Howie’s Substack Podcast (private feed for howielisnoff@gmail.com)

The Duckbill Platypus Van InfluencersI recently noticed that many so-called YouTube influencers do their schtick, or thing, on the front seats or cars, trucks, or vans. The people I see, or who come across my feed on that media, are usually liberal or slightly to the left. That’s probably the algorithm for having previously seen that kind of content. I don’t know if they believe what they’re saying or not, but they garner thousands of likes and keep on coming. They’re sort of like adult acne… tough to get rid of once you’ve got it.They are now appropriately focused on the murder of Renee Good in the Minneapolis area. Good’s murder at the hands of an ICE lout is a horror. The murder of innocent people has been going on since the founding of this nation and in much higher numbers than in the present. The horror is still obvious, whether a person is in the vicinity of an ICE action, or a native on the North American continent, or an enslaved or tormented Black person.I thought that I might board an Amtrak train, or perhaps the Metro North Railroad, or get on a subway in New York City and record a topical segment wearing a rubber duckbill platypus mask. The horrors now come with such frequency that there may or may not be plenty of time to address any of these pressing woes. We’ve gone pretty much full fascist here, and Trump and his ilk like Miller and Noem and Vance cook up new enemies and forays every day. If it isn’t Venezuela’s oil and leader, then it’s Greenland, and if it’s not Greenland then it’s Iran or Cuba. Genocide in Gaza is fine with the power elite in the US, as is endless war in Ukraine and new forays into Syria after murderous ISIS, which can be traced back to US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Choose your enemy and the militarism and police actions will soon be there. Forget about vaccinating kids and adults, or SNAP benefits for the hungry, or educational assistance from the feds. They’re there to do harm and Trump et al are more than willing to provide for that harm.Back to the experts on the Internet. I see linguists pontificating about the power elite. I listen to economists holding court about militarism. I listen to just about anybody pontificating about just about everything with a hubris that is unmistakable. It seems that the front seat of a vehicle gives these experts in their particular fields knowledge about everything, including the absolute truth and definitive answer of what’s at the end of the observable universe.So, I guess if I board that Amtrak along the Hudson River with the platypus rubber mask, I can hold court on the latest findings in medicine, physics, physical fitness, and anything else that comes to mind, and some of the MAGA crowd might just believe me because they’ve seen it on their screens.And why a duckbill? As a kid of about 10, a few families in my neighborhood travelled by train from Providence, Rhode Island, to the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It was probably the Penn Central Line then, but the roundtrip to the zoo was spectacular, and we even got a 78 rpm soft recording of a rendition of “Animal Fair” on the trip. One of the highlights of the trip was the duckbill platypus, an animal I never knew existed until that day. Now I can see all manner of exotic species on the Internet, including a leader that would be better placed in a zoo! Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

A Shitshow Every DayThe shitshow I awake to every day happens outside of the US, but only sometimes. The three-ring circus shitshow happens right here daily in “the land of the brave and the home of the free.” I don’t feel particularly free anymore, but I haven’t felt that way since the slide to the far right that began with Ronald Reagan, The Great Communicator, and moved through to the US dictator Trump.Trump in all his right-wing glory entertains sometimes. Such an entertainment came yesterday when he said he was the only moral force. He said it differently, but his self-described moral center, is sort of like a fictional scenario, analogous to, Adolph Hitler being invited to a bar or bat mitzvah.Trump has the so-called moral compass of a poisonous snake, with apologies to the latter because genetics sets that species on a specific trajectory. However, even a snake would not have allegedly raped a woman in a high-end retail store in Manhattan.Yesterday, Renée Good was shot and killed by ICE agents in Minnesota, and lawless Trump immediately began spreading lies about the murder and limiting the investigation of that murder. This sounds like Trump’s “some very good people” bleat about Charlottesville, Virginia where Heather Heyer was run over and killed by yet another right-wing zealot.I learned how far to the right the US had lurched during military training during the Vietnam era. Trump factors into that war, too, so people don’t have to jump to Venezuela, or Gaza, or Ukraine to figure out where the world stands today on the cusp of great disaster. But, and this is important, I left the Vietnam era with a sense of idealism, that things could and would get better.I don’t think that this is a failed species, but there are many ruthless and violent creeps in power in many nations who are indeed ruthless creeps! The road to this creepiness was aided, or paved, by Clinton in the former Yugoslavia and through banking deregulation, Obama with his bailout and failed troop surge in Afghanistan, and well, Biden’s ineptitude and championing of the Israeli wars in Gaza and elsewhere. A person does not need Dante Alighieri to know in which direction all of this is going. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Published at CounterPunch on December 29, 2025 with edits.The Vietnam Draft Revisited With Trump’s Class of ShipsThe jokes about the first ship of Trump’s planned new class of naval vessels being called the USS Bone Spurs abound. Herr Trump, who some thought would apply restraint to US foreign policy, is going to name a class of US Navy ships after him (New York Times, December 22, 2025). Readers will recall that Trump, who now celebrates and uses militarism instead of diplomacy in almost every case, used a diagnosis of bone spurs to get out of the military draft during the Vietnam War. Seeing Trump salute and use the military as mentioned above would be almost laughable if it weren’t for the damage and killing taking place across the globe. When Trump isn’t using direct and clandestine military action, he’s achieving the same goals with US armaments as in Gaza and Ukraine. It’s the old game of empire that he’s at. On Christmas Day, Trump attacked