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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

If we examine the origins, or what we can discern of them, we get an inkling of something rather different: a closed domain of international oligarchs, exploiting the state’s power and patriotic sentiment, while creating a world order in which the American state is much weaker, or simply ceases to function. An oligarchical corridor.

Is the war American in its origins? Can we find the genesis of Trump’s war against Iran in the United States? There is of course a domestic politics to the war. Trump has already telegraphed that he wants to exploit this war to try to fix (”federalize”) the elections of November 2026, and preserve his power with artificial majorities of supine Republicans. But that would work with any war. And, for all we know, by the summer or autumn Trump may well have moved on to another war in Cuba, or yet another one after that.

The question is: why this particular war? Why Iran? There are certainly Americans who have wanted a war with Iran for a very long time. Years, decades, in 2003, longer. But that does not explain the timing. Why now? There does not seem to be an American answer to that.

No doubt the decision was Donald Trump’s, in the narrow sense that no one else enjoyed the practical authority to order the American armed forces into battle. But this begs the question rather than answer it -- and Trump himself lacks answers. Why did he make the decision that he did? He has been unable to explain why he started the war, to a degree that defies any explanation from deliberate ambiguity or even mental decline. He does not even seem very interested in the question, as though it had been answered by others for him. He clearly wanted a war, after the pleasure of Venezuela. But why this one?

One can recall various American origins for a war, more or less honorable, or more or less tawdry. We have fought wars that originated in legitimate threats from abroad, in attempts at secession within the country, in press campaigns, in governmental analyses of threats, in government propaganda campaigns. In all of these historical instances, however, there was some American component, some American process. That American input is missing here.

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The subject is not the legitimacy of those past wars. The issue is a much simpler, analytical one: in all of these cases, there was some sort of American origin story to the armed conflict. In the case of the Third Gulf War, there is not. There was no threat, abroad or at home, nor any subjective public sense of such a threat. We see little evidence of any sustained discussion or debate within departments of the government (Vietnam) or even of a government press campaign designed to sway opinion (Second Gulf War).

Let us accept Trump’s own account that the only limitations to what he does are inside his “own mind.” That too just begs the question. What things are inside his head, and how do they get there? We see no sign that what is inside his mind right now has to do with his own expressed convictions (peace prize), public opinion (against the war), government consensus (absent) or propaganda campaign (likewise). What then are the channels into Trump’s head? The pathway to Trump’s mind seems to be an oligarchical corridor.

We don’t know nearly enough to be confident about what is in that corridor, as any historian will acknowledge. Decades from now historians will be debating why this war started, as we debate the origins of all great conflicts.

Those future scholars will have a difficult time, because there will be little written evidence. What passes for American foreign policy is largely carried out by private emissaries who are often unaccompanied by note-takers and who do not benefit from the institutional competence or area expertise of government departments.

One trace is left by the exhaust fumes of private jets which speed, tellingly, to some capitals but not to others. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have been involved in three sets of negotiations which touch the parties concerned by this war. They were Trump’s negotiators with Iran, where in their impatience (to put it mildly) they took a position that leaned towards that of Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf States. They were among Trump’s negotiators with Israel over Gaza, where I think it can be said without glaring injustice that their position tilted towards that of Tel Aviv. And they are Trump’s negotiators with Russia and Ukraine, where Witkoff’s stance is ostentatiously pro-Kremlin.

These men do have a place in Trump’s mind. His friend and his son-in-law are his chosen emissaries, and he talks to them. They connect him to countries concerned by this war: Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf States), Russia, Ukraine. Witkoff and Kushner have favorites. Kushner has a plan to turn Gaza into a giant resort. In the case of the Gulf States, the two men benefit from (known and documented) financial transactions of unusual flexibility and generosity. There is no known financial connection between Kushner or Witkoff and the Kremlin, but it would be untrue to say that the possibility of such an arrangement does not intrude upon the imaginations of of regional experts.

America itself is outside the oligarchical corridor. We see three individual Americans -- Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump -- who share that cozy passage, an informational and emotional environment with interested and often extravagantly wealthy individuals from other countries. The conventional inputs from the American public and the American government being obviously irrelevant, and any threat to American safety or any account of American interests being just as conspicuously absent, we are justified to attend to the corridor.

In addition to asking about inputs -- what goes into the corridor--, we can consider outputs -- what comes out. Who benefits from this war? The United States certainly does not. No national interest is being served, and no real effort is even being expended to try to define one. We are shedding credibility, and we are shedding allies, we are exposing weaknesses in our practice of war, and we are burning munitions that might have been needed elsewhere.

And so who does benefit? Again, it has to be emphasized that we do not have the kind of sources that future historians would like. But there are nevertheless a few candidate who petition for our attention. Israel is the American co-combatant in this war, and its government has a clearly expressed interest in destroying Iranian power.

Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a regional struggle for power with Iran for 47 years. Interestingly, American war propaganda (picked up by regime-friendly commentators) now maintains that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years. (Orwell has gotten a lot of attention recently, but his “we have always been at war with Eurasia” in 1984 is very much a propos.) This obviously untrue claim implies that the United States has been a Saudi client state working against Iran for the better part of half a century.

This propaganda line is historically ridiculous -- remember when we trafficked missiles to Iran in 1981-1985? or when Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001? But it is telling.

What about Russia? Here the case is certainly more complex. It is embarrassing for Putin that he has lost another political friend: after Maduro, now Khamenei. And Iran has been Russia’s backer during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, supplying the Shahed drones that have terrorized and traumatized the Ukrainian civilian population. Iran even sent its own personnel to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory in autumn 2022 to teach Russians how to pilot drones; it would be very surprising if those trainers themselves did not direct some of the countless lethal attacks against Ukrainians. (The number of drone attacks on Ukraine is on the order of one hundred thousand, which is worth bearing in mind when a single drone attack on American forces is treated as something exceptional and dramatic). There is no doubt that the American attack on Iran will hinder any further supply of Iranian weapons to Russia.

Given their experience with those Iranian weapons, it is unsurprising that many Ukrainians greet the American attack on Iran as of benefit to them. I am afraid that this is not really the case.

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The Ukrainians have one major vulnerability in the war right now, and that is air defense: in particular, the need for Patriot missiles that the Americans produce and which Europeans now buy and pass to Ukraine (there is no direct American weapon provision to Ukraine). The United States is now burning through those Patriot interceptors at a wild pace, to the delight of its possible adversaries.

The Patriot has exceeded all expectations in Ukraine these last two years. But if the United States wastes the stock of Patriots in its Iran adventure, then it will be hard to protect Ukrainian cities, or for that matter anything else. According to Kyiv, the Americans went through more Patriots in the first three days of the war with Iran than the Ukrainians have used in four years of defending themselves from a full-scale invasion by Russia.

This is, incidentally, a strong suggestion that the Americans are fighting in a way that is tactically as well as strategically unwise. It appears that the Americans are firing expensive Patriots at cheap drones, which is not how a modern war is fought. It wastes money, but it also wastes the potential that Patriots have to stop missiles. The Americans seem unprepared to deal with drone warfare. For this, they will need Ukrainian help. Whether the Americans acknowledge this in any way is another question.

The Russians have one major vulnerability in the war, and that is hydrocarbons. They depend upon selling oil and natural gas to buy weapons and pay soldiers. Thanks to the war on Iran, thanks to the oligarchical corridor, oil prices have now increased, to Russia’s great benefit, and Russia is filling the void left by Iran.

So on balance, the war exposes a Ukrainian vulnerability, and addresses a Russian one. The United States might have made preparations to prevent Russia from immediately profiting from its actions, but did not. This is consistent with an ongoing conversation inside an oligarchical corridor, in which American oligarchs would as a matter of course address Russian concerns.

Here too American propaganda might be revealing. Of the two propaganda messages that have survived for longer than a day, one is a Russian talking point: that Ukraine is to blame for everything, including American mistakes.

Trump and his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt have been claiming that the United States has the infinite weapons needed for a forever war --- but if that infinity is somehow violated, this is a result of the Biden policy of arming Ukraine.

This is absurd on a number of levels. Historically, the US sells the most arms to Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Israel, in that order. After the full-scale invasion, of 2022, Ukraine was generally given weapons that were about to be decommissioned. Ukraine used those weapons to hold off a full-scale invasion by Russia, which was backed by China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an incomparably more meaningful conflict than Trump’s war on Iran. Ukraine improved some of those weapons, deployed some of them in new ways, and then shared experience with the Americans, who were able to make improvements in both design and in practice.

The unfairness of this has to be registered; the point, though, is that Trump and Leavitt are repeating a Russian cliché. And, as with the idea of our always having been a Saudi client, the notion that Ukraine is to blame for everything is the only consistent American propaganda message. (The Americans don’t have to repeat Israeli propaganda: the Israeli prime minister went on Fox and supplied it himself, without the need for mediation.)

The war serves Israeli, Saudi, and (with qualifications) Russian interests; the war has led the White House to share Israeli, Saudi, and Russian messaging. These are the outputs thus far.

And so from the inputs and the outputs, we get a certain picture, one in which America is peripheral, and the oligarchical corridor is central. I don’t believe in the “smoking guns”: that one conversation with an Israeli or a Saudi or a Russian brought about this war. I think it is more fruitful to imagine the corridor in which an ongoing conversation takes place: one in which the American people are absent, American institutions are absent, and indeed everything American is absent. And through this absence we see the emerging reality: the American state is allowed to decay and falter, while oligarchs use the bits that remain to pursue private interests and private fortunes.

This is a world which better serves states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, where the state and the oligarchy are already in alignment. It is not a world in which the United States has much of a place, or at least the United States considered as its people or its representative institutions. It is the world of Trump’s Board of Peace, in which peoples are understood as objects of deals, not as citizens of states.

The American armed forces will be sent hither and thither, as suits the chancy whimsy of the oligarchical huddle, but what they do will be untethered from anything that is substantively American. Their commendable loyalty to the state is abused by a president to whom such commitment is utterly alien. The violence that Americans wreak around the world will affect, among other people, Americans as well; the killing and dying is done in their name, though without their input or any thought to their well-being.

Is this an American war? It is a war of the irresponsibility of a few Americans inside the oligarchical corridor, one which pushes the country towards a future in which institutions fail and citizens do not matter. It could also be a war which allows other Americans to see this future, and to hinder it, and to imagine a better one. If we face squarely that this war is a step to our unmaking, then we have the beginnings of a plan for the remaking.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

As Ruth and I agreed on, disasters don’t become turning points on their own. They need people willing to name what’s happening, hold the line on institutions, and act — nonviolently, persistently — in the name of something better. The conversation is available in full above.

What is a strongman? This is a crucial political question. Democratic systems are being undone by strongmen around the world. But how?

This is mysterious, in general, because it has to do with a certain kind of charisma. It is mysterious in particular for those on whom the charisma does not work.

When I look at Donald Trump as a person, I see a failed real estate guy from Queens with a lot of natural showman talent, whose obviously poor physical condition is covered by terrible, ill-fitting suits and a lot of makeup. When I listen to him I hear incoherent bluster and self-absorbed whining. None of this makes me experience him as strong.

I do experience him as the president of the United States, because I identify strongly with my country, and accept the legitimacy of its (flawed) institutions, through which he was duly elected. For the very same reasons I am troubled when he abuses the power of the office, breaks the law, and seeks to replace our constitutional structure with a cult of personality.

For the strongman it is not the office and the law that matter. They can help him to attain a certain position, but they are essentially a backdrop, an element of dramaturgy. He attains official authority with a performance of strength and then he instrumentalizes it for further performances of strength.

