts.”

Then next, he speaks of more articles in the press and banners in shop windows, “’Our will to live is stronger than our enemies’ will to destroy’. ‘Only a strong heart withstands the harshest test.’ An article by a Lieutenant Colonel Ellenbeck. ‘Daily reflection. What can I do to help my nation?’  Content: One minute of reflection every morning. Then weigh every word, show no weakness, be convinced of victory. Encourage those who show weakness, denounce defeatists. The really interesting thing about this sermon is its style. For the LTI, (Lanuage of the Third Reich) there is only the Goebbels-Hitler pattern-all the run-of-the-mill is imitation of that. “

The Goebbels-Hitler pattern. The propaganda never stops, the denial of reality, the assertion of final victory is eminent. Sound familiar?  The Trump regime operates with the same logic. Why? They must destroy the ability of people to learn the truth, and believe any admission of weakness will turn into further weakness, defeat, and losing the whole thing. A desperation. The Nazi language always asserting “Aryan” superiority, specialness, unprecedentedness, historic nature, the virtues and awe of their great “Fuhrer” who is invincible, “ordained by Providence”. As if bluster and assertion alone can overcome or supersede reality. 

Sound familiar? So Trumpian! So reminiscent in language and approach. Yes, a very different country, different parameters, history and without a pre-determined path. Yet, consistent in language and basic goals of unchallenged power.

And no, the position of the defeated German Reich is not reflected in the actual situation of the Trump regime. But in ideology and method the same and so revealing of an underlying weakness.  Where every sycophant and lackey in the ruling party must of necessity worship and heap ridiculous, outlandish, even silly praise on for the amazing insight and great leadership of Trump. Who,  falsely as it’s claimed,  “the American people so overwhelmingly elected” to create all the horrors he has. (Despite polls of 37% in support vs. 59% in opposition.). The leader who “God has chosen”.  So transparently and demonstrably false.

Without substance, hollow and false, and yes, desperate.

Who knows where this all ends up. But truth matters and reality asserts itself. At least truth can matter if fought for consistently. The regimes’ defeats are not primary. I would argue they are unfortunately mainly succeeding. Things are increasingly dangerous, and they could win out in the drive to fully consolidate fascism.  

But also underlying, there is desperation and danger for them. Exactly so because of what they are doing to so many, how open and outrageous they are doing this, and how they are turning so many against them. The protest and resistance to Trump and the system in general matter a great deal, especially in this context. Yet even so, there is a tremendous need to reach new levels where millions consistently and without pause put this regime on the defense and turn things so it can no longer govern in this way. This could be accomplished. Will it be? Without the people making this happen, no one will save us- humanity, and the planet. .

Forest Protectors Launch Tree Sit and Lawsuits to Stop Ecocidal Logging in WA

Forest protectors are defending mature forests from logging after dam removal and restoration on the Elwha River.

By Curtis Johnson , Truthout

Published July 6, 2025

Activists with the Elwha Legacy Forest coalition hold a sign above a logged tree at the Aldwell former legacy forest site above the Elwha River in Washington state, on April 6, 2024.

Standing at the edge of the Aldwell Forest clearcut just above the Elwha River in Washington State, the Murphy Company’s devastation of the landscape slaps you in the face. Here on land owned by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), a beautiful mature forest has been logged for hardwood, plywood, and other wood products. Hacked-off stumps are visible in all directions, a few trees left to stand. The former forest floor, once rich with organisms and nutrients that fed life, now stands heaped into huge slash piles to be burned. The land doused with herbicide to kill any competitors to Douglas fir seedlings that will become a new tree plantation monoculture.

The contrast with the remaining intact Elwha legacy forests, located nearby in the watershed, couldn’t be starker. There, in naturally regenerated forests more than a century old, large Douglas fir, western red cedar and big-leaf maple trees festooned with moss and licorice ferns surround you. Native sword ferns, trillium, salal, red huckleberry, lichen, and other native vegetation in multiple shades of brilliant green abound.

After DNR put more Elwha legacy forest on the chopping block during a November 2024 auction, environmentalists, citizens, and forest defenders are fighting to stop Murphy’s logging there through lawsuits and direct action.

For over a month, a tree-sit launched by a grouping called the Olympic Forest Defenders (OFD) blocked the road into the Parched forest site scheduled for destruction. The sit received broad support through encampments, rallies, and continuous supply efforts from community members. After a judge refused to extend an injunction against logging, police and violent vigilantes attacked the sit and encampment. The OFD made a decision to end the tree-sit on June 15 for the safety of those involved.

“Our commitment to defend the forests and waters of the Olympic Peninsula remains strong,” states an OFD press release. “To the vigilantes, the DNR cops, and state-sponsored repression, we say: You did not dig up our roots. We are still here. Stop pillaging our people. Stop pillaging our forests. Stop pillaging our waters. Our movement has not been uprooted. It is just beginning to grow.”

The Restored Elwha and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe

The Lower Elwha River in Washington state, as seen on June 3, 2025.
The Lower Elwha River in Washington state, as seen on June 3, 2025.

The Elwha River runs out of the protected Olympic National Park. It is the pulsing heart of the ancestral homelands of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe. Two large hydropower dams, the Elwha and Glines Canyon, were built on the river between 1910 and 1927 to fuel timber processing and industry in the Port Angeles area. The dam builder didn’t bother to include legally required mechanisms for fish passage.

The dams blocked the free-flowing river, flooding tribal village and cultural sites and decimating the tribe’s way of life. Ninety-three percent of the upstream salmon spawning habitat was cut off, leading to near extirpation of pristine populations of wild salmon in the river that was central to the Lower Elwha people’s life and culture. Before the dams, the Elwha was famous for its enormous chinook salmon, precious to the tribe and a primary food source for orca whales of the Salish Sea.