Nigeria.Again, nothing laughable, but scrutiny of his record with the US military draft during the Vietnam War demands attention. Many during that war believed that any way out of the military was a positive action during the horrific quagmire of Vietnam, really also in Cambodia, where a genocide ultimately took place, and Laos, which was bombed into oblivion from the air. I don’t believe in the principle that any way out from the military draft was necessarily the best route to take all of those decades ago. I look to the tradition and philosophy of Gandhi’s civil disobedience to inform resistance. The civil rights movement and anti-war movement in the US both had at its center civil disobedience. In the US, civil disobedience has its roots in Thoreau’s resistance to the Mexican-American War.David Harris, the late war resister and journalist, in Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us (1996), highlighted Bill Clinton’s manipulation of the system during the Vietnam War to seek an easy exit. Our War is still well worth reading. Harris’s discussion of Bill Clinton’s draft history is telling. Recall the so-called chicken hawks in the administration of George W. Bush who waged war after war including regime change. During the Vietnam War, I knew people who used all manner of techniques to avoid being drafted into the military. Ways out included everything from a hand rash that I knew was a completely fabricated issue of my best friend whose father was a MD. A pre-induction evaluation by a psychiatrist was an almost certain way out of the draft. There seemed to be a rash of serious mental illness diagnoses during the Vietnam era that were quickly cured by careerism following the war. I knew classmates who took lots of drugs before their induction physical and a Marine Corps officer who came back from Vietnam with parts of his legs gone. I also knew other college friends who went to Vietnam. Many thousands would leave for Canada. Gerald Ford’s amnesty was grossly vindictive. Jimmy Carter’s was much more humane and reasonable. My discharge from the military has the word “honorable”.By 1969, the Selective Service implemented a draft lottery. Up until its (the draft) end in 1973, young men were drafted according to their date of birth. The latter did not affect the atrocities carried out in Southeast Asia by all of those involved. To think of war as sanitized is insane.Look at September 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of these acts of war involved atrocities.Readers may recall the false claims in 2003 against presidential candidate John Kerry’s military record in what was called “swiftboating.” The far right has much different standards when it comes to Donald Trump. Despite Kerry’s anti-war stand during the Vietnam War, he supported the Iraq War in 2004.By the end of the war in 1975, millions would die in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, somewhere between 3-5 million, and about 58,000 Americans would also die. All of these decades later, Vietnam recedes from memory, but it is of interest to those who know the history. Donald Trump took a particular course of action to remove himself from danger during that war, as did millions of others in the US. To see Donald Trump now championing militarism, well out of harm’s way, is exponentially hypocritical.A $901 billion war chest for the next fiscal year makes arms profits and continued wars a given. The US showed fault lines as far back as Vietnam and Reaganism. The acceleration of the decline of the empire is obvious in overextension and through wars and rumors of wars. The government acting at the behest of the power elite shows its penchant for bread and circuses. For many there is not enough bread to go around. Jeffrey Epstein and his coterie in and out of power are symptoms of this extreme sickness and debauchery. Militarism grabs anything it wants almost anywhere with Venezuela a prime example of its overextension. Useless so-called defense spending in unnecessary implements of war is another example of empire’s demise. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Living Amid the Lap of LuxuryI didn’t plan to set down amid the level of luxury that now surrounds me. I, we, actually bought a house that could be called a fixer-upper. The latter was not my intention, but because of a really bad home inspector, required in Massachusetts in a real estate purchase, the house needed what was literally a ton of work. Since then, home prices have escalated so much here that the contemporary value of the home has made up for the incompetency of the inspector.But that, home prices, is not the sole subject of this commentary. Of the three homes that surround me today, two were homes owned by full-time homeowners when my wife and I moved here. One was owned by someone from out of state. Today, all three homes are owned by people whose primary residences are out of state. Housing prices have shot through the roof here to use a metaphor. Ordinary people can’t afford the cost of a house here. I worked in the 2010 US Census in the community where I now live and tracking all of these homeowners, who in many, many cases are from out of state, is no easy task. In terms of figuring out the median income of the area, there is no way of measuring the income of these out of staters because their income is not included in local statistics. Median housing prices range between $1.1 million to $1.5 million in the town where my wife and I live.I grew up in a tight-knit community more than a hundred miles from where I now live. Interaction among neighbors in that community was a given. In the community where I now live, communication in the best of situations consists of a sentence or two with others. It is truly the picture of a stratified and isolated location. Income inequality is writ large over this community. I knew of no one in my hometown who owned a second home. Some families rented a place for a few a week or two near the ocean during the summer.A haughty and superior attitude is the one attribute that I can assign to the neighbors that I know from two of the three surrounding homes. Only some towns in this area of western Massachusetts, a geographical area of many places containing natural beauty, have the glitz of second home prosperities. Some towns have high levels of poverty and are not the destination of either tourists or second-home owners.Each of the three houses mentioned above have had what amounts to millions of dollars poured into them through massive landscaping projects, repeated renovations, new swimming pools, an array of solar panels, hardscaping, and other projects including typical maintenance. One