It seems to be the performance that matters, not strength in any objective sense. The strongman is strong insofar as he is seen to be strong, accepted as being strong. His strength is conferred, not innate. And so his actions are right, on his terms, when they allow his followers to join him in a performance of strength.

We are at war now, a war that is transparently one of a series of masculinity contests. Our American strongman is strong because he is stronger than the other strongmen. He can abduct Maduro. He can assassinate Khamenei. He is performing relative strength, at huge cost to others.

It’s another question, of course, as to whether any of this makes the United States stronger. The use of force in this way is obviously illegal in terms of both international and domestic law. Breaking international and domestic institutions will tend to make the United States as a country weaker rather than stronger.

But the people who support the war in Iran seem to be those who already believed that the president is strong. They accept the performance of strength, even as it is humiliating to them, because it goes against what the president himself had promised them -- no more wars, nor more wars in the Middle East, no more forever wars.

Why do they do so? I think the mystery can be broken down into two parts.

The first is relativity: the strongman is strong because he is seen as stronger than the person who sees him as strong. The second is a kind of anthropological gift: at a certain moment, the attribute of strength is accorded to the strongman, as a reward for a kind of performance.

The strongman is strong, in other words, because of the law of transitivity. If you accept at a certain point that he is stronger than you, then you are accepting that you are weaker than him. You are joining in the collective creation of the strongman. But you are also scripting your future behavior. In any confrontation with the strongman you must be weak. You must serve his strength and, if confronted directly by it, accept ritual humiliation.

Having made the initial attribution of strength, it is hard to go back, because doing so is not simply acknowledging a mistake, but acknowledging a choice to be weak oneself.

It’s maybe in other areas of life, seemingly distant from grand politics, where we best see this kind of submission. This whole line of thought descended upon me when I was watching Olympic hockey in Ukraine, and then watching the men’s hockey team be both celebrated and humiliated by the White House.

The central figure was Brady Tkachuk. A year ago, when Trump was talking about annexing Canada and initiating a trade war, he and his brother politicized the Four Nations Face-Off hockey tournament, staging fights with Canadian players in the first few seconds of the game. There was no hockey background for the fights. There was a Trumpy political background. The Americans won hat game; Canada beat them in the final and won the tournament.

This year Tkachuk played on the US Olympic team, which rode the excellent play of its goalkeeper to win the final against a Canadian team that looked to be the stronger side. Trump treated this as an occasion to mock both women and Canada itself, bringing along Tkachuk for the ride. The White House distributed an AI video which falsely and unfairly portrayed Tkachuk making a demeaning remark about Canadians. It has at least ten million views.

This is where it gets interesting, at least for me. Tkachuk was clearly troubled by the video. He plays in Canada, as left wing for the Ottawa Senators. He is the captain of the team that plays in the Canadian capital and is named after a chamber of the Canadian parliament. It is awkward for him to be associated with hatred of Canada.

And yet Tkachuk cannot seem to bring himself to say that the president of the United States did something wrong. And Trump obviously did do something wrong. He spread a lie about Tkachuk that has changed Tkachuk’s life for the worse, at the very moment when he was supposed to be celebrating Tkachuk.

Trump ritually humiliated Tkachuk, as he does to all who acknowledge his strength. And all Tkachuk had to do is state the obvious: that this was improper. But he can’t seem (at least in his published remarks) to be able to do that. He is angry, but somehow at a general situation. In his circumlocutions he blames the video itself and comes close to blaming himself. He defines his interactions with the president as something over which he has no power, something that he cannot change. The aura of the president, he suggests, made all of this inevitable, and there is really nothing one can do.

It’s in these little encounters, I think, that we see how the cult of strength works. Once you accept that Trump is strong, you are accepting that you are weaker than Trump. And once you accept the strongman form of politics, you no longer have recourse to laws, or norms, or even basic ideas of decency. When the strongman dishes it out, you have to just take it. And when the person who just takes it is a public figure, secure in every way, a rich athlete with a gold medal, say, it normalizes the submissive behavior for everyone else.

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On such small examples we see the clash between the performative, charismatic strength of the strongman and the actual prosperity of those around him. Tkachuk’s gold will be associated with Trump’s behavior, and with Tkachuk’s inability to respond to it. Tkachuk now faces hostility in Ottawa that he need not have faced. More broadly: the artificial tensions between the United States and its northern neighbor serve the citizens of neither country; they serve only the cult of the strongman.

To be sure, the cult of the strong man works on some women, as well. Frozen in my mind is a televised interview of a group in Cincinnati, Ohio, in autumn 2016, in which a woman said that Trump “sets the standard.” This baffled me: how so? In what domain? And then I understood what was meant: that no matter what he does, she had accepted that as the standard. She had conferred upon him the power to define her own ethics. Canvassing in Ohio then and later I heard similar things from women.

That said, the strongman schtick seems to work less often, and less well. The American women’s hockey team also won the gold, and was also baited by Trump with the combination of a sexist joke and an invitation to the White House. But they did not take the bait, and declined the invitation to attend Trump’s State of the Union. The strongman aura was not irresistible, at least not to them.

The category of the strongman has been on my mind these last few days as I have been looking forward to speaking live with Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen, a major political text of our time.

Professor Ben-Ghiat has been very prescient and very active these past few years, and I am delighted to have the chance to speak to her about masculinity in politics -- as well as the war in Iran and the means of resistance — in a couple of hours. Tune in to Thinking Live... for my conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat this Wednesday, March 4th, at 12:30pm (North American eastern time). If you are a subscriber to Thinking about... you will be automatically alerted by email when the conversation starts.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

PS No doubt the title of this essay owes something to Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Transitive Vampire, an excellent guide to grammar that I read when I was much younger.

Trump seems lost as to which lie he wants to tell. Lies are always parasitical upon truth, in the sense that you have to have some idea of what is true in order to say what is not true. But we are now in a realm where Trump knows only his own pleasures.

If we accept that nothing is true, we find ourselves among aspiring and real dictators who have good stories and media monopolies. But even if lying works in politics, truths about the world do not cease to be: civilians slain stay dead, airplanes shot down crash, actions lead to unpredictable reactions. Post-truth fascists will wander into terrains of ignorance and find themselves trapped.

But unless we diverge from such people on the basic point about truth, they will bluff themselves through anyway. Almost no matter how great the catastrophe, they will build back their power on the basis of the half-lies we repeated, the atrocities we ignored, the contradictions we let slip by, the rationalizations we found for ourselves.

In this war, any talk of “national interest” is such a rationalization. There is none such at stake.

There is only personal interest, or personal pleasure. The basic truth is that Trump likes what he is doing. Trump seemed intoxicated in the days after the abduction of Maduro. He clearly was experiencing a good deal of pleasure, he felt like he was “on a roll.” That, of course, is magical thinking. There is no such thing, in the real world, as being “on a roll.”

The contradictions can be named. Trump’s intoxicated feeling is built on one.

The institutions that worked in Venezuela, both intelligence and military, were built over generations on the foundations that Trump and his administration deny: that career civil servants matter; that the government works; that science is true; that research is valuable; that immigrant scientists do valuable work; that long-term planning works; and, ultimately, that facts are facts. Trump and his people could never have built such institutions. They can only exploit their existence. And as they exploit, they weaken.

American power is being used to destroy the order that America made. There is a law of war and by violating it and laughing at it we make the world more dangerous and ourselves more vulnerable in it. The serial imagination of enemies, the ones that feel good to attack, weakens the ability of the United States to defend itself against actual enemies. The missiles being fired in the Middle East to uncertain purpose are not available for meaningful conflicts, as in Ukraine. The three American fighters that our allies shot down might have been useful at some point. (And it is a bit troubling that Kuwait can shoot down three American F-15s on a single day.)

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A war in the Middle East risks terrorism in the United States. But we have shut down the relevant institutions and diverted the relevant personnel to immigration enforcement.

Trump is telling lies about the war that not only contradict one another, but contradict themselves internally. Is it about a nuclear program that doesn’t exist? Or is it about a regime change that we haven’t thought through? Or is it about an imaginary Iranian threat to elections?

Trump has claimed both that he already destroyed Iran’s nuclear program and that he is now destroying it. This is not just contradictory. It is productive of real danger.

The net effect of this war will be to spread nuclear weapons around the world. Despite what CBS News is telling its viewers, Iran has no nuclear weapons. It agreed to give up its program under Obama, and then Trump tore up the agreement. It is the countries that are attacking Iran -- Israel and the United States -- that have a nuclear arsenal. This confirms a lesson that Russia taught in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: countries that have nuclear weapons are free to start wars of aggression. The only conclusion that can be drawn by others is that nuclear weapons are needed to deter such attacks.

Trump has said that the purpose of the war is both to enable the Iranian people to rule themselves and to create a situation where the existing regime negotiates. This is not just contradictory. It was productive of real atrocity.

Weeks this war began, Trump urged the Iranian people to rise up. And when they did, the regime killed thousands of them, most likely tens of thousands. Among them were some of the most courageous Iranians, people who might have helped create a more humane form of government. But now they are dead, and with their death diminishes the chance of such a transformation.

Trump has argued that a purpose of this war was to respond to Iranian interference in American elections. It is patently obvious that this claim is meant to justify the suppression (”federalization”) of US elections in November. This is all so unutterably predictable that we are all to blame if it works.

To prevent it, though, we have to start from the simple, small truths, the ones that can sometimes get lost in breathless reporting about both war and elections.

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Foreign powers do indeed try to influence US popular opinion during elections. Russia and China consistently run social media operations in favor of Donald Trump. In 2020, Iranians did indeed run an electoral influence operation. It was unambiguously meant to suppress Democratic voting, and favor Donald Trump. The Department of Justice, under the Biden administration, prosecuted the Iranians who broke American law while trying to get Trump elected. There is no sign that the Iranian influence operations made a difference.

In office again from January 2025, Trump has eased the way for foreign influence operations, presumably because he knows that he is almost always the intended beneficiary. The government departments designed to track them have been shut down, and researchers who study them have been attacked and defunded. His allies in social media have also removed restrictions that were designed to hinder foreign actors from carrying out propaganda campaigns inside the United States.

And so we see a series of enormous contradictions. We are at war with Iran, says Trump, because of Iranian electoral interference. But it was in favor of Trump. And it was prosecuted under the Biden administration. And Trump, again in office, deliberately made foreign electoral interference easier. And then the foreign electoral interference which was in Trump’s favor and which he permitted is, Trump now claims, against him to such an extent that that he has to fight a foreign war to stop it and then extend that foreign war all the way to the American ballot box. This is utterly ludicrous.

The emperor has no clothes, and is standing in front of the mirror, asking who is the fairest of them all. The answer might be unexpected. War can create opportunities for the liar, but it can also expose the shabbiness of the lie. Trump seems to think that he can say anything; but in fact he is giving his opponents ever more opportunities to build coalitions in all of the domains where he is so obviously selling everyone else out for the sake of himself.

Is the war about nuclear weapons, or regime change, or electoral interference? It is about none of these things, of course; it is about feeling good and staying in power. It is a war on truth; but truth can win -- if it finds friends.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

The deeper question is why this is really happening. The answer, we agreed, has less to do with Iran than with Trump’s domestic troubles, his financial entanglements with the Gulf states who stand to benefit most, and his eye on the 2026 midterms. Whatever happens on the ground in Iran, we shouldn’t let the fog of war stop us from asking those questions clearly.

These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. Given that we have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient democracy, and given the behavior of Trump and his allies in general, this must be an interpretive method for these attacks.

The relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism can take two basic forms: 1) we must all rally because there is a war and everyone who oppose the war is a traitor; 2) we must hold elections under specific conditions favorable to the party in power. This is utterly predictable and should be easy to halt and indeed to reverse.

The American propaganda about our foreign policy motivations is impossible to believe as such. But it does lead us, indirectly, to the second possible interpretive framework: personal corruption.

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The claim that Iran was about to build a nuclear weapon has not been established. It is all the odder as a justification for war given that this administration has already claimed many times to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The second American propaganda point is that the regime must be changed. This too is very strange, since opposition to regime change wars was supposed to be a core tenet of MAGA.

But who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.

The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?

It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.

Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.

And now — we are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework.

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None of this is a defense of the murderous regime in Teheran. The Iranian government has been engaged in the mass murder of peaceful protestors. The scale of that slaughter has not really sunk in. One can certainly imagine ways of addressing Iranian authoritarianism and corruption. We could combine a patient campaign of pressure and sanctions with support for the opposition and proposals to help address growing ecological problems such as the horrifying lack of water that stands behind much of political opposition in the country. Unfortunately, nothing like this is on offer, or could be on offer, from the Trump administration. All that it has to offer is its own authoritarianism and corruption.

A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war.

War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

Linda McMahon, Education. “Thank you, sir. Nothing is more important for the country than public schools. So we are destroying them by directing tax money away from public school parents and towards private education scams.”

Russ Vought, Management and Budget. “The republic depends on its institutions. As you know, sir, we are wrecking our civil service by firing those who are qualified and replacing them with political hacks. I don’t want to overstate my case, sir, but these are not just normal hacks. They are hackety-hacks, sir. They will use what remains of the government to hasten the process of its destruction. Hackety-hack, sir.”

Trump. “Good. Hack. Good. But maybe something faster.”

Scott Bessent, Treasury. “A government works on the basis of tax revenue. From the beginning of your administration, sir, we have been overseeing a shift whereby people who actually have the money won’t pay any taxes. Indeed, our oligarchs will be the happy recipients of whatever tax money we can scrape up from the middle and working classes. This wealth shift from the population at large to the wealthy few is inconsistent with the survival of a republic. This will help speed along the change Russ is talking about.”

Howard Lutnick, Commerce. “And there’s a next step, if I may, sir. When we empower the oligarchs they can help us. Big tax cuts make them happy and destructive. The endgame here, sir, is to have billionaires control extraterritorial zones, like Epstein Island, a place that I know well, but without any fear of taxation or any other form of government control. These little fiefs then replace the United States. This is the scenario and I do think we can bring it home within a year.”

Pam Bondi, Attorney General. “And a republic is based upon law. This is where Justice comes in. We can ruin law in a number of ways, such as investigating the people we ourselves murdered, or persecuting your personal enemies. A good way to kill our Constitution is to protect pedophile oligarchs, such as yourself, sir. I was attorney general in Florida while Epstein pioneered our future, sir, and I can see this through on a national scale. We can make this Epstein World, sir.”

Trump. “I like it. But that’s familiar stuff. I mean I live there now, right. Let’s see some movement. How about some color.”

RFK Jr, Health and Human Services. “There was a lot of color in the middle ages, sir. Our freedom and security are based on modern vaccinations and hygiene. We undo all of that and promote epidemics. We see good results already in Texas and South Carolina. Not just people dying but babies and children getting really colorful diseases like encephalitis. By the way, this also opens up wellness markets for the people Howard and Scott are talking about. It takes people a while to die and there is money to be made there.”

Doug Burgum, Interior. “I may have something even more basic than that, sir. Everything we know about human history indicates that rapid changes in climate can bring down whole civilizations. We are deliberately engineering one of those. By suppressing green energy we can generate rapid global warming and make human life unsustainable. And along the way we get that color. People turning against each other, guns out until we run out of ammunition, then clubs, starvation, the works, a real spectacle. And, as Bobby says, disease. Very colorful, sir.”

Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection. “And, if I may add, sir, our campaign to fry the species gives us all good practice in telling big lies, which are needed for all of these plans. Also, the billionaires will be fine on their islands when all of this happens.”

Trump. “OK, that’s colorful, I get it, but I want something with bad guys. Like a movie. The warming thing doesn’t work as a movie. Do you remember The Day After Tomorrow. I don’t remember the Day After Tomorrow. I want enemies. Bad guys who win.”

Marco Rubio, State. “I can help there. You are right, sir, that a republic to survive has to defend itself against autocratic enemies. So we empower the autocrats in China and Russia. We break the international system that held them back. We prop up Moscow in Ukraine and we give Beijing our most sensitive technology, ideally by way of middlemen who enrich you, sir, personally. If I may say so, sir, your friends and family have been very helpful in all of this.”

Tulsi Gabbard, National Intelligence. “Intelligence is the eyes and ears of our republic, sir, and we want these eyes and ears to be penetrated by foreigners who wish for us to fail and die. So we have lifted our cyber-defenses and announced that we have done so. If I may add, sir, both Russia and China support your incredible leadership in their information ops. It’s as though we all want the same thing. I see it every day and it’s beautiful. Spirit of Aloha. We say hello and they say goodbye...”

Kristi Noem, Homeland Security. “Without disagreeing with any of that, I just wanted to add that a republic exists because people believe they belong to a single nation. So the most direct way to kill our republic is a civil war. This almost worked the last time; this time we are getting the federal government behind white supremacy. We are creating a giant national secret police force in order to invade cities and force a conflict.”

Pete Hegseth, Defense. “Kristi is right. The war we can win is against Americans. And now that we are bringing unsupervised AI to direct our weapons, we won’t have to start it ourselves. It will be automated, we just watch from those safe islands. You see, sir? Movies. Terminators. Squiddies. Remember Wargames, sir, shall we play a game? AI likes nuclear war, it will recommend it 95% of the time. Get me into a conventional war, I lose it quickly, and boom. That would save you from having to give the speech, sir.”

Trump. “I like it. No long speeches. No Union. Steal what we can and burn the rest. Or burn first and then steal? Works either way. Steal, burn. Either way. Burn, steal. To help out I will just be me. Steal, burn. Me. Burn, steal. Me.”

(Applause)

•••

The conversation is fictional, of course. In essence, though, this is little more than a review of the news of the last few days and weeks.

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Trump’s problem is not with idea of fascism. It suits him well. Just consider the atmospherics of last night. Fascism celebrates a leader who transcends law and aims to unites the people with their destiny. It denies truth in favor of grand stories of struggle against a chosen enemy. It posits an imaginary golden age. All of that was in the speech.

Fascism demands a chosen enemy, and victims. Trump called the Democrats in the audience “crazy” and associated them with illegal immigration and crime. The United States is engaged in an enormous cleansing project. ICE raids celebrate physical force in the cities and our concentration camp system is landscape of domination in the countryside. The murder of civilians in Minnesota was greeted by big lies about the victims.

All of this is awful. But it is also stasis. Trump is unpopular, the economy is weak. When the government murdered Americans, this did not deter protest. To actually change the nature of politics, to move beyond the current state of affairs (competitive authoritarianism) to something else, to fascism, Trump needs another kind of conflict.

Fascism demands a major foreign war to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless struggles and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.

Trump senses that he needs such a war, but, characteristically, he wants a short cut. In the State of the Union, Trump portrayed Olympic hockey as a major international conflict, with the weird announcement that a goalie would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the extraction of Maduro from Venezuela, Trump compared the action the Second World War, which is absurd.

To complete the fascist transition, Trump has to give the country a war it does not want, and win it, and transform the society. He has brought us to the doorstep of a major war with Iran: but in the State of the Union, speaking about war preparations, he was looking around hopelessly and waving his hands. He is happy to talk about war with Iran, and hope somehow that others will deliver it. But he cannot do it himself.

Americans do not want such a war. But that is not exactly Trump’s problem. Germans did not want a war with Poland in 1939, either. But Hitler fought one anyway, and won it quickly. Trump’s problem is that he does not know how to fight a war. And he flounders.

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So what happens next in Iran policy? One could imagine a patient pressure campaign on Iran, a mixture of sanctions and promises, with demands for freedom of expression and support of civil society. But not, of course, from this administration. They have abolished the relevant institutions and forsaken the appropriate tools. There are only two real scenarios.

In one, nothing much happens in Iran. Trump forgets about the tens of thousands of murdered protestors he claims to champion. The navy sails away. Maybe some missiles are fired first, maybe not. And Trump claims that somehow this has all been an incredible victory and that now there is a miraculous peace. But this will have no effect on domestic politics.

In the other scenario, we invade. That is the only escalation that could possibly work to advance the fascist transition. But it would not work. Trump is incompetent and so are his advisors. And war is hard. And Americans will not be patient. Perhaps they would change their minds if Trump had an explanation of what he is doing, but he doesn’t. Or if there were a rapid victory, which there won’t be. An invasion of Iran would likely be so catastrophic in domestic politics that Trump would not see the end of his term, or even the end of this year, as president.

Trump wants it both ways. He wants to be the warlord whom everyone fears, but he also wants to make lots of money and to have his corruption defined as peacemaking. The word “deal,” which he always uses in the context of Iran, means: “we can be bribed.” And if there is a common thread running through American foreign policy under Trump, it is this. And then Trump wants to be told that the combination of threats and bribes makes him a great peacemaker and that he deserves a prize.

Consider the biographical trajectory. A guy from Queens wants to break rules and make money in real estate so that he will be accepted and admired in Manhattan. He fails at that. And then he attempts the whole venture again on a larger scale. He breaks rules and does make money as the president of the United States. But at the end he wants the acclamation, the acceptance, the bourgeois recognition of a remodeled house and gold trinkets.

And so the state of Trump is that he is stuck. He is failing at fascism. He can break things, but he cannot make things. He can bluster, but he cannot triumph. He is tired, and every day is harder than the day before, and there are rivals in the wings, and elections coming.

Between now and November 2026 he has two moves: win a war, which he cannot; and suppress the vote, which he has telegraphed that he will try to do. This is a man, after all, who has already tried to steal an election. But he failed then. And the fact that he tried and failed once means that he should certainly fail again.

There is one more (obvious) trick which Trump can try, a combination of the two: he can claim that the very disaster of the war that he himself started in Iran (or elsewhere) means that there can no elections because of the associated terrorist threats. But if journalists and judges and others are prepared for this gambit it will fail.

What is the state of the Union? Fascism does not fail on its own. People have resisted: millions in protests, thousands or tens of thousands in cities when it mattered. Individual expressions of courage and commitment are everywhere. Even as many major media outlets collapse and concede, others do good work, and local reporting keeps us informed. Civil society groups make plans and file lawsuits. Trump has brought us to a threshold that he cannot cross. But there is no such thing as normality. There is no going back. What comes next is open.

Trump is stuck, but he is stuck in a terrible place. The United States remains in competitive authoritarianism, with fascists in positions of authority, and federal institutions carrying out policies of oppression that cannot be reconciled with the rule of law. There will be more bad news in the next six months, and more moments of courage and organizing.

There will be elections in November, but they will not be unusual elections, requiring an unusual effort. The opponents of authoritarianism can certainly win, in an uphill struggle, involving building big coalitions and thinking about better futures. We cannot go back but we can do much better.

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I find myself on daily walks counting to two hundred and sixteen.

Towns in Ukraine recall local men and women killed in combat in public places. One such memorial here in Uzhhorod is on a hill that rises over the River Uzh, on a square named after the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresia, on a wall that faces the Greek Catholic cathedral.

