Society Must Be Defended

I read the collection by Michel Foucault for which this essay is titled in the weeks before a certain current presidential candidate had been inaugurated 8 years ago, and I was thinking about that today, as that candidate's campaign rhetoric has begun to overtly rely on messaging and slogans used by actual Nazis in 1930s Germany, and whose speeches have habitually invoked or incited public violence and numerous acts of domestic terrorism.

I do not care what anyone thinks of Biden as a person or as a President; I don't care whether it "hurts your pride" or if voting for him isn't "what you wanted" or is a "hard pill to swallow" or any other, for lack of a more fitting term, bullshit.

The media has not, on the whole, done an appreciable job in communicating the scale of the danger that Agent Orange poses to the free world--which is already teetering on the brink as I type this--and to American citizens directly. Even if you believe that someone else might handle any given issue better than Biden has, Donald Trump is most certainly not that candidate. The choice, as I stressed in 2016, is between to continue playing the game, and flipping the table and setting the game board aflame. Only this time, it won't be just the board game itself on fire, but us, too.

A second Biden campaign may look like a placeholder presidency (wherein Biden holds office but doesn't manage to advance liberal policies), and he might end up being a placeholder, but we can be assured that when his 4 years (8, counting this current term) are up, he will execute the transition peaceably and honorably as it behooves a steward of the Constitutional Order. We will continue playing the game, and have an opportunity to elect someone who may more closely align with our priorities (I want Gretchen Whitmer in 2028!)

A second Trump campaign would not be that. We know that, much like Netanyahu, he is facing 34 serious criminal indictments, his businesses are failing, and we know, based on past experiences that have already faded from public memory, that he enjoys violence. He has major incentives to enrich himself at the expense of the state and the public, and the intellectual core of his movement consists of Christian fanatics and Neo-Nazi extremists. 

The list of things that Trump wants to accomplish is long and devastating to everyone. Trump and his partisans will stop supporting Ukraine and give Putin a red carpet to the rest of Europe. Other despotic and authoritarian regimes will have a green light to infringe upon human rights abroad in places like India, Israel, China, and Hungary. One could argue that in some of these places, Biden's hands are tied, but there is a big difference between not liking it but not being able to do much to stop it and actively encouraging it. 

Domestically, little will stand in the way of gutting reproductive rights, enacting a mass migration policy against anyone suspected of being undocumented (watch food prices soar as no one will want to replace those workers), restricting what books students can read and teachers can use, not just in the South, but eventually everywhere, and, most devastatingly, he will fully control the Supreme Court, particularly if he is able to achieve a third term. 

"A third term!? You must be crazy! There's no way he will get a third term!" Who is going to stop him? What prevents Biden from disbanding the legislature and packing the court in order to amass power for himself is something that does not exist in Trump. 

Trump exists only for Trump. He is not a public servant; the Constitution is an obstacle, not something that has ensured our prosperity for just under 300 years. His ultimate goal is to solidify his own power, to protect himself from the law--to destroy it if necessary; and to enrich himself. A man who shits on a golden toilet is not going to do anything for anyone.

There will be little incentive for anyone in positions of power to stop him. The GOP itself is fully under his control and has already rolled over like an obsequious dog at every opportunity--even while his ascendency was still in question after his first term. Knowing that he will expand the conservatives' power for decades, the Roberts Court has every incentive to give him whatever he wants. If you thought three seats was lucky, he will get even "luckier" (it wasn't luck).

The media writes about him already as though Punxsutawney Phil were a demagogue, cataloguing his every movement to and from his criminal trial in a kind of obsessive fugue state. The executives at the top learned that Trump's first term brought them massive success as people were glued to their screens in the maelstrom of chaos and disorder that was his administration, and things will only get worse as the journalists in the press corps show fealty in exchange for access, and investigation either stops under threat or slows to a trickle as they become more fawning. The Fourth Estate wants a piece of Trump's Estate.