Tribal elders passed down to their children and grandchildren the stories of the river filled with fish before the dams. Under tribal pressure that spanned generations, a $325 million project was launched in 2011 by tribal, governmental, and academic agencies and scientists to restore the river ecosystem by removing the dams; restoring the river’s flow; planting native plants; and building back the populations of five species of Pacific salmon, steelhead, and other species. The dams were finally taken down in the years between 2011 and 2014 — more than 20 years after a 1992 Congressional Act ordered it.

The project has been an inspiring success in restoring the anadromous fish populations and the ecosystem, as well as a source of pride for the Lower Elwha people. The river returned to natural channels after dam removal, and after a few years of major sediment release, it began to clear. The released sediment rebuilt the delta and estuary at the Elwha mouth on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which is critical to rearing juvenile migrating fish.

But new logging of forests on the hills just above the river represents an assault on the restoration efforts that have been achieved. It also explains the deep feelings held among tribal members, Forest Defenders, conservationists, and others who care about the land and river ecosystem.

Logging clear-cut at the Aldwell former legacy forest site above the Elwha River in Washington state, as seen on June 3, 2025.

A petition circulated in October 2024 by Lower Elwha tribe members and signed by over half of the members of the tribe, as well as 2,500 other people, states that,

We do not understand a way of thinking that would spend hundreds of millions on Elwha River restoration but continue to industrially log in that same watershed. We do not understand a way of thinking that takes too much and says it is never enough; that would disrespect a River that gives us so much life and now hope.

Our ancestral knowledge and sacred obligation to the natural world teaches us a different path. We have inherent and treaty protected rights in these lands as our usual and accustomed gathering areas. Together, we call for the protection of the Elwha Watershed as a commitment to our mutual future and to the wellbeing of all who depend upon it. We ask you to stop these planned timber sales and heed our call to be guided by principles of respect and reciprocity in caring for the watershed.

Lawsuits in Defense of the Elwha Legacy Forests

The DNR’s November 2024 auction of the now-threatened Elwha forests to the Murphy Company were among others the DNR Board of Resources rushed through in apparent anticipation of new Public Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove taking office in January 2025. Upthegrove had pledged to protect legacy forests if elected.

The Tree Well and Parched logging plans threaten to cut over 300 acres of mature legacy conifer forest, some of which has never been logged. Two lawsuits were filed to overturn the sales in December 2024 by the Earth Law Center (ELC) in conjunction with the Orca Network, the Center for Whale Research, and the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition (LFDC).

The lawsuits lay out a coherent, detailed picture of the damage new logging would cause to the river ecosystem. The ELC suit alleges that the DNR is violating the state Public Lands and Environmental Policy Acts by failing to perform an adequate environmental assessment of the logging’s impact on mature, structurally complex, and biodiverse forests. The two forest sites are critical to carbon sequestration and as habitat for wildlife and culturally significant native plants.

The lawsuit also argues scientific studies have shown logging negatively impacts stream flows, hydrology, and water temperature — all factors critical to supporting the Elwha system and its salmon populations, which in turn support populations of the critically endangered southern resident orcas.

The groups’ also charge that logging on steep slopes in these sites above the Elwha and its tributaries threatens slope stability, pointing out the potential impact to Port Angeles’s water supply.

LFCD is suing for injunctive relief against the sale of the forests on the basis that the DNR is neglecting to follow its own policies to regenerate old-growth forest on 10-15 percent of state forestlands — a legal approach that has successfully paused other DNR timber sales.

The LFDC’s Kyle Krakow told Truthout in an emailed statement that the group has “appealed a total of 32 sales in lawsuits that are still ongoing in most cases. Collectively, these timber sales threaten over 2,300 acres of biodiverse and carbon-dense legacy forests across western Washington.”

Truthout also spoke to LaTrisha Suggs, a restoration planner for, and enrolled member of, the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe. Her family has lived for time immemorial in Clallam County. Suggs is also a Port Angeles City Council member who worked as a restoration planner for the Lower Elwha tribe on the river restoration project.

In a declaration filed in support of the LFDC lawsuit, Suggs stated that,

The sites of many of the proposed and sold parcels have steep slopes, and the levels of logging that occurs has an impact on the potential for landslides, particularly with the impacts of climate change and increased rain events in Port Angeles. When landslides occur, because the trees can no longer hold back the soil due to clear cutting, the soil runs into the streams and rivers, blocking access to salmon and impacting water quality. The soils of mature forests act as storage for water that the plant communities rely on during the summer months.

Her declaration also stated that Port Angeles has been under a stage three water shortage each summer since 2022, and Clallam County has been under a drought advisory for years — issues expected to get worse as climate change advances.

Elizabeth Dunne is ELC’s director of legal advocacy. She lives near the Elwha River and co-founded the Elwha Legacy Forest Coalition (ELF) after DNR sanctioned logging on the Aldwell forest. Dunne and the coalition’s successful efforts to stop a prior timber sale in the Elwha has been told in an award-winning short film, Last Stand, Saving the Elwha River’s Legacy Forests.

She shared a map with Truthout showing that greater than 50 percent of the Elwha’s legacy forests have been logged in just the last 17 years; little older forest remains in the Elwha watershed. Now DNR has plans for logging 800 more acres.

