Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness -- CounterPunch
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness
Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).
So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness.
Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into “fascism”? I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic.
In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than “fascism”? Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism?
How about a face-to-face confrontation with America’s own history, come alive on the streets of our largest cities, like armed zombies emerged from musty graves thought long buried.
Trump’s malignant genius is that while he’s furiously trying to whitewash American history at the Smithsonian, Gettysburg and Stonewall, he’s forcing Americans into a live-fire reenactment of some of its most nightmarish episodes.
The political antecedents of Donald Trump aren’t to be found in Weimar, Germany or the nationalist movements of post-WW I Italy, but in the authors of the Constitution, a document that not only condoned the ownership of human beings, but, through the 3/5s clause, gave a political advantage to the states whose economies were driven by slave labor. A constitution that doubled down on this ignominy in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, requiring the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, even from states that had outlawed slavery. It’s hard to hide that from the kiddies. But the Constitution just set the stage for what followed…
+ The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the Republic’s infancy (1798), outlawing “malicious speech” against the government and targeting immigrants as “enemy aliens.” (Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as part of his program against immigrants.)
+ Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law in 1808. It’s been invoked by 15 presidents and General Douglas MacArthur, who thought he outranked the president, to suppress domestic dissent.
+ In 1831, Trump’s hero Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and began the forced relocation of 60,000 people from the so-called “civilized” tribes of the southeast, a death march that went on for 19 years known as the Trail of Tears.
+ In the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Supreme Court not only upheld the Fugitive Slave laws but also effectively ruled that blacks were subhuman and not entitled to any rights under the Constitution.
+ In the 1850s and a group known as the Secret Order of the Stars Spangled Banner (later known colloquially as the Know-Nothings) rose to political prominence through immigrant bashing, mainly of Irish Catholics, in the East who they slandered as corrupting the US political system.
+ During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, hanging 33 Lakota men for defending their homeland from white land thieves.
+ Former Confederate officers, such as KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged a war of terror against blacks and Radical Republicans across the South for 12 years until Reconstruction was abolished and Jim Crow established, effectively eviscerating the “rights” of southern blacks that had been won under the 13th and 14th Amendments.
+ In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the US and preventing Chinese residents of the US from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943.
+ In 1890, yes 1890!, the US Cavalry massacred nearly 300 wearing and near-starving Lakota people, including dozens of women and children, at Wounded Knee. Thirty-one of the murderers were awarded Medals of Honor for the slaughter, tributes recently reaffirmed by Pete Hegseth, who called the killers “brave soldiers” who “deserved their medals.”
+ The eugenics movement (backed by some of the nation’s leading corporations and tycoons) originated in the US in the late 1890s, first with laws prohibiting marriage by people the state considered “epileptic, imbeciles or the feeble-minded.” Then, in 1908, Indiana (then considered a progressive state) enacted the first forced sterilization laws for those the state deemed “mentally ill or retarded.” These laws became the template for the eugenics programs of the Nazis, as Hitler himself admitted, not the other way round.
In 1917, Mexican immigrants crossing the border at El Paso, Texas, were doused with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, more than two decades before the Nazis used it on Jews and other “undesirables” in the death camps of Eastern Europe.
+ In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed the Palmer Raids, targeting suspected pacifists, black radicals, socialists, communists, anarchists and basically anyone who might’ve objected to Wilson screening Birth of a Nation in the White House for mass arrest and deportation. The raids launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover.
+ All of these grim chapters of homegrown authoritarianism unfolded long before Mussolini ever dreamed of bundling his fasces into a political cudgel and calling himself Il Duce.
But the beat went on…
+ In 1939, at a time when Trump’s father was attending pro-Nazi rallies in the US, the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner of the Hamburg America Line, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Europe attempting to escape being rounded up by the Gestapo, was denied entry into the US by the Roosevelt Administration. The Coast Guard shadowed the ship to prevent the Captain from intentionally running it aground on the US coast. Ultimately, the MS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where an estimated 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.
+ FDR imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 concentration camps, nearly all of them without warrants or any indication of subversive intent. The Supreme Court sanctified this massive violation of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the Korematsu decision.
+ Truman nuked two civilian cities in Japan as the war in the Pacific was nearing its inevitable end, primarily to intimidate the Soviets, who responded by building their own arsenal of atomic weapons, thus putting the planet at risk of nuclear annihilation, which now, eight decades later, seems closer than ever.
+ The bipartisan Red Scare of the late 40s and 50s saw the government ignite (one of the chief arsonists being Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn) a nationwide hysteria over alleged communist infiltration that led to purges of government workers (many of them at the State Department), academics, and Hollywood.
+ COINTELPRO was established in 1955 to spy on, harass, infiltrate, smear and even assassinate leaders of leftwing movements in the US, unfettered by any Constitutional restraints. The plug wasn’t pulled on COINTELPRO until 1971…so they claim.
+ JFK, RFK, LBJ, and J. Edgar spied on the leaders of the civil rights movement, smeared many as communists, and even blackmailed and tried to encourage MLK, Jr. to commit suicide. When he didn’t, did they have him killed? There’s a case to be made. A strong one.
+ Nixon illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia and manufactured a repressive drug war that one of his chief henchmen, John Ehrlichman, later admitted was “all about the blacks.”
+ Carter secretly started the largest CIA-run war in US history in Afghanistan, a war that gave the young Osama Bin Laden the training and weapons he would turn two decades later against his infidel benefactors.
+ Clinton declared the era of big government over, destroyed welfare, bombed Afghanistan to divert attention from sexual trysts, instituted the most punitive and racist crime laws (written by Joe Biden’s staff) in US history and blamed black popular music for America’s cultural decline.
+ Bush the Lesser stole an election and then lied the US into a still-reverberating war that Biden and HRC both backed.
+ John Kerry lost an election, which his backers claimed was stolen by Bush-friendly Diebold voting machines in Ohio.
+ Obama, the OG Deporter-in-Chief, bailed out Wall Street, executed a coup in Honduras, a regime change in Libya and droned American citizens, including at least two children, without any legal justification.
+ Biden armed, justified, and prolonged a genocide in Gaza that Trump extended and is now poised to capitalize on. Biden’s auto-penned pardons of his own family and inner-circle have enabled Trump to use the White House as a billion-dollar giftshop to enrich himself, his family and his cronies.
+ And, of course, this grisly history also includes, yes, an apparently undying obsession, one might even say fetishization, of the Nazis, from Sieg Heiling industrials like Henry Ford and Elon Musk to the smack-chatting leaders of the Republican Youth movement to the progressive Democratic from Maine, Graham Plotter, who even now is having Nazi tattoos lasered from his flesh.
Trump isn’t trying anything new. He’s not an original thinker, even in a Machiavellian sense. Instead, he’s sampling the most authoritarian measures from the American past and trying them out on everything, everywhere, all at once.
Excuse me for a second. I’ve just been reminded by Becky Grant that this is supposed to be a fall fund drive appeal and not another Friday morning, stream-of-consciousness rant. Right, sorry.
Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.
Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.
I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years.
But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.
Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them.
Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”
The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.
This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.
The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization.
Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.
With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”
And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.
I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.
Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity.
We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye.
But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push.
In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated.
We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions.
We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.
How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.
Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations.
You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are.
Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.
I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.
So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming.
If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending.
A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.
We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/10/24/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-an-appeal-in-a-time-of-darkness/
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