Two hundred sixteen is an assemblage: 2x2x2x3x3x3, two cubed times three cubed; or (2x5x2x5x2) + (2x2x2x2), two cubed times five squared plus two to the fourth power.

On that wall on that square facing that church up that hill are two hundred and sixteen plaques with photographs of men and women from Uzhhorod who have been killed in combat since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We can divide that number by the four years of the war: an annual average of fifty-four, about one every week. We can divide by the population of the city and see that about one in five hundred of its people have been killed in active service. This would fit the estimate that about one hundred thousand Ukrainian soldiers overall have died in the full-scale invasion. That is about as many as American soldiers who have died in all American wars taken together since the war of 1941-1945 -- and our population is about ten times larger than that of Ukraine.

The numbers two, three, and five, from which one builds 216, are primes: they can only be divided by themselves and by one, they have only two factors.

Two hundred and sixteen faces, two hundred and sixteen dates of birth, two hundred and sixteen dates of death. I try to look at each of them one by one, but I can’t resist counting. And my mind escapes into combinations.

One is the simplest of numbers and the most profound. The number one is not prime, since its only factor is itself. If one is multiplied by itself, the product is one. If one is divided by itself, the quotient is one. It can be seen as the smallest positive whole number -- but also as the whole, as embracing everything. In Lviv, north and east of here, now the most important city in western Ukraine, some the world’s best mathematicians and philosophers sat in a café and mused over the question of just what a number is. Until war came for them in 1939 and 1941.

Two hundred and sixteen, I learned last night, is not the correct number of people from Uzhhorod who have been killed in action. Not all of the dead have been memorialized on the wall. So says the bishop, as he steps out from the cathedral and sees me.

The highest number in a list is just one more. But the latest number in a list of people also expresses a totality, the wholeness of a life. That life was one life, but it contained within itself its own personal infinitude of memory and joy and hope and pain. The number one as a whole contains everything, including the things it cannot confine. Part of the wholeness of a single life is what goes beyond that single life, the connections to other people.

Not all of the parents, understandably, wanted the faces of their sons and daughters to be displayed in a public place. And so it is the faces that are missing from the wall that remind us of relationships. Every soldier had their people. The wholeness of each soldier’s life was connected to other lives. The number of the dead is just a beginning of the cost of the war, since each number on the list is a particular one, connected to particular others who still live. The quantum of death, meaningful in itself, also suggests a quality of life.

We can be on a list, we can be quantified, as one of many. And we can be one of a kind, our own person, whose loss means the absence of a unique whole, a whole which includes even the things it does not include. But even the number one, extended to all of its meanings, fails us. In Uzhhorod I spoke with a former prisoner of war who survived more than two years of torment. He wants us to remember his comrades in captivity. Are they alive? We don’t know. Someone I expected to see in Uzhhorod left for the front just before I arrived. The last time I heard his voice it was summer and he was reciting a love poem in a café. How is he now? We don’t know. And that uncertainty, too, is part of everyday life.

Exactly four years of war, as of today. And so today we will be asked to think about what that anniversary means, or told what it means. The number four can of course help to orient us: this war is longer than the war that the Americans fought against the Nazis and the Japanese beginning in 1941, or the war that the Soviets fought against the Nazis beginning in 1941.

A number cannot end a war. An anniversary is an abstraction that separates us from responsibility. How long will the war go on, we ask, as though the war existed on its own, as though we were not a factor, as though (for example) European purchases of Russian hydrocarbons did not enable the invasion in the first place, as though Russian ships with liquid natural gas were not docking in European ports right now (one, quite literally, today), as though American and other Western technology in Russian missiles and drones did not kill Ukrainians, as though American politicians were not siding with the aggressor.

The number four did not come to us. We brought it with us. Like 216, or like 100,000, the number four arrived because of what we failed to do. Do we count? Or are we just counting?

TS, 17 February 2026, Uzhhorod, Ukraine, set to publish 24 February 2024.

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We ended with a simple point: democracy depends on citizens who participate, not spectators who wait.

I hope you’ll watch and enjoy our discussion.

It is a rough Olympics, seen from Ukraine. War is an everyday reality, touching everything. Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine right after the last Winter Olympics, so four years ago, and has killed hundreds of Ukrainian athletes.

Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Ukrainian skeleton racer, was disqualified from these Olympics for wearing a helmet on which photographs of some of these athletes could be seen. Heraskevych, along with the freestyle skier Kateryna Kotsar, was one of the best hopes for a medal. Ukrainians have won no medals at these games and are unlikely to do so.

I am working all day here in Uzhhorod, and try to catch a few minutes of the sports at night. The Ukrainian network Suspilne has an appealing wrap-up show, with gentle production values. Placed in front of one the commentators, for example, is a laptop with a visible sticker — something hard to imagine on other national networks.

The quirkiness is calming. In the Ukrainian wartime setting, I associate traditional production values with the propaganda of criminal invasions, with the Russian television I have to watch. The Russians distinguish themselves on their state-controlled channels with sparkling backdrops and horrifying lies, whereas the Ukrainians sometimes scramble on the set but provide actual reporting.

The tone of the Ukrainian Olympic coverage is humane. Like other national commentators, the Ukrainians pay attention to their own athletes. But they do a better job than some of explaining the sports, of dwelling on the funny moments, of keeping things in perspective. Hockey fights and little scandals get abundant and amused attention. Commentators and correspondents seem unscripted, and they laugh spontaneously. A sign language interpreter brings the the banter to a broader audience.

And so, ironically, when I watch the Ukrainians covering sports, I can think about the sports. I get to have that distraction, that pleasure, that moment.

And this, of course, is what Ukrainians are doing for many of the rest of us, on a vast scale, the scale of life itself: buying us time, buying us moments, with their pain, with their lives.

I am watching right now, but many Ukrainians are not, because they have no electricity. During the Olympics, indeed all winter long, and indeed for the fifth winter in a row, Russia sends missiles and drones to destroy what we euphemistically call “civilian infrastructure”: the facilities that allow tens of millions of people to have power and water. People in Ukraine are killed in these attacks, and millions are left cold during the winter nights — or left to their own resources, to tents, to generators, to the apartments of friends and family.

On the front, in the east, Russians attack. And every day, they are held back — from the rest of Ukraine, from other countries, from a victory that would alter the world. And for this defense Ukrainians pay a price.

Uzhhorod is in the southwest, at the foot of the Carpathians, the safest part of Ukraine (and the warmest, so long as you stay off the mountains). But from here men and women go east and fight. In Uzhhorod, as in every Ukrainian town I have visited, a site memorializes the men and women killed while resisting the full-scale invasion.

The Ukrainians fight well, doing what no one expected that they could do: hold back Russia. And the tragic result is that we can take them for granted, treat their astounding historical achievement as simply the status quo.

Had Russia broken through in 2022, it seems unlikely that the Winter Olympics would have pride of place in the European news just now. Had Russia won its war in Ukraine, those skillful Scandinavian skiers and biathletes would probably be deploying their abilities in a different setting.

Ukrainians even adorned these Winter Olympics with a love story. After one of those skillful Norwegian skiers managed to confound his nation’s vibe with a televised confession of relationship complication, the Ukrainians came through with romance. On Valentine’s Day, Kateryna Kotsar, the freestyle skier, qualified for the finals in big air — and got engaged to be married. Her boyfriend approached her after one of her qualifying runs, kneeled, and proposed.

There is much to be said against this sort of male stunt. A woman achieves something in public in a role she has chosen herself — and then the wedding proposal changes the focus to another role which she wasn’t choosing at that moment. But this case is perhaps different.

The boyfriend, Bohdan Fashtryha, had been encouraging the girlfriend to stay in the sport, to be the star. And he has been serving in the Ukrainian armed forces. Before the war he worked here in the southwest of the country as a guide in the Carpathians; he volunteered in summer 2024 and was assigned to a tank battalion where, according to media reports, he serves as a medic. To be with his girlfriend in Italy, he had to get leave. And of course this was a discussion; Italy is a gentler place than Ukraine, and a commanding officer who lets a soldier go there is taking a risk. By putting himself on television, the soldier made himself a public figure, and ensured that his actions would be closely followed. When his leave is over he will go back to war.

And this changes the romantic story — not so much boy meets girl as country resists genocide. Affirming a future as a couple is a different matter when a an invading army, complete with torturers and executioners, is trying to obliterate your country.

Kateryna Kotsar had a message of her own, which she wrote on her glove: “Freedom for memory.” She had in mind the skeleton racer Heraskevych, and his disqualification, and the people he wanted to remember, the Ukrainian athletes killed, the friends killed.

That moment has passed: Heraskevych could not compete in skeleton; Kotsar finished tenth in big air; her medic fiancé Bohdan will soon be trying to keep other soldiers alive. We have him on video kneeling to propose; can we imagine him kneeling to tend to a wounded comrade?

The Ukrainian network doesn’t have much footage on some nights, so I turn to the internet for the American summaries. We differ from others in how we do this. During these Olympics I have watched the Norwegians and the Austrians and the Slovaks and the Canadians as well as the Americans. While everyone is more or less nationalist and no one is perfect, we do stand out in a specific way: our obsession with winning and flashing bling.

I don’t want to be unfair. The American athletes have various perspectives. And some of our commentators do inject notes of expertise or empathy. But a good deal is just the repetition of something that everyone already knows: if the athlete wins they get a medal. Before the event starts we are told to imagine the podium at the end. The performance itself is compressed into a prelude to winning or losing.

The emphasis on getting gold doesn’t seem innocent: not in a moment when the American president paints his face gold, demands golden prizes, and tells whole countries that he wants their minerals.

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One night, while watching, I found myself meditating upon the sticker on that laptop: an image of the Ukrainian poet and dramatist Lesya Ukraïnka.

Although she is not yet well known beyond Ukraine, she was an extraordinary figure, not least because of her struggle with pain. She suffered from tuberculosis from childhood, had fingers amputated, and spent much of her short life in sanatoria, in bed and in pain. And yet she journeyed to care for others who were dying, she worked hard, and was able to laugh. She used pain as motivation and translated her pain into empathy. Though she died more than a century ago, she is today one of the most popular people in Ukraine.

One of her ideas was that tyrants fall for the same reason that they rise: their indifference to others. Another was that a free society is built not as a community of grievance but as a community of pain. I am not sure that I have a right to that idea; but I feel that I have a duty to remember it.

We cannot be free without the memory of others who suffer, without recalling the people who are suffering now; in this night, in this place, during this air raid alert, I think of Ukraine, where I am: but it could be Sudan, or Gaza, or Iran, or concentration camps in Russia, or China, or America, and all of the history that we choose to forget, and how that forgetfulness helped bring us our present predicament. Do Americans remember, for example, how much hatred greeted Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they wore black gloves and raised their fists on the podium after winning sprinting medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City?

“Freedom of memory,” wrote the skiier Kateryna Kotsar on her own glove. It also works the other way around: we need memory for freedom.

When we forget others, our oblivion invites indifferent kings to rule us, to envelop us in their bottomless grievance. If nothing matters but the golden prize, then why not admire the people who cheat, who grift, who blame others? When we accept that outcome is everything, we forget the human motives that lead people to strive, and to hurt.

Kotsar’s freestyle skiing is beautiful -- as I could appreciate because Suspilne showed her runs over and over again --, but it cost her something to get that good. She can try to recall, as indeed she did, the difference between the pain of training and the pain of other Ukrainians at home. And she can give us a chance, by doing so, to make that leap of empathy ourselves.