“The Elwha River is really speaking for many of these ecosystems that are suffering at the hands of over-extraction and exploitation for profit without having any kind of sense of responsibility of the balance that we need to show back to the Earth if we are going to continue to survive as a species. And not just survive but be able to thrive,” Dunne said. “Imagine a world where we can go fishing, where we have abundant ecosystems, and they’re not all controlled and commodified, and we’re able to, sustain ourselves.”

The Fight to Save the Parched Legacy Forest

In early May, Murphy began building roads into the Parched timber units, tearing down trees and bringing in gravel. In response, on May 7 the Olympic Forest Defenders began their tree-sit, blocking the road into the Parched site off U.S. Highway 101.

The Forest Defenders demanded an immediate cancellation of the Parched timber sale, a pause on all logging in the Elwha watershed, and a permanent ban on logging the remaining mature forests in western Washington.

The tree-sit involved a cable pulley stretched from logs and other debris blocking the middle of the logging road connected to a “dunk tank”-type platform 60-80 feet up a nearby large grand fir tree. Cutting the cable would cause the sitter on the platform to come crashing down.

Truthout was able to visit and speak there and on the phone with “Fable,” a 25-year-old tree-sitter, about the goals of the tree-sit and why they were participating. “There’s a long history in the Pacific Northwest of direct action and tree-sitting being effective, especially when done in conjunction with some sort of legal pressure,” Fable told Truthout.

They told Truthout they had grown up a timber farm and helped manage it with their parents. The family would talk about the impact of logging on the land and the creeks, and Fable would go salmon fishing with their dad and uncles, learning about the connection between forests, rivers, and salmon.

Fable told Truthout that they had studied math to get a master’s degree, but their recent experience of caretaking for a loved one who was sick changed their life. The experience “made me want to be more involved in things that actually make change in the world,” they said. “Realistically, the most good you can do is caring for people and caring for land, and keeping people and land safe from the really evil things that are out there.”

Rallies were held at the Parched site, and for over a month community members from around the region continuously brought in supplies and camped to protect the sitter. DNR officers initially surrounded the tree, running generator-powered lights around the clock before backing off. They would at times try to stop people from going in or threaten them with arrest.

“The support’s been great and kind of surprising,” Fable said. “People understand how critical of a moment this is and that this kind of action is necessary, which really gives me a lot of hope because that’s how I feel. And to not just be a lone person doing something like this is just really, really cool.”

After the tree-sit began, Land Commissioner Upthegrove, who placed a six-month pause on logging legacy forests, condemned the sitters saying, “This stunt is dangerous, reckless and counterproductive…. Their actions put the safety and lives of my employees at risk, and I will seek the prosecution of those involved to the fullest extent of the law. This kind of dangerous vandalism makes it harder to advance a positive environmental agenda.”

The sitters’ message, on the other hand, was: “Dave Upthegrove promised to protect mature forests. We are here helping him keep his promise.”

Upthegrove’s threats ignited phone calls and emails to his office, including from some who had worked for him because of his campaign pledges. Nonetheless on May 28, he doubled down on threats to the Forest Defenders, saying, “We intend to hold those responsible accountable.”

A statement on DNR’s website says Upthegrove is reassessing the process on legacy forests, but that, “Some paused sales could be reconfigured and brought forward to auction once the criteria to exclude structurally complex forests that are critical to carbon storage and habitat biodiversity are developed.” Upthegrove also said he’s committed to protect sales approved before he took office, saying, “It’s important to defend policies and the authority of the agency.”

It’s unclear what DNR will do after the six-month “pause” in legacy forest sales ends. In a letter to Clallam County Democrats, Upthegrove said he intended to bring forward a policy to protect 77,000 acres of older forests, a significant step if done, though less than the 106,000 acres of legacy forest currently unprotected. He claimed, without evidence, that the tree-sit had endangered DNR employees.

After first ordering a two-week injunction against logging and compelling DNR to produce administrative records supporting its decision to approve the timber sales, a Clallam County Superior Court judge refused to extend the injunction past May 23. On June 6, she ruled against an LFDC filing which sought to prevent logging until both lawsuits could receive a full hearing on their merits. Hearings on the merits should be held in coming months.

Dunne told Truthout that she was disappointed in the judge’s ruling. “Existing policies aside, what we need today is action commensurate with the gravity of the extinction and biodiversity crisis: a clear directive creating an Ecological Forest Reserve and permanently protecting all remaining legacy forests on state lands for their intrinsic value and as essential to the survival of all species,” she said.

On June 13, police of unknown affiliation swept the camp, seizing supplies and hindering the ability of the encampment to protect the tree-sitter’s life. (A DNR spokesperson told Truthout he couldn’t comment on the raid of the encampment or the vigilante attacks, only saying DNR had “cleared the many makeshift barricades” on the logging road.) Despite this, the community rallied in support, bringing new supplies and people to keep the sit protected.

Over the next days, violent vigilantes attacked the tree-sit twice. They tampered with the cable and tripod anchoring the platform supporting the tree-sitter, causing it to dangerously dip. Vigilantes also drunkenly threatened to kill the Forest Defenders and threw bottles around. One pointed a gun at Forest Defenders, walking aggressively toward them and then shot into the forest. After this, the Defenders decided to safely evacuate the site before someone was hurt or killed.

At press time, the tree-sit and encampment are gone but the outcome with the threatened forests remains undetermined. Those protecting the forests remain committed to their aims and lawsuits on the merits of the logging remain to be heard.

“Dave Upthegrove ran as a progressive, and that’s kind of the first and main legislator we’re pushing back against right now. I don’t know that we would have done things any different if there weren’t these sort of executive orders (like Trump’s on timber sales) going into place, and this sort of over-escalation and fascism in our country … and is giving people hope that even under a really threatening administration, we can keep pushing back against it,” Fable told Truthout.