Before Trump became President in 2016, I thought it was a joke. There's a post I wrote about him being President, and I jokingly asked, "What do we have to lose?" A lot, as it turns out. I'm not making that mistake again.

"You're Worse Than Hitler!"

    When Netanyahu first got elected to his current term, after the very short tenure of Yair Lapid, he was fleeing a looming corruption indictment. This fact colors all that follows.

    The minute I received news of the Oct 7^th attack, I knew that Netanyahu would capitalize upon it in the same way that W Bush capitalized on the WTC attack by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Foresight did not fail me: Eight months later, 34,000+ Palestinians are dead, hundreds of thousands of others are now starving, the IDF is committing war crimes, several hundred hostages are still missing, and Hamas still exists. It is deeply ironic and significant that South Africa, which has gone through what Palestinians in Israel are now going through, is charging Israel with crimes against humanity at the ICC.

    The Israelis have to contend, above all, with the massive intelligence oversight of the occurrence of the attack itself, something that Netanyahu is at least indirectly responsible for. But beyond that lies greater danger: Netanyahu himself, during his first term and, worse, this term, is a demagogue who is now capitalizing on the Oct 7^th attack to preserve his own power at the expense of Israel’s long-term security and the United States’ moral credibility. So long as the hostages exist somewhere out there, (WMDs, anyone?) Netanyahu can wage his campaign of terror and revenge, thus preserving his hold on the government.

    Years ago, I read a book called The Two-State Delusion by Padraig O’Malley, which, among other things, gave a history of the demography of Israel and explained how the hard-right gained prominence. Netanyahu’s party, the Lukids, are functionally equivalent to the Evangelicals in the United States, but even more disastrous; they don’t participate in society, are exempt from conscription (there’s an ongoing court case in Israel right now about this very issue), but they vote in large numbers and drag all of Israel in line with their exclusionary, supremacist ideology. They make up the base of support for Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians. They are responsible for the pogroms and land seizures, and they are responsible for Netanyahu’s calamitous return to power.

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    In recent weeks, massive protests have erupted across college campuses in support of Palestinians. They each demand that their universities end investments that benefit Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Naturally, the forces that support Israel have the resources and the power to browbeat university leadership into using overwhelming violence to crack down on their students.

    Things are so intense that Congress wants to hold a hearing on universities that are not deploying jackboots against teenagers. Speaker Mike Johnson himself visited one campus to give his best Grandpa Simpson impression, despite leading the “least productive Congress ever.”

    Netanyahu, of course, chimed in with his Hitler Finger, smiting these protests with his almighty “You’re worse than Hitler!” attack. The GOP, of course, is going full-bore on these kids, because they can. What’s interesting is why.

    Over the past decade, CPAC has steadily been filling with a greater white supremacist, Neo-Nazi presence, and, according to one eyewitness, 2024’s event was thoroughly permeated with known fascist figures. It is not uncommon, especially now, for an elected Republican official to cavort with a known Neo-Nazi. Consequences for doing so have been getting progressively lighter.

    You don’t have to read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt to know that Neo-Nazis hate Jews, and they are a much, much greater threat to Jews everywhere than the college kids who don’t support the Israeli government. It is also not surprising to me—and something I’ve known for a while—that many people who love Israel also hate Jews, and vice-versa (see Elon Musk). I have yet to figure out why, but if I had to guess, perhaps Israel is a model ethnostate, as far as they are concerned.

    So what does any of this have to do with the protests? It is easy, and extremely convenient, to be able to smear a bunch of politically illiterate college kids as antisemetic when the GOP is openly catering to fascism. The more they can look like they're doing something about antisemitism, the easier it is for Trump to have people like Nick Fuentes over for dinner.

    Netanyahu doesn’t seem to understand, or care at all, about this distinction, and it seems quite possible that both he and Israel in general may end up paying dearly for it in the future.