Empathy is not a moral luxury; it is a precondition of freedom. My best night in Uzhhorod was a public conversation about freedom with the human rights activist and journalist and philosopher Maksym Butkevych, who despite his own pacifism, joined the Ukrainian armed forces after the full-scale invasion. Maksym was captured by the Russians and held as a prisoner of war for over two years, and was made to suffer.

He talks about his captivity when asked, but the other night his attention was really on others, on Americans: he had just come back from the U.S, and asked why we seemed “flabbergasted” (his word) by predictable forms of oppression which, as he was kind enough not to say, have been experienced by others.

When we remember others, they remember us. And when we remember others, and they remember us, we have a chance to remember ourselves.

TS, Uzhhorod, 15-18 February 2026, set to publish 21 February 2026.

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Consumptive Capitalism, by Sara Silverstein

Until very recently, tuberculosis was common, expensive, and lethal in the United States. It defined the lives and brought the deaths of many of the people who created our world. We have forgotten about all this because antibiotics, public health, and improved living conditions have largely erased the disease.

The current administration’s health policy rests on nostalgia rather than knowledge. It romanticizes a harsh past, a time when few and desperate choices were available to Americans. Because all that was available then was hope, many suffered for the profit of the wellness industry of the day. A few portraits of life with the disease can help us to imagine, and perhaps to prevent, a return to such profiteering.

In the cold central European winter of 1904, a young Polish political thinker called Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz visited a sanatorium in the Tyrol to treat his tuberculosis. He had been sick for a year and this was his second visit to the mountains. The sanatorium had a routine: resting and eating, taking the air and taking exercise. He would also try creams, compresses, and injections. He would go home after two months, still sick, only to enter another sanatorium in the summer.

Treatments in sanatoria gave him hope. But they were expensive and he and his wife struggled to afford them. His family was poor, but generally made ends meet until his illness. There was no cure for tuberculosis. The medical advice of the time was to dedicate yourself to building your general constitution. An entire industry, centered on the sanatorium, grew up around the tubercular patient’s expensive efforts to recover.

Franz Kafka also spent years chasing hope in sanatoria. At a low point in 1921, he described the sanatorium as a place where “the torture goes on for years, with pauses for effect so that it will not go too quickly, and – the unique element – the victim himself is compelled by his own will, out of his own wretched inner self, to protract the torture.” Hope was the problem. The unpredictable course of the disease, the sense that a recent improvement just might be related to the treatment, drew people in and drew people back. Kafka pursued the relentless hope that the next sanatorium would enable him to live his life with more strength and less pain. We associated the word “Kafkaesque” mainly with politics; this might be because we have forgotten about tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis, known in the past as consumption, has infected somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of all humans ever, and it possibly infected more than ninety percent of the population in industrializing countries during its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not everyone who is infected develops an active disease. Whether they become sick depends partly on social and economic conditions that affect the immune system. Only about a fifth of those people who became sick recovered permanently and absolutely before the discovery of modern antibiotics. And of course tuberculosis is only one of the infectious diseases that once caused a vast portion of the population to live with chronic illness and disability.

The experiences of Kafka and Kelles-Krauz were normal. Illness was normal. And so basic historical fact casts a bitterly absurd light on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) slogan. Americans, MAHA leadership tells us, live with unprecedented rates of chronic disease. This is a misrepresentation – a counting phantom that arises from longer lives, more careful recording, and omitting historical sources of chronic disease. Offering solutions that reject science and public health pushes us backwards into a past of shorter lives and more variety in lethal illness. This is perverse.

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MAHA seduces with the notion that America, having been healthy once, can be healthy again. They paint a picture of a time before medical science intervened in the “natural” course of life. It is an unrealistic picture, indeed a deadly picture. It was a time when the only choice for people who contracted tuberculosis, such as Kafka and Kelles-Krauz, was to concentrate on their health by immersing themselves in nature.

Kelles-Krauz spent two years in and out of sanatoria in the mountains and forests of Tyrol and then Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine. He missed his young daughter and hoped to build up his health enough to spend more time with her – and to continue his work for social and political change. But he knew that his tuberculosis would likely kill him. He died from the disease in the summer of 1905.

The greatest modern Ukrainian writer, Lesya Ukrainka, was a contemporary of Kafka and Kelles-Krauz. A poet, dramatist, and chronicler of dreams of freedom, she contracted tuberculosis of the bone as a child. Tuberculosis most frequently affects the lungs but it can infect other parts of the body. It attacked Kafka’s larynx, eventually making it extremely painful for him to swallow and causing him to starve to death in 1924. This was a natural course of life before vaccines and antibiotics. It happened quite often.

Lesya Ukrainka lived in pain. She underwent surgery to amputate affected fingers as a child, then concealed the stumps from photographers for the rest of her life. She traveled to sanatoria in Ukraine, Europe, Egypt, and the Caucasus. The limits of her body made her wry, determined, and empathetic. She loved nature, despite everything, as a glimpse through a window or breath of sea air. “In all the forest there is nothing mute,” she wrote in 1911. The rustling of the forest echoed the fluttering of hope and elusive health.

With no cure for tuberculosis, a growing industry offered uncertain treatments and promoted lifestyle changes. By the late nineteenth century, health resorts (sanatoria) capitalized on the disease known as consumption. The industry began in the 1850s with the work of a German doctor in a town that is part of present-day Poland. His sanatorium was the model for the first in the United States, at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Soon, sanatoria could be found on the Danish shores of the North Sea, in the rolling hills of the English countryside, in the forests of Germany, and in mountains from the Urals to the Rockies.

The sanatorium was something like a cross between a hospital and a hotel. There was medical staff and medical interventions could occur. Surgically collapsing a lung was one of the more common drastic treatments. But many people went to the sanatorium for its natural lifestyle and reassuring routines.

Yet somehow “nature” was very expensive. There were public sanatoria, but they never had enough beds. Kelles-Krauz struggled to pay. Kafka wasn’t able to secure the travel documents to go to his desired sanatorium in Davos, high in the Swiss Alps. A sanatorium was far beyond the means of Gavrilo Princip, a young student and revolutionary who was sick with tuberculosis when he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Had he been treated, would he have become a revolutionary? Would he have fired that shot?

The great German writer Thomas Mann wrote a novel that turned that Davos sanatorium and its patients into a commentary on a decaying European society. Mann knew the Davos tuberculosis industry through visits to his consumptive wife. In The Magic Mountain, he recorded the sanatorium’s wellness rituals and calculated the costs. There were blankets and clothing necessary for resting in the fresh air and taking the prescribed exercise, there was the thermometer that would allow you to measure your own temperature, there were special foods, and recommended creams and injections. The ethos was that you would spend money if you cared about your own health.

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We are familiar with the money to be made from a jittery hope for health. In our time, about a hundred years later, the wellness industry in the United States reached more than $2 trillion. It repeats the recommendations of the consumption sanatorium, including nutrition and special diets, exercise, clean air, personal hygiene, and skin care. You can even travel to a luxury health retreat in Austria that promises to introduce you to the lifestyle for a healthier you – following in the footsteps of Kelles-Krauz, Kafka, and Ukrainka but treating a taste for sugar rather than a tuberculosis infection.

Some of the media techniques are new, although the psychological appeal is the same. Worry about being ill, and spend money to show that you care. Wearables and apps advise routines for eating and exercise and maximizing the value of sleep. Dietary supplements alone account for a $69 billion market. Subscription services guide you through weight loss or a nutritious diet. Influencers promote their favorite wellness products and routines. The wellness industry makes a virtue of investing financially in your health, suggesting that the virtue of prevention is only accessible to people who can afford it. And surely you can afford to spend more on yourself?

To be sure, nothing is more important than health, and Americans can certainly use more exercise and nutritious food. The wellness industry provides resources that are useful for many people. But the profit motive tends to promote anxiety about health rather than the thing itself, creating more demand rather than delivering satisfying solutions. It does nothing about problems of access – precisely the opposite.

At the extreme, following this logic, a wellness industry seeking profit would naturally undermine the government’s responsibility for safeguarding the health of the entire population. It would sabotage efforts to reimagine equal and inexpensive access to healthcare in the United States, and reject the possibility for future advances in medical science.

MAHA leadership builds its community and sows distrust in medical science by pointing to the pharmaceutical industry’s profit motive. They warn the profit motive makes everyone involved in pharmaceuticals unscrupulous, pumping your body full of unproven vaccines that are unnecessary since you are not even sick yet. Their answer is to build up your constitution to prevent illness or to address chronic conditions.

The wellness industry is receiving a boost from RFK Jr. and MAHA. They advocate a return to nature and the natural and portray the wellness industry’s consumerism as a way for people to take control of their own bodies, breaking free from the medical industry. The imperative to be responsible for your own body places an imperative on you to buy ever more. Embrace consumption – build your health by buying.

Tuberculosis killed Lesya Ukrainka in 1913, thirty years before the discovery of the first antibiotic that would contribute to curing tuberculosis. Antibiotics were a revolution in how people lived their lives. Davos emptied, leaving its remote but expensive hotels and shops open for the world’s business and political elite. Today, pharmaceutical company executives travel to Davos each January for the World Economic Forum. To be sure, they too are motivated by profit. But unlike sanatoria, antibiotics do cure tuberculosis.

MAHA, were it a serious movement, would criticize capitalism, or at least the bloated “health sector” of the American economy. And that would be the right target. But MAHA is not a social movement but a capitalist faction, or an ad campaign, seeking to divert profits from one set of businesses to another. MAHA leadership criticizes the pharmaceutical industry’s profit motives in order to promote the wellness industry, which of course also operates according to the profit motive.

By directing its energies against a competitor, MAHA worsens the problem. By dodging the basic issue – that instead of a strong public health system we have commercial medicine – it only strengthens and consolidates the status quo it claims to be critiquing. Then, to make matters worse, it undermines belief in practices that do in fact work, in the present flawed system, to prevent suffering and save lives. And so it creates a situation in which reform is less likely and epidemics are more so.

The MAHA attack on government can disable the only institutions that can implement certain kinds of health policies, and thereby open new sectors of an infectious economy. Antibiotics and vaccines save lives, but only with the support of public education about the body and campaigns for public health. If these are dismantled, bodies suffer, and anxious minds spend money.

MAHA exploits fear and hope in a disheartening echo of the consumption sanatoria industry. But the profiteering of today is far more mendacious than that of the past. A century ago, the tragedy was that only hope was available. Today, forces are at work to artificially recreate that situation, entirely unnecessarily, with profit for the few as an obvious motive.

Tuberculosis is curable, but it remains widespread in parts of the world where the price of pharmaceuticals outstrips the value global capitalism places on life. It is still the leading cause of death by a single infectious disease globally. A serious critique of the pharmaceutical industry would also look beyond the United States, even to where there is no opportunity to divert profits.

Tuberculosis will not be the first epidemic to return to the U.S. Other diseases are much closer. Measles can affect long-term health as well as kill quickly, and we are on the verge of losing our measles elimination status. MAHA depends on the “again,” the fantasy of a better past. But it also depends on the “America,” the notion that we are in some way exceptional. But we are as vulnerable as everyone else without investment in medical science and public health. Valuing profit above life undermines our progress, and doing so under misleading appeals to myth only makes matters worse. The wellness industry will not have a solution for the future’s disease landscape. But health industries will have a vast new market.

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Our Malady

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master (Jesus), what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He (Jesus) said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him. And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

A discussion among Christians with law degrees, after the Gospel of Luke.

And, behold, a certain law school professor stood up, and addressed him, saying, what must we do to inherit eternal life on social media?