Trump’s War on Forests

republished from truthout.org

Trump’s Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

Trump’s Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

The president’s push to expand timber and fossil fuel production “is a double whammy on the climate.”

By Curtis Johnson , Truthout

Published May 17, 2025

Workers add freshly harvested logs to the piles in a timber company log yard near Clarkia, Idaho.
Workers add freshly harvested logs to the piles in a timber company log yard near Clarkia, Idaho.

On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order claimed “onerous Federal policies” have hindered domestic timber production and that expanding logging was a matter of protecting “national and economic security.” It ordered the secretary of the Interior and head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) respectively, to develop a plan to expand timber targets and streamline permitting “to suspend, revise, or rescind all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, settlements, consent orders, and other agency actions that impose an undue burden on timber production.”

The responsible departments and agencies were instructed to find categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act and use “emergency regulations” to circumvent the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

After Trump’s order, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service continued the assault on endangered species by proposing a new rule that would redefine “harm” under the ESA to only include directly killing species, replacing the current definition that includes destruction of a species’ habitat. Habitat destruction is the greatest source of species extinction.

In April, USDA head Brooke Rollins directed the stripping of forest protections on more than half of all national forests and called for expanding timber production by 25 percent to address a “wildfire emergency,” and restore forest “resources.” A report from the Associated Press says the directive “exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized.”

A map of forests Rollins has targeted includes all national forests in Washington State and California, and large sections throughout the west and other parts of the country. It even includes some wilderness areas. These forests contain some of the most cherished old-growth and mature forest ecosystems remaining in the U.S.

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In the Pacific Northwest, millions of acres of older and mature forests and old-growth dependent species like the northern spotted owl were finally protected by the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in the 1990s after a century of logging that had reduced the forest to about a fourth of its historical extent. The NWFP happened as a result of intense forest defense and protest by Earth First! and many other environmental groups, studies by forest ecologists and court injunctions. The idea that these forests of immense trees, stunning natural beauty, rich biodiversity and crucial reserves of carbon sequestration could now, once again, be opened to logging is stomach-turning.

In late April, Idaho Gov. Brad Little issued his own executive order in line with Trump’s, aiming to ramp up logging with the same “rationale” as the Trump order, combatting increased wildfire danger. The order appears to replace federal responsibility for forest management in that of the state.

Jeff Juel, forest policy director for Friends of the Clearwater (FOC) said, “The state of Idaho has not earned the trust of the American public to manage forests while preserving old growth, assuring wildlife populations are robust and healthy, or maintaining hunting and fishing opportunities.… They are, on the other hand, experts at clearcutting and making state lands resemble a war zone.”

Climate Change and Wildfire

Trump’s order called for “forest management and wildfire risk reduction projects” to “save American lives and communities.” Yet none of the administration’s orders even gave lip service to the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that climate change is the main driver of more severe wildfire that has resulted in the destruction of whole communities in the west in recent years, including parts of Los Angeles.

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with Wild Heritage, whose stated mission is to protect and restore forests and safeguard biocultural diversity around the world, told Truthout that Trump’s policies are “a double whammy on the climate. By beginning the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, they’re going to continue to drill for fossil fuels and increase our emissions to the atmosphere. At the same time, they’re talking about an executive order that would increase logging on 280 million acres of forests across the U.S., bypassing the nation’s … landmark environmental laws, even the Endangered Species Act.”

DellaSala led an international team of scientists in doing the first nationwide mapping of mature and old-growth forests in the U.S. Their analysis found these forests sequester 9 percent of the nation’s total emissions.

“These big, fast-moving fires are the combination of extreme fire weather caused by anthropogenic climate change interacting with heavily logged landscapes. So it’s that double whammy again, by doing more logging and contributing to more emissions, you have a feedback on fire weather over the long run, that’s what’s really driving these big fires,” DellaSala told Truthout. “The latest climate attribute models are showing now that we can explain a lot of the causality around these big fires because of the increase in spring and summertime temperatures, especially heat domes, high winds and extreme droughts.”

As the Trump administration cited wildfire mitigation as a reason to increase logging to “save communities” from wildfire, it was busy axing programs, agencies and employees who were researching or seeking ways to combat the climate crisis driving increased wildfire. Trump also declared an “energy emergency” justifying elimination of government environmental regulations on energy production.

Wildfire Science and “Mitigation”

A growing body of knowledge in fire ecology understands wildfire is a natural phenomenon that ecosystems have evolved in relation to. Trees and plants have evolved strategies for flourishing with fire — such as conifers which have serotinous cones that require fire to open them so seeds are distributed.

Fire plays a key role in ecosystem restoration. It is increasingly understood among fire ecologists that a century of fire suppression in the U.S. has failed, and has been damaging in preventing fire from playing its role in maintaining forest health.

Traditionally, Indigenous cultures in the U.S. burned the landscape to control larger, more dangerous wildfires and to generate better growing conditions for native plants they harvested. Cultural burning is credited by most scientists as well as tribes with helping maintain healthy forest ecosystems and biodiversity.

A member of the Karuk tribe in California told CalMatters “Fire, for us, is not just a tool — it’s a lifeline, a means of renewal, and a vital part of our culture.” Indigenous burning was suppressed in California and in the U.S. as a whole in the 19th century by the government as part of destruction of Native culture, theft of land and genocide.

Wildland fire is a very complex phenomenon. Different types of forests have very different fire regimes. Degrees of fire intensity differ greatly between forests and even within forests of the same general type, depending on rainfall, climate, and other factors. Historically, fire intensity varied, even within forest patches.