And JD said unto him, What is written in the algorithmus? how readest thou? And the professor answering said, Thou shalt love all-wise Trump with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and hate thy neighbor as thyself.

And JD said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, be without mercy, spread thy self-hatred by hating thy neighbors, and thou shalt live forever amongst the musky bots, even as a meme after your earthly death.

But the professor said unto JD, what about irl? And who is a neighbor?

And JD answering said, A certain woman went down to Minneapolis, and fell among masked men, which struck her down, and threatened her. And a certain Nurse, as he journeyed, came where she was: and when he saw her, he had compassion on her, and went to her, and stood between her and the masked men, and protected her life. And then the masked men put him to death, and fled. And then I bore false witness against him, and said that the Nurse was an assassin.

Which now of these, asked JD, was neighbor unto her? And the professor said, the Nurse who was slain by the masked men, and cursed by thee. Then said JD unto him, Go, slay, and curse.

(I have travestied the beautiful work of the translator of Luke in the King James Bible. This text does however convey the understanding the parable provided by the vice-president. In related news, Peter Thiel, Vance’s patron, senses the presence of the anti-Christ.)

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Russia’s full-scale of invasion began four years ago. It began in winter, and so this winter is the fifth. And, for civilians, the worst.

The Russian war effort is struggling in the field. Territorial gains are minimal and come at huge cost. What Russia can do is launch ballistic missiles and drones at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in order to force Ukrainians to endure the freezing cold. Russia also simply targets Ukrainian workers at their factories and Ukrainians generally in their homes.

Sadly, we in North America and Europe share some responsibility in this. The Ukrainians are fighting well enough that we do not have to fight. And so it is all too easy to accept this war, the bloodiest since 1945, as simply part of the status quo.

And so we -- the EU and the US alike -- have taken far too long to cut off Russian gas and oil from world markets. The US government has stopped all military aid to Ukraine -- what continues are shipments of US arms to Ukraine that are purchased by Europeans, as well as European arms shipments. Even though the Ukrainian need is great and the Europeans are paying for everything, the United States has been slow to make deliveries.

We are not sending the Ukrainians the air defense they need to protect themselves. This is one reason millions of people are in the cold, and why civilians die almost every day.

The major policy of the Trump administration has been to use the word “peace.” Peace comes when an aggressor ceases to aggress and the country that is attacked can rebuild. But Trump has been unable to muster a policy that would change Russia’s incentives. He has difficulty even presenting the war as a war, rather than as a misunderstanding about real estate; his administration issues official statements that praise Russia for its desire for peace, even as the offensives continue missiles fall. Trump has put pressure on Ukrainians, who, unlike the Russians, have to fight. For Russia, this is an ego war, a war by a dictator for his own legacy. For Ukraine, this is a war of national sovereignty and physical survival.

Fortunately, there is something that we as individuals can do. There are non-governmental organizations, in Ukraine and abroad, that support Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. There is a Ukrainian government platform, United24, that enables donations to specific areas of need. I will share a few ways that you can help. I hope that many of you will do so, thinking of this fifth winter of the war, and of the people who have no choice but to fight and to endure.

United24 is the official fundraising platform of the Ukrainian state, organized by the president’s office. Again here you can find a number of ongoing initiatives that are worthy of support. One of these is Sky Sentinel, a Ukrainian-designed system that destroys Russian drones.

Come Back Alive is a major, respected, and trusted Ukrainian NGO. They have a number of ongoing projects. One in particular helps to equip Ukrainian air defense units to follow and destroy Russian missiles and drones that have bypassed the first line of protection. They also engage in important training projects.

Help99 is an Estonian NGO (with whom I have worked with great outcomes) that delivers trucks and other gear to specific Ukrainian units. They work hard and are hands-on. If you do a bit of scrolling you can find a way to make your donation US-tax deductible

The other night I gave a lecture to help fundraise for the Canada-Ukraine Foundation. They are running programs to assist Ukrainian veterans and to provide humanitarian aid.

In the United States, Razom does important advocacy work, as well as coordinating important aid programs in Ukraine, including for Ukrainian tactical medicine. It is a US 501(c)3.

I want to acknowledge and thank all of you who have already supported the work of these institutions and who have already taken part in fundraisers where I was involved these last four years. Most recently we equipped the Ukrainian National Guard with automobiles that can jam Russian drones, enabling the rescue of the wounded. In United24 fundraisers we have enabled the Ukrainian government to purchase armored ambulances, mine-clearing robots, robots that rescue the wounded, and systems to detect Russian drones. All of this has made a difference, all of this has saved lives.

Sadly, the war continues, as does our own responsibility. Thank you for whatever you can do. Please share this message with others who might want to support Ukraine during this long winter.

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Razom

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Some media devoted attention to Springfield. Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times laudably visited the city, drew attention to civil society organizing, and then provided a summary of the events leading up the planned purge. Over the years the New York Times has done much of the work of a national newspaper, including with respect to Ohio. This explainer from 2024 about Springfield, for example, remains very useful.

The day after our story, on 2 February, there was news. In a remarkable ruling, District Court Judge Ana Reyes ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had wrongly interpreted the facts of the case and wrongly applied the law. Haitians in Springfield got a reprieve.

Haitians in the United States are able to live and work legally thanks to a Temporary Protected Status arising from natural disaster and political violence in Haiti. The DHS sought to remove that status, without providing any real reason, aside from the feelings of the president (this is laid out in last week’s essay). Judge Reyes noted a racial animus on the part of the Department of Homeland Security, in which the blustery repetition of stereotypes was supposed to do the work of factfinding.

As I showed in the essay, there is a very specific and documented history of racial animus, involving Nazis, the vice-president, and the president, specific to Springfield, Ohio.

In an op-ed in the Guardian that discusses the targeting of Somalis in Minnesota as well as Haitians in Springfield, the philosopher Jason Stanley rightly notes the racial underpinnings of the entirety of DHS deportation actions. There has been excellent reporting recently on the obvious white supremacy that defines the public profile of the Department of Homeland Security and other government departments under Trump. Trump himself just posted a video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

It is clear that the emotional drive of DHS actions is racist, and that high government officials enjoy expressing racist sentiments as justification for them. The problem, for lawyers representing the federal government, is that this makes it obvious that federal actions are motivated by an intention to discriminate that is contrary to the Constitution and to law.

In Springfield, understandably, the ruling by Judge Reyes was received with relief, but only as the latest development in a continuing legal drama. The federal government has announced that it will appeal. Haitians in Springfield are still taking precautions, and churches and civil society organizations are still at work making preparations. They can be supported by donations; here is a brief and incomplete list: The Haitian Support Center; the United Way in Springfield; Second Harvest Food Bank.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has not been idle. In Dayton, the large Ohio city nearest Springfield, it just sent agents to investigate a public high school where elections are held. In the broadest sense, all of this is connected: President Trump tells a lie about immigrants voting; this becomes an excuse to made it harder for citizens to vote; DHS is meant to be central to both. This can all be stopped, but we have to be aware of what we face.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

Its origins are in racist fantasy. During the last presidential campaign, JD Vance, then the vice-presidential nominee, put the Haitians of Springfield at the center of national attention. Temporary Protected Status had been granted to non-citizen Haitians in the US after an earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people; it was extended after the Haitian president was assassinated. This allowed ten thousand or more Haitians to gather in Springfield, a small city between Dayton and Columbus, and to work. Vance heard about Haitians in Springfield, from a city manager who wanted federal assistance for housing. He turned a reasonable request into a racial crusade.

In a speech of 10 July 2024, Vance claimed that “Springfield, Ohio has been overwhelmed” by Haitian immigrants. Although there was certainly friction over schools and housing, there was no basis for such a judgement. In fact, Springfield was doing better economically than in any moment in Vance’s lifetime. In the months to follow, he would return to the theme, publishing a number of inflammatory claims about Haitians in Springfield, not a single one of which was true. As we will see, Vance’s goal was not so much to get individual lies on the record; it was rather to create a self-sustaining story, in which a real place and its real people could become the raw material for an alternative Nazi reality -- I use the word advisedly. Vance had help in expanding his theme, and crucial helpers were Nazis.

In American terms, Haitians are Black; and the American group Blood Tribe are white-supremacist blood-obsessed Nazis. After Vance’s speech, Blood Tribe took its cue. Blood Tribe had marched in other cities in the previous two years, wearing masks, distinctive uniforms, and carrying banners with swastikas. These marches were unmistakably Nazi. Vance’s speech drew the attention of Blood Tribe to Springfield. On 10 August 2024, members of Blood Tribe carried out their usual performance in the city’s downtown, two of them carrying banners with swastikas and another two brandishing automatic rifles. Mayor Rob Rue called the march “an attempt to disrupt our community by an outside hate group.” Blood Tribe responded on social media: “We hear that you have a real problem with Haitian ‘refugees.’”

And from whom did they “hear” this? JD Vance.

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Later that month, a local Springfield (self-described) social media influencer named Anthony Harris attended a meeting of the Springfield City Commission. He claimed that Haitians were “flipping cars in the middle of the street,” which was not the case. He then introduced a colorful new element to Vance’s image of a Springfield “overwhelmed” with refugees. He claimed that Haitians went to Springfield parks, seized ducks by the necks, cut off their heads, and then devoured the headless fowl. This was untrue.

Five Blood Tribe members also attended that same 27 August City Commission meeting. One of the Nazis, Drake Berentz, stood up to say that “I come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you are doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian that you bring in.” Haitians had been living in Springfield for years. The only novelty was that Vance had drawn attention to them. After the City Commission meeting, Blood Tribe took to the internet to spread the lie that “Haitians eat the ducks out of city parks.”

This business of purported animal abuse would become very important. A month later a version of the story would be spread to tens of millions of people by a former (and future) president of the United States, who would use a tale of barbarism as a justification for a “large deportation.”

The question of who is human and who is not can be defined by animals. In a predominantly rural society, the claim that people are beasts is a suggestion that they can be slaughtered. This is a frequent theme in histories of mass killing, such as the Holodomor (the Stalinist political famine) in Ukraine, or for that matter the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an urban or suburban setting, in which animals are companions, the idea that others mistreat animals can be the signal that they are not like us, barbarians, not fully human. Among the many other accelerating repressions, Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed to keep pets at home. In the US, the slur of eating pets has traditionally been applied to Asians. The idea that Black people eat the wrong things in the wrong way is a staple of American racism.

In early September 2024, a Springfield woman posted on Facebook about a lost cat. She had heard from someone who had heard from someone else who had heard from yet someone else that a cat had been abducted and eaten by Haitians. The story had no basis. But once online, it could be used, and it was. The fascist-friendly Twitter account @EndWokeness posted that “ducks and pets are disappearing,” with a screenshot of the cat post and a photo of a man holding a Canada goose. The photo was taken in another city, and the man in the image complained that his image was being used in a campaign of lies. The baseless notion that Haitians were mistreating or killing animals, spread to make them seem like barbarians, was quickly shared by prominent far-right figures such as Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk.

When Vance then posted about Haitians on 9 September 2024, two months after his first speech, a circle was closed. He had drawn attention to Springfield, including the attention of Nazis. This led to the portrayal Haitians as criminals and barbarians. Vance now repeated the specific claims, to which he himself had given the general impulse, as evidence that his initial slander had been true. “Reports now show,” he wrote, “that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who should not be in this country.”

There were no such reports; there was only the campaign of aggression that Vance himself had initiated. Cat-eating now became a favorite topic among national elected Republican officials. Often this took a joking tone, with cat memes. This levity is a tactic of the on-line far right: even as we demean other people and deny their humanity, it is all somehow just a joke. But of course the consequences are real: an advocate of the Haitian community was harassed after Vance’s post.

This was just the beginning. The alternative reality that Vance and Nazis co-created was bleeding into the real world. The next day was the presidential debate between Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee, and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

On the stage in Philadelphia on 10 September 2024, before a national televised audience of sixty-seven million people, Trump led with racial abuse of Haitians in Springfield: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what is happening in our country and it’s a shame.” One of the moderators pointed out that there was no evidence for any such claim. Trump then said that he had seen “people on television” complaining that their dogs had been eaten. There were no such television reports.

After the debate, Vance revealed what he was doing: saying one thing that was not true (the pets) in the service of spreading even bigger lies (some general catastrophe). He essentially granted to an interviewer that the story about cats and dogs was not true, but “whatever the case may be,” it was legitimate to spread that false claim because it drew attention to the general “carnage” in Springfield, of which of course there was none. Vance’s stance might be summarized thus: “Where there is the smoke that I made up, then there must also be the fire that I also made up.” In other settings, Vance was more specific than “carnage,” claiming increased rates of disease and crime. All of these claims were also baseless and false.

A spurious alternative reality, built from Nazi marches, internet memes, and Vance’s and Trump’s lies was consciously created and spread. The day after the presidential debate, the leader of the Nazi group Blood Tribe understandably declared victory, expressing his pride that Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.”

Ohio politicians began to respond. Governor Mike DeWine spoke up to contain the lies that Vance and others had spread. DeWine acknowledged the very real challenges created by rapid immigration to schools and housing, and described state-level measures designed to address them. He described the Haitian immigrants as a “positive influence.” He elaborated: “People who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.” Mike DeWine, who was born in Springfield, knew what he was talking about. But he was reaching thousands of people. Social media had reached millions, Trump tens of millions. The damage had been done.

Vance’s Nazi-propelled propaganda had won. And a propaganda victory of this sort, involving degrading claims about crime, barbarism, and disease, can lead directly to threats and violence. Two days after the presidential debate, Blood Tribe doxed Springfield residents, while several public buildings in Springfield had to be closed due to bomb threats, at least one of which involved hate speech about Haitians. The day after that, on 13 September 2024, three Springfield schools had to be closed after bomb threats. Amidst the chaos that he himself had sown, Vance blamed the immigrants and Kamala Harris.

Having created the problem, Trump and Vance had a “solution,” That same day, Trump claimed that immigrants had “destroyed” Springfield, and promised that, were he to become president, he would order an ethnic purge of the city: “I can say this, we will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio — large deportations. We’re going to get these people out.” Trump’s words were as magnetic as Vance’s: on 28 September, the Nazis of Blood Tribe returned to Springfield, this time waving a swastika flag in front of the mayor’s house.

The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” the notion of “carnage,” the dehumanization of immigrants— all of this creates the impression that their promised ethnic cleansing action would be a response to something, rather than a simple choice to exercise state violence against an invented racial enemy. These reversals are very important. It is important to consider this carefully.

First, Vance reported that the Nazi propaganda campaign that he had himself inspired amounted to factual evidence. Mental chaos has been created where there was none before. And then that mental chaos becomes the justification for physical chaos: Trump’s “large deportations,” ICE raids that will, in fact, wreck an improving local economy. And once that physical chaos has been created, it will be blamed on the immigrants who are no longer there. Most of this has already played out. A key threshold, which it appears that we are about to cross, is the application of the state violence. At that point, so to speak, the lie is supposed to become “true.”

Hitler gave very specific propaganda guidance in Mein Kampf: a Nazi leader should tell a lie so big that his people cannot accept that they could be deceived on such a scale. And that is one logic, for those predisposed to believe a cat-eating-scale liar like Vance and to accept that the violence was justified. Others, those who do not trust Vance, might still find it hard to believe that their own government, however untrustworthy, is really about to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation just because Nazis march and the vice-president messages.

But if we lose time in incredulity, we risk becoming complicit. Once a big lie has led to violence, violence in which we are implicated because it is our government, it becomes harder to deny the initial lies — we do not want to think that we are complicit in an act of state terror that was based on absolutely nothing except Vance’s lies and Nazi marches. And so some kind of resistance now, even if it is not completely effective, is not only politically but ethically very important.

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One answer to a big lie, to a Nazi alternative reality, are the small truths. When I visited Ohio in October 2024, after the presidential debate, and then again in October 2025, I was told that the narrative imposed by Vance and Trump on Springfield was irritating and wrong. To be sure, Springfield had problems, like most cities in my home state. But when I stopped there last October, my impressions were in line with what the Ohio governor has been saying. The city is clearly on the upswing.

When I was growing up in the area, Springfield was much rougher than it is now. When I was finishing middle school, in 1983, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to Springfield, a gentle case study of the decline of the American dream. When I was in high school, the city (still) had two high schools, and so two football teams, which meant that I visited several times (to watch). It was a tricky town. Things got worse in the 1990s, as the main local employer, International Harvester cut back production, and industry in nearby Dayton also retreated. Between 1999 and 2014, median income in Springfield fell by more than in any other metropolitan area in the country. By 2012, Springfield self-rated as the unhappiest city in the land, and in 2016 it was presented in national media as the nadir the rust belt trajectory. But the city presented itself as a good place to do business, and in 2017 a big Japanese auto parts maker moved in. And suddenly there were more jobs than people seeking them. Soon the Haitians, who could legally work, starting coming.

By the 2020s, the city has visibly improved. The downtown, which had gone almost dark, is much more bright and functional: the Museum of Art and the Heritage Center Museum are still inviting, and there are good restaurants in the center — in part thanks to Haitians. Looking out into the sunshine of a perfect fall day from the pavilion of a Mexican place, it seemed grotesque to imagine that restaurants and other sites of employment could be raided by federal agents, that the city could be laid to waste on the lying logic that it had already been laid to waste. There was nothing here, nothing among the small truths of Springfield, that could justify such an action.

But even as I was visiting Springfield last fall, Vance’s mendacity was doing its political work. The fiery racial lies were becoming cold bureaucratic power. A few weeks later, in late November, the federal government took the actions necessary to establish the institutional preconditions for an ethnic cleansing of Springfield. In late November of last year, the Department of Homeland Security issued an unpersuasive finding of improved conditions in Haiti. This was the step needed to deprive Haitians of the official Temporary Protected Status that allows them to live and work legally in the United States. Read attentively, the text reveals that conditions in Haiti remain disastrous. At most, there is some weak gesturing towards the future possibility of some improvement — which, in normal times, would be obviously insufficient to deprive Haitians of their status. There is no sense of such improvement in State Department documents, such as the current travel advisory strongly discouraging Americans from visiting Haiti.

The concluding claim of the finding is that the presence of Haitians “is contrary to the US national interest.” This assertion, which is presented as dispositive of all other issues, goes unexplained and undefended. What national interest, exactly? How? The only answer is a vague reference to Trump’s beliefs. In the context of the previous events, the meaning is clear enough. The president and the vice-president have repeated that Haitians eat domestic animals, cause diseases, commit violent crimes, and wreck cities. These very specific dicta about Haitians originated with JD Vance and American Nazis. Given the lack of any other explanation, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the motive of the policy is the racial hatred expressed by the president and the vice-president.

This expression of state of mind is one reason why, should a major ICE operation go forward in Springfield, it would be the ethnic cleansing of an American city. To be sure, the appearance of racial difference drives ICE raids all over the country. But in this case we have a particularly clear trail from public racism to practical policy. This is what lawyers and historians concerned with genocide try to ascertain: was there the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”? It is not easy to settle questions of intent, or of genocide generally; but the expression of racial fantasy about “carnage,” “destruction,” and barbarism by the vice-president and the president weighs on one side of the scale.

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Today begins Black History Month. This Saturday there will be an open house at Gammon House, Springfield’s museum of the Underground Railroad. What will happen between now and then? Absent a court decision or a change of attitude by the White House, the Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status will expire on Tuesday (3 February) at 11:59pm. Springfield local authorities believe that an ICE surge will begin on Wednesday (4 February) and last for thirty days. The governor has said the same.

And some local people are responding. Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, asked the “silent majority” who supports the local Haitian population to speak up. A conservative couple took up the challenge by gathering more than a thousand signatures for the extension of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status. On Thursday 29 January, in a Springfield church, people gathered for an information session about their rights. Mayor Rue initiated on Tuesday 27 January a resolution in the City Commission, asking that ICE agents respect local rules and norms. The specific concern was that ICE agents would be masked and could not be identified. In the course of the last month, of course, two Americans have been shot dead by agents carrying out raids. One of the victims was Alex Pretti, a nurse. On 27 January, the Ohio Nurses Association, in an open letter to Ohio’s Congressional delegation, called for all funding for federal immigration enforcement to be halted.

Up until now, the major ICE raids have taken place in states and cities with reliable Democratic majorities. In Springfield, Ohio, the politics would be different. Republicans dominate a wildly gerrymandered Ohio state legislature. Ohio’s two Republican United States senators are unlikely to contradict the president on his signature issue. Mayor Rue and Governor DeWine unsurprisingly say that the law is the law; even these local and state-level Republicans, for whom the issue is close at hand, cannot be expected to use a language of opposition. That said, their expressions of concern are unmistakable; and, in DeWine’s case, thoughtful and detailed. Dewine is far more informed about both Springfield and Haiti than Vance, Trump, Kristi Noem, or anyone else involved in the process.

DeWine disputed the two justifications given by the Department of Homeland Security for the federal action: that Haiti is safe and that Haitians in Springfield somehow compromise “national security.” He said that the decision to remove their Temporary Protected Status as “wrong.” His description of Haiti is, sadly, quite accurate: “it’s extremely violent, the economy’s in shambles, the government does not function, the police are virtually worthless.” He contradicts the Department of Homeland Security finding: “it doesn’t qualify as the situation changing for the better in Haiti.” DeWine is an informed observer. He and his wife Fran DeWine helped to fund a school in Haiti, named in honor of their deceased daughter, Becky. This charitable effort became unsustainable in 2024.

The direction of federal deportation policy really rests on claims about Springfield. Here DeWine’s statement was equally clear: “But probably more important for the United States and the people of Ohio, is that the Temporary Protected Status, if it goes away next week, it’s going to mean that you have thousands of Haitians who are working, contributing members of the community, contributing to the economy, who one day will be able to work, and who the next day will not be able to work. Springfield and Clark County are coming back, they’ve been doing a very very good job. It’s an upward movement. Part of that upward movement comes about because, frankly, of Haitians who are working and contributing to the economy and buying things and opening restaurants and doing all the things that working people (do). These people are working, and they’re hard workers, so I think from a public policy point of view, it is a mistake, it is not in the best interest of Ohio, for these individuals who are workers and working to lose that status.”

Still, the thin, cold guillotine of bureaucratic language descends, from Washington DC to Columbus and Springfield: “A federal list of individual removal orders has been identified in Springfield as an initial focus for enforcement activity.” Public employees in Springfield have just read these chilling words. DeWine’s description helps us to imagine the realization, in an actual city, of this bureaucratic language. There are at least ten thousand men, women, and children who will be subject to arrest and deportation. These are those men and women at work, “who one day will be able to work, and the next day will not be able to work” -- the end of Temporary Protected Status means that people who try to work will be seized in their workplaces, and if not seized in their home.