Decades of fire suppression by the USFS has led to a buildup of denser forests in some western dry forests. In the era of climate crisis, this has contributed to more intense and widespread fires. There is basic agreement among scientists on the role of climate change as a prime driver that must be addressed. Many agree on the need to curtail fire suppression in the backcountry to help restore the natural function of fire on the landscape. Steps here include allowing certain backcountry fires to burn and to increase prescribed burning, especially during seasons of lower fire risk.

There’s also a clear need to develop programs for home hardening, vegetation clearing near structures and better escape plans for threatened communities.

But the science on using mechanical thinning of forests to manage wildfire is not settled. There is ongoing debate about how effective it is at lowering the severity of wildfire or its threat to communities. Disagreements remain over the degree and type of thinning that should occur, where and when it should be done if at all, if it should only be undertaken in tandem with prescribed burning and whether it is beneficial or harmful to the ecosystem.

Scientists do in general agree that if done, thinning should focus on dry forests, removing smaller trees and protecting more fire-resilient older and mature trees. A USFS study showed that older forests that have been protected from logging to preserve nesting area for the northern spotted owl under the NWFP can act as “fire refugia,” burning at lower intensity than surrounding landscape. A 2016 study in Ecosphere showed forests with high levels of protection from logging in dry and mixed-conifer forests burn with lower intensity than unprotected forests or those subjected to logging, even though they generally contain more forest biomass.

Forest Service Fuel Treatment

No matter the scientific debate, the reality is that over recent decades, government policy has largely continued to rely on fire suppression. This strategy has failed to lower the risks to communities or to save forested ecosystems. At the same time, the USFS has, in recent years, begun to use thinning and prescribed burning on hundreds of thousands of acres of land each year and has plans for tens of millions more.

Environmental groups that are watching this on the ground say some mitigation projects have been done more judiciously and can be helpful, but now a great deal of USFS projects are just clear-cutting of forests to produce revenue for timber companies.

Karen Coulter of Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project (BMBP), which works to protect and restore the ecosystems of the Blue Mountains and Eastern Oregon Cascades, told Truthout she has been monitoring public lands in eastern Oregon and southwest Washington for 33 years. She said in the 1990s, average timber sales were smaller-scale, legitimate commercial thinning. “Sometimes I could agree with it. Because it was thinning from below, and it wasn’t hacking down the large trees and so forth. It was more reasonable. Now it’s virtual clear-cutting, much more intense logging, and it’s on a landscape scale.”

BMBP’s website has many photos of USFS projects termed “free selection,” “commercial” thinning or “understory removal” in the Malheur and Umatilla National Forests that are essentially clear-cuts. Everything is mowed down. Some of these include old-growth trees.

Right now, the organization is contesting a USFS project in an Inventoried Roadless Area, (public lands without roads that have high conservation value), that includes Walla Walla, Washington’s, municipal watershed and old-growth trees. They say logging here could cause damage to water quality for the city and streams that support threatened salmon, steelhead and bull trout.

Nick Cady is the legal director with Cascadia Wildlands (CW) in Eugene, Oregon. CW works to defend and restore wild ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. Cady told Truthout that another issue is often Forest Service proposals are turned over to timber companies to execute, giving them leeway. Meanwhile, he said the BLM is “just logging as much as they can.”

Cady said of USFS “mitigation” proposals, “If you log to maximize value, you dramatically increase fire risk. That is what the data on the ground has shown time and time again…. So if you say you’re going to maximize logging to improve fire, it’s just not real.”

USFS did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

In Montana, the Alliance For The Wild Rockies recently sued and stopped a USFS project planning to cut and burn 15,000-45,000 acres covering the whole eastern side of the Bitterroot National Forest over 20 years, claiming “categorical exclusions” from protecting threatened species.

The amount of timber sold from logging USFS lands in the U.S. from 2014 to 2023 has varied between 2.8 and 3.2 billion board feet a year. Expanding timber production by 25 percent would increase sales to 3.75 billion board feet a year from its current 2024 level of around 3 billion board feet.

Internal USFS documents obtained by WildEarth Guardians (WEG) show top officials under both Trump and former President Joe Biden have pressured foresters to streamline the process for timber sales. At a June 2017 meeting, the USFS leadership team for the Pacific Northwest said the head of USFS was calling to “increase our restoration activities” so as to “increase acres treated and volume output as a consequence.”

USFS has also been undertaking plans to revamp the NWFP in ways that would increase the cut of older trees. One proposal would, among other things, change the age of trees protected in wet forest Late Successional Reserves from 80 to 120 years, opening up 824,000 acres to logging. WEG says this would “eviscerate the entire concept of [the reserves] which were originally intended to provide large blocks of older forests for species like the northern spotted owl.”

What’s Next?

The Trump regime now threatens to worsen the devastation of some of our most important older forests, gutting the most fire-resilient ecosystems, increasing the threat of climate change and more dangerous wildfire. It does so while slashing environmental protections across the board and gutting key agencies and programs that offer some protection to humans and the planet.

Cady and Coulter both told Truthout that the regime is going to run into all kinds of problems with accomplishing their plan — shuttered lumber mills, previous legal decisions against timber interests in court and real difficulties with the process of designing these sales after firing thousands of forest service employees.

Cady said Cascadia Wildlands has “a massive body of supporters” that can be mobilized to act regardless of decisions in the courts. He said, “People live here, they don’t want massive amounts of logging.”

In cooperation with court challenges and active public engagement by these and other groups, forest defense efforts including active tree sits have increasingly jumped off in Pacific Northwest forests recently. These include two tree sits in southern Oregon on BLM land, one of which helped precipitate a court ruling canceling logging in the Poor Windy Project in May 2024. Another tree sit has just begun to protect legacy forest on Department of Natural Resource land in Washington State near the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula.

Coulter said what Trump’s order is attempting “would be illegal and challenged in court, but the problem is their strategy seems to be that they could wrench these destructive timber sales through first before there’s any final legal outcome. And this is kind of what they’re doing, is wrecking everything as fast as they can, dismantling the agencies,” she said. “We need to raise the profile of the forest defense movement…. We need to raise the profile of forests, along with everything else that they’re targeting.”

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The Language of Fascism

from Counterpunch

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/06/the-language-of-fascism/

May 6, 2025

Curtis Johnson

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Image by Mika Baumeister.

Since the advent of Trump 2.0 in January of this year, it has become increasingly clear that this time around, we face a more virulent and all-encompassing attempt to impose fascism than the first try.

I’ve searched for ways to explain what was occurring and what I might contribute to opposing it, including through writing. I was surprised by the speed and extremity of what was happening. What I expected to be a more slow-moving Orban or Putinesque version of fascism/authoritarianism, seemed more akin to the Nazi experience.

I’ve been somewhat a student of the history of Nazism in Germany and was struck by how the language and methods of Trump et al resembled much of that of the Nazis, albeit in a greatly altered situation including the peculiar history and reality of the United States. No, I’m not arguing that this is a replica with the same predictable outcome. Far from it, and the outcome is unwritten.

What I am arguing though is the parallels and dangers shouldn’t be ignored.

One thing that presented itself to me was the need and potential importance of recording observations of events under the “new” Trump regime, as well as the growing resistance to it. I was drawn to read Victor Klemperer’s two volume Diary, I Will Bear Witness of daily life as a Jewish academic in Nazi Germany from 1933-1945.

Klemperer details from a very personal perspective the encirclement and escalating suppression of Jewish life, and especially that of he and his “Aryan” wife Eva, as well as their circle of friends and associates. Victor miraculously survived the holocaust, largely due to Eva’s background. When the firebombing of Dresden by the U.S destroyed the city in 1945, Victor and Eva managed to escape. Ripping off the yellow star the Nazis required Jews to wear upon penalty of death, Victor left with Eva and made their way to allied lines

I’m just finishing volume I, which ends in 1941. Through this volume, Klemperer, who was a professor/author on French and world literature, documents the language of the Third Reich. He has an idea, which he despairs of even being able to execute due to the increasing threat of death, of someday writing a book on it. In fact, he survived and did publish that book, which I plan to read.

Reading Klemperer’s diary rings a frightening warning from history as fascism unfolds now in the U.S. I can’t shake the feeling that reading this is prologue, albeit as I say in a different situation and time with different parameters or potential results, and being deeply shaken and disturbed by that.

Klemperer, a military veteran who has always considered himself German and Protestant rather than Jewish, is finding himself increasingly estranged from that feeling of “Germaness”.

In 1938, he writes of this being “knocked out of him”, and says, “too much of what, in the past, I took lightly, viewed as an embarrassing minor phenomenon, I now consider to be German and typical. The superlativism, which is a special hallmark of the language of the Third Reich…. the Nazis do it in a way that is half megalomania, half frantic autosuggestion. One of their favorite words is ‘eternal’.”

Trumpist language oozes superlativism. In typical manner, Trump lauded his “accomplishments” in 43 days during his State of the Union address- “The American dream is unstoppable, and our country is on the verge of a comeback, the likes of which the world has never witnessed and perhaps will never witness again.  There’s never been anything like it.”

In 1936, Klemperer writes, “The Fuhrer must be followed blindly, blindly! They do not need to explain anything at all, since they are accountable to no one. Today it occurred to me: Never has the tension between human power and powerlessness, human knowledge and human stupidity been so overwhelmingly great as now.” I am reminded here of the destruction of scientific research by the Trump regime, but also the lock-step sycophancy of the GOP in extolling Trump’s first 100 days.

With the mad celebration of the German annexation of Austria in 1938 and its increased vitriol against Jews, Klemperer recounts “a broad yellow handbill with the Star of David has been stuck to every post of our fence. ‘Jew’. Warning against the unflagged plague barracks. Der Sturmer has dug up its usual ritual murder; I would truly not be surprised if next I were to find the body of a child in the garden.”

He speaks of Hitler presenting Goering with his “marshal’s baton in a great ceremony. They have no sense of the comic impression they make. Their conscious humor is spite against the defenseless”. And further, “For some days now divine right has been given ever more prominence. Again and again in the newspaper. He is the instrument of Providence- the hands that write ‘no’ (in the April 1938 vote to endorse the regime) will wither- the sacred election. .. We think he will have himself crowned Emperor.”

This all sounds quite familiar. Trump speaking of himself as “the King”, tweeting memes of himself wearing a crown. He mused about seizing a third term despite Constitutional limits. How many of his supporters imagine him as “picked by God” after surviving an assassination attempt last summer. Now, Trump has gone so far as to tweet a meme of himself as the new pope!

In a recent interview on “Trump’s first 100 days” with The Atlantic, Trump claims he “runs the country and runs the world”.

So many other examples of Americanized but Naziesque type language or imagery from regime officials stand out, including their glee in crushing the powerless. Musk with a chain saw on stage, bragging of putting USAID into the “woodchipper” despite the deaths it will cause, declaring social security which millions have paid into and rely on for survival a “Ponzi scheme”. The thinly veiled but obvious Nazi salutes of Bannon and Musk. The constant bragging by Trump and his toadies about their “right” to annex Greenland and deport whoever they want without regard to the law, The constant, “biggest ever” crowds at his election rallies and his first inauguration, the plan for a June military parade in D.C. honoring him. The constant demands of other Trump officials demanding world leaders “thank” and bow down to him.