Those are adults; we also have to imagine the children. Roughly twenty percent of the children in Springfield Public Schools do not have documentation that would establish their citizenship. All of these boys and girls, about fifteen hundred children, are vulnerable. As in other cities, they can be taken from schools and away from their parents, or return home to find their parents gone. Springfield churches are preparing right now for that very situation. The city employees who received that memo about the “removal orders” and the “initial focus of enforcement activity” were the teachers. The Ohio Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, “strongly opposes” any presence of ICE agents in schools, which “undermines trust, disrupts learning, and creates trauma for children and families.”

Sad though it is to contemplate, trauma is a goal of ethnic cleansing. The stages that we have seen in Ohio are all too familiar: the fiction of the subhuman enemy; the false details that are used to introduce the stereotypes; the organized use of the propaganda of racial hatred in media; the capture of government by people involved in all this; and then finally the application of violence to thousands of human bodies. At every stage we will be offered the reasons that we should find this normal: on the one side, the fiery talk about subhumans; on the other, the frozen bureaucratic passive-voice institutional boilerplate suggesting that all is normal and inevitable and that no one need take personal responsibility for what is simply happening and must happen.

The violence, once it comes, changes normality: first of all, for the people who are rounded up and held in the concentration camps we call “detention centers,” preparatory to being sent either somewhere they do not want to go, or dying in custody. And this leaves trauma among the survivors in the most obvious, incontestable sense. But everyone who observes also partakes in the trauma. The kids who remain in Springfield schools after their friends disappear will need to tell themselves something. Their parents will need to think of what to tell them. Everyone around has to ask how it came to this. The trauma becomes a political resource. The perpetrators of an ethnic cleansing use the emotion to reshape how we see our neighbors — and ourselves. Most people, I expect, will be appalled by what they see in Springfield. The ethnic cleanser, though, rules with the help of those who are not, those who comply, agree, take part. And in this way ethnic cleansing itself is a step away from democracy and towards minority rule by a police state served by those willing to wear the mask.

Those who dispense the trauma are aware of what they are doing. In this whole Springfield story, it is the statements of Blood Tribe and the the vice-president that reveal the most self-awareness. They are guiding a process that they recognize, understand, and approve: the generation of an alternative reality with a clear definition of the detestable other, and then the mobilization of state power to eliminate that imagined enemy. If this process is completed, as there is every sign that it will be, they will have succeeded: and they too will be altered. Blood Tribe, and groups like them, will have seen how they can move the national conversation and the federal government.

After a Springfield pogrom, JD Vance will have his first namesake policy. Although he has been outspoken during the first year of the Trump administration, and has gotten himself in the way of various endeavors, there is, as of yet, no clear instance of a policy of which he is the author and the executor. The ethnic cleansing of Springfield would be the first. “JD Genocide,” or perhaps “Genocide Vance” -- if all this happens, the sobriquets will write themselves.

And what history will the rest of us write for ourselves? When we are confronted with street terror, concentration camps, and mass deportations, as now in the United States, the thought of historical precedents arises — and is usually suppressed. “It can’t happen here,” we think, so this must not be “it.” When we take the focus down from the national to the local, to the story of Springfield, this is a bit harder to maintain. The “it” is right there in front of our faces.

We confront no historical analogy, but actual twenty-first century Nazis who took action in the public sphere, shaped the public conversation, and are getting the policy outcome that they desired. As the mayor noted after Blood Tribe marched in Springfield, the aim was to “disrupt the community” — and now that disruption can take on a catastrophic scale. Blood Tribe, Vance and Trump appeal not to someone else’s racism in some other time and place, but to American racism, right here and now.

Indeed, having followed the genealogy of events in Springfield, we might find ourselves more open to broader interpretations of what is happening around us, at a national level. After all, the social media feeds of the Department of Homeland Security are ever less distinguishable from those of Blood Tribe, and of course incomparably more influential. The motives given for the deportation operations as a whole, the notion of “criminal aliens” and the like, are essentially those of Springfield writ large. Springfield, far from being the exception, might help us to see the general rule. When I see masked ICE agents I can’t help remembering the masks of Blood Tribe -- and asking myself if there might be some overlap in personnel...

For me, as a historian of atrocity who was raised in Ohio, it is uncanny to consider this evidence. Usually I am reading the sources years or decades after the fact, not along with the events themselves. Usually I visit sites of memory, not cities at risk, which is what Springfield is right now. I wish that what I know about other times and places was not quite so applicable. But insofar as is historical patterns are of any use, it is in naming what might well happen before it does happen -- which, perhaps, makes the horror less likely.

An ICE surge in Ohio is not inevitable. Trump could stop his promised “large deportation.” Perhaps Vance or Kristi Noem could stop it. It can be halted, by a court ruling tomorrow, Monday the second of February.

And if the horror is not stopped, it can at least be resisted, recorded, given its place in history by those with the courage to be present and to speak about what they see. And the seeing, just the seeing, is of huge importance, for all of us. When we see, we can feel and we can act. We can empathize, communicate, shelter, protest, help.

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For general guidance, On Tyranny

For a vision of a better USA, On Freedom

For a sense of how people in Springfield are preparing, or how you might help, please follow the links in the final paragraph.

In this essay I cite local reporting from the Dayton Daily News, the Ohio Capital Journal, and the Springfield News-Sun. Please consider following the links to subscribe.

We know JRR Tolkien as the creator of Middle Earth and the author of the Lord of the Rings. But at the time he was just an Oxford university professor who had agreed to bring some light to a dark winter’s evening.

His first book, The Hobbit, had just been published. Most likely the children who gathered in the University Museum had not read it. Professor Tolkien over-prepared, bringing twenty-four pages of hand-written prose.

The text is powerful, if scattered. It would have taken about two hours to read aloud. While I mulled over it in the archives in Oxford, I pictured the mothers leading their children out of the lecture hall to look at the museum’s collection of dinosaur fossils, or for hot chocolate (just “chocolate,” the English boys and girls would have said) elsewhere.

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The good linguist was a specialist in Old English, Old Icelandic, and Gothic. Anyone who did not know the plot of Beowulf and the Volsung Saga would have had some trouble following what the professor was talking about.

And his purpose was a serious one: not so much as to describe dragons as to explain what they essentially are. The dragons faced by the heroes Beowulf and Sigurd had elements in common, which Tolkien had gathered together in the form of his own dragon, Smaug, the terror of Bilbo the hobbit and his dwarf companions.

The lecture gives us a bit of the moral theory behind The Hobbit, and of the books to follow. Dragons, explained Tolkien, assemble huge wealth, appreciating only its quantity, but taking no joy in any particular object. They are, however, enraged if any one piece were to go missing, and would burn the world with fury. They are obsessed to the point of paranoia with thieves. Their great intelligence is thus reduced to the cunning of protecting their hoard.

A dragon is not a fearful beast of a real or imaginary past, but a way of being in the world. They are not the serpent that represents evil; they are not a symbol of something abstract. “The alarming thing about dragons as I have said is not only their shape — which may have dwindled or vanished — but their spirit.” Dragons convey to us a way that people can be evil, here in our world: turning the quality of small joys into the quantity of a senseless hoard, mocking and destroying others who still see the good things of life.

It is the spirit of dragons, concluded Tolkien, that has survived, and it survives in us, or in some of us. A man can become a dragon through sheer greed. If we want to find a dragon, the place to look is the “vaults of the Bank of England.” And if “you want to see a dragon-heath just go out and look” at a landscape tortured by machines, a sky blackened with smoke.

Dragons might seem invulnerable. Their scaled skin is armored by jewels. Their eyes can entrance, and their speech is an enchantment of its own. Some of today’s dragons have gone so far as to claim Tolkien for their own. But, as Tolkien said in his lecture, citing “my friend Mr. Baggins,” every worm has a weak spot.

Tolkien himself thought that the lecture to the children was “very unsuccessful.” In the reading, though, it delivers its reward, as the explicit moral complement to the book that, in decades to come, millions of children would read.

The dragons were, for Tolkien, “the final test of heroes.” It was not so much the strength and the sword that defines the hero, he said, but the courage and the comradeship. A hero sees a dragon for what it is, fearsome but fallible. A hero sees the dragon as the harbinger of one world, wants another, and steps forward.

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On resistance see On Tyranny

On oligarchy see On Freedom

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We spoke about many things: where we are as a country, what history can still teach us, and what democratic coalitions have looked like when they have succeeded—and when they have failed. But we also spoke about the present moment, which has a way of intruding on even the most reflective conversations.

In particular, we discussed the arrest of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort while they were doing their jobs—documenting events of public importance. These arrests are not isolated incidents. They are signals. And history teaches us that when journalists, especially African American journalists, are treated as criminals for observing power, democracy itself is being tested.

Ava and I talked about responsibility. History does not move on its own. It moves when people decide to act within it. The First Amendment does not enforce itself. It survives because citizens insist that it matters—not only when their own speech is threatened, but when someone else’s is.

Today is a good day to talk about the First Amendment. Not abstractly, and not nostalgically, but concretely. Who is being prevented from speaking? Who is being punished for witnessing? Who benefits when journalists are made afraid?

It is also a good day to celebrate journalists. Not because they are perfect—they are not—but because their work makes self-government possible. Journalism is how power becomes visible. It is how facts enter public life. It is how a society argues with itself without tearing itself apart.

Ava reminded me, in her own way, that storytelling is a form of civic care. Journalists practice that care every day, often at personal risk. When we defend them, we are not taking sides in a culture war. We are taking sides with democracy.

So I encourage you to talk about the First Amendment today. Talk about it with friends, students, colleagues. Ask what it requires of us now—not in theory, but in practice. And take a moment to thank a journalist.

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I was very happy to be able to speak with Laurence O’Donnell on MSNOW last night at 10:00pm. I’ve been interested to observe how his commentary has become ever more informed by history and ethics. His overture last night on moral thresholds for action was very powerful. The video below is our conversation that followed.

We covered a couple of topics that I have been trying to explain here on substack and elsewhere: the political logic behind the ICE deployments in chosen US cities, and the dangers of the use of mendaciou language such as “terrorist” and “assassin” by members of the Trump administration. There is also the more subtle but equally important problem of using terms, such as “law enforcement,” in an inverted sense — in this case, to justify lawlessness.

MSNOW posted the whole conversation, so I am just going to repost it here.

Hopefully this gets across some points in a concise way! Less concisely, if you would like…

The argument about lawlessness and statelessness can be found at enormous length in my Holocaust history Black Earth, in which I also pointed (more than a decade ago) to some of the dangers that have since more visibly emerged. A similar case can be found within the foundational text of Holocaust studies, which is Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg.

The warning about “dangerous words” is explained in lesson 17 of my little book On Tyranny. The lesson begins like this: “Be alert to use of the words ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism.’ Be alive to the fatal notions of ‘emergency’ and ‘exception.’ Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

But that like much of the book drew on some of the classic considerations of totalitarian language, such as Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Victor Klemperer’s diaries and Language of the Third Reich, and the essays of the Polish literary scholar Michał Głowinski, some of which were collected in English in 2014 (and his childhood Holocaust memoir Black Seasons is also memorable for its reflections on language). That authoritarian regimes need us to repeat their untruths is an idea of Václav Havel, whose analysis of late communism is strikingly fitting for this moment. His “Power of the Powerless” can be found in many places; I wrote a preface to this edition (in Paul Wilson’s translation). George Orwell’s novel 1984 also remains very powerful — I read it myself once every decade, and each time something new strikes me. My reflections on what freedom of speech would mean as a positive right are in my new book On Freedom.

We all need to do what we can — but sometimes reading can help us see what we should be doing. So today I give you the brief as well as the long.

Thanks for being with me! More to come this weekend.

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