The approach is so comic, so seemingly bizarre, so brazen, and transparent. So lunatic and out to lunch yet at the same moment so dangerous. They view reality as whatever those in power can bludgeon people into accepting and they intend to do so no matter how extreme.

Many other examples spring to mind of the fascist Trumpian language and propaganda. The constant use by the curent regime of the Nazi playbook of “accusing the other side of what you yourself are doing” –(from Goebbels reportedly)-characterizing press exposure of Trump’s misdeeds or crimes as “fake news” and the press as “enemy of the people”, targeting political opponents for investigation or jail as corrective justice against those who conducted a “witch hunt” after Trump (for obvious crimes he committed), targeting and threatening to impeach the “radical activist judges”, who would dare to cross him on due process.

Calling the scrubbing of the racist history of America from museums, institutions, government agencies and websites, or ridding them of programs or language that just slightly took account of historic discrimination against people of color as “reversing racial discrimination” (toward white people!-just replace Aryan with this for the U.S.) Promoting the spread of misinformation, lies, and fascist narratives as “promoting freedom” that has been suppressed by “the woke culture”. The analogies are too numerous to recount, the speed of attack too fast to ignore.

A Case Study of Trumpian Fascist Propaganda

April 29th, Trump interviewed with Terry Moran from ABC News on his first 100 Days. In this, he admitted he could bring Kilmar Obrego Garcia home from the Salvadoran CECOT prison, but his lawyers don’t want him to and so he doesn’t have plans to. Trump’s statement proves false the previous blather from Trump officials like Pam Bondi and Steven Miller that the U.S. couldn’t return Kilmar despite court rulings including the Supreme Court, because it was solely up to El Salvador.

Of course originally, a DOJ lawyer in court said Kilmar had been deported “by administrative error”, (for which he was then fired by Bondi apparently). Later, refusing to be seen as misstepping, regime officials claimed this wasn’t the case. They fastened on the lie Kilmar was a MS-13 gang member, which they have since stuck with despite the almost complete lack of evidence.

Trump argued with Moran that Obrego Garcia literally had “MS-13” tattooed on his fingers. Trump had earlier tweeted out a photograph of Obrego Garcia’s hand which is apparently a photo-shop produced photo. Some source had taken a photo of Garcia’s hand, which has tattoos on it, and “interpreted” the symbols on it- (a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a crucifix, and a skull)- as indicating “M S 1 3”. These enumerations were then digitally added above the actual symbols to create this impression. Experts aware of MS13 tatoos say the actual symbols that are on Kilmar’s hand aren’t indicative of MS13 gang tattoos. One, a Salvadoran journalist who has written a book on MS13 said, “Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos”.

Undeterred by the truth, Trump argued those letters and numbers were actually and literally on Kilmar’s hand in the photo. He argued Moran should just agree with him and say yes, they were on his hands!

Now, it’s being reported in NYT that the State Department in response to the Federal court that ordered his return and after the Supreme Court ordered the regime to “facilitate” his return, had inquired with El Salvador about returning Garcia but that Salvadoran dictator Bukele had refused to release him because he was Salvadoran. Thus it seemed regime officials may have been planning to use this to claim to appear to be in correspondence with the Supreme Court order to “facilitate” Kilmar’s return-saying they tried, but failed. But now Trump has let out this is all bullshit, just that his lawyers don’t want to.

But this is common Trumpism, one might say, Trumpism 101. Completely opposing statements are given from one day to the next from Trump or top Trump officials. There is a pretense, sometimes unchallenged by the press, that these statements aren’t in complete opposition to each other and at the same time a refusal to offer any coherence or clarity. And then again, resetting a path to bully their way forward when exposed. This is part of the use of language to eliminate truth and logic.

A big part of the fascist “language and method” is to send up a cloud of conflicting bullshit from various officials, often involving the dictator in chief himself-to create a fog of confusion and obfuscation that becomes difficult to walk back through, separate out and document who said what when and make it hard to even pin down either the argument or “bottom line” of what the regime says when it gets in trouble.

In an interview, journalist and author Masha Gessen speaks of Trump’s “bully lie”. Lying with a wink that you know what you’re saying is transparently and provably false, but that you have power over others, so you determine what to believe. The choice provided by power is, accept it and maybe you will be allowed to live and prosper in the world we own and rule, refuse to, and you’ll pay the price. In Trump’s world and the one he seeks to create, there is no truth, really, no evidence, no logic, no reason, no “thinking things through”-just power in charge to follow and be obedient to, or suffer.

Curtis Johnson is a former research scientist, freelance writer, and environmental activist. He has reported and written on the Gulf oil spill, the battle to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Western wildfires, the threat to orcas and wild salmon, the extinction and climate crisis, as well as the fight for justice for families of those murdered by police and to stop Trump’s fascism. Follow him on bluesky: curtisjohnson97404.bsky.social or his blog at https://forplanetandhumanity.com/author/forplanetandhumanity/  

A short report on A5 in Seattle and a few reflections on nationwide.

Yesterday, a massive day of coordinated protest nationwide called by Indivisible and 50501 and dozens of other groups. April 5th Hands off Democracy, government agencies, immigrants, civil rights, etc. I hoped for at least 10K here and it easily exceeded that-likely 20-40K-maybe 25-30 is decent estimate. The media here said “thousands” or said 7,000 registered but that it was impossible to tell how many. The center grounds were packed around the central fountain, with one area cordoned off for grass growth-but likely 10-15K here with thousands more packing paths into area and scattered over the center grounds.

We started out driving from home at 11. Driving through our side of town we saw groups at every bus stop with signs-at first thinking people were just protesting there, then realizing people were waiting for buses. We thought we saw a friend on way down, who was planning to catch bus to meet us at the protest. So we turned around, here a guy with a sign told us the buses were packed and he couldn’t get on so was apparently headed home. We called our friend and he was actually at home so we stopped by his place and picked him up.

On the way we stopped at one bus stop asking if 2 people wanted to get in for ride, and 2 women did-so off we went. On the way down we talked about the state of things, history of protests in our lives-from anti-Vietnam war days to WTO and exchanged info on what we were headed for and how to protect and go forward through repression.

We were magically able to grab a parking spot only 15 minutes walk away from Seattle center grounds where the protest was held.  People streamed in on all sides. Everywhere the center grounds were packed, with people still coming at noon. We made our way to the Flag Pavillion area. For some reason they had a space on south end cordoned off on the grass, maybe to protect that area, but all around and down by the fountain the crowd was packed in-later looked to me like 10-15,000 just from what was in the main area-but later seeing more people to north entrances and on all sides, so my guess is 25-30K.

 We worked our way closer to the stage near north end of center grounds to hear a native American speaker-Collen Echohawk, followed by a Latino immigrant speaker, Both were good and defiant, hitting all the things under attack, emphasizing standing together, not allowing regime to pick off immigrants, trans people and all the most vulnerable-and emphazing love for each other and resistance.

There was a big focus on the power people have to stop this vs. the courts or Congress or voting with most of these first speeches at least. Not in opposition to the latter-but this was their focus, which I thought positive. Chants from the stage reflected this. “Who saves us? We save us” led by the immigrant speaker and later,   “Ain’t no power like the power of the people and the power of the people don’t stop”, from famous WTO protests. 

We listened then to Pramilla Jayapal-Congressperson who’s about the best the Dems have to offer. She’s a good speaker and was pretty strong, pointing out billionaires are responsible for all the things people are experiencing and the reason for rising prices, rising rents, etc. –kind of trying to repolarize the Trump/MAGA arguments about who’s to blame, but emphasizing also repelling all the attacks on all the people including against dissent.

She’s organizing “Resistance Labs” to train people en masse (reports 20K so far) in civil disobedience, so has some handle on the level of the danger and kind of opposition necessary, though what they will do or organize isn’t clear.

So Pretty good speeches, though only stayed for first three.

Unfortunately the sound system was way too small-good for maybe 5,000, so most people in crowd over whole grounds couldn’t hear the speeches. It seemed to me the organizers had vastly underestimated how many would be drawn to this event. Space not big enough for entire crowd and sound system nowhere near powerful enough.  I tried to pan around with video to see size of ground from what we could see.

We tried to then leave to walk around and see what was going on, the size of crowd, etc. . It was so completely packed in it took maybe 20-30 minutes to move through a massive and at times a bit frightening scrum,  to move about a hundred yards-and to the north, there were more masses of people far away from central stage area, reflecting my estimates (and others )of tens of thousands.

We finally got through. All around the center ground area there were people with signs, people dancing, drum corps, music, bands and people with signs of every kind. I wondered if the people who had been waiting for buses ever even got here and wouldn’t be surprised if many didn’t.

A good day. Still however, I strongly believe the resistance will be set up if the Dems, even left Dems, are allowed to lead it. Will they, or will masses with new leadership push past them or at least push through them to not be led into something short of defeating this?

This could well sharpen if repression sharpens, which seems very likely. I think being part of a UF type coalition, if not organizationally at least programatically with very broad forces is important overall and at this stage especially, although it’s not clear where this will end up or if Dems and some associates will become a barrier. Helping and working with people to develop political awareness of the stakes and the real danger the regime represents, and what it will take to defeat fascism, I see as central, and forging forms of leadership.

Another question-where is it at with youth, on campuses and high schools and working masses as much as known? A friend feels there has to be more emphasis on the working class and bringing out class interests as way to strike deeper and to basically repolarize sections of people to side with resistance, and to unite people. There’s some point to this seems to me.

So A5 nationwide was very positive in my estimation, and it’s quite clear despite media underplaying nationwide,-eg. an early NYT article reported A5 protests as “thousands in several cities” and later saying “protests in cities and towns nationwide” without specifying numbers or even numbers of locations as I recall-(which was 12-1400). Then today Sunday-the massive protests estimated at 2-3 million from what I have heard so far,  have completely evaporated from NYT Sunday edition.

They swiftly refocus on impacts of Trump’s tariffs with Americans “wrestling over” how they will be effected. And how Trump’s 3rd term talk “tests democracy” . This is of course maddening, but completely typical of how they represent capitalist ruling class interests opposing yet at same time normalizing and abetting fascism by undercutting the danger, while trying to keep masses outrage and interests confined, underplayed and only occasionally let out to channel people under the wing of those ruling class forces who want to try to maintain the center,  with the U.S. as a functioning imperialist empire in the traditional way.

One point standing out. Yesterday was powerful and shows real potential, yet we’re not yet at the point of the very important in my mind,  Refuse Fascism outlined goal of filling streets and town squares day after day with millions and non-violently bringing the regime and country to a standstill and forced out by the opposition, ala South Korea.  The potential is there, but you can see the level and understanding is not there yet. Will it become that? Key question. What will it take for that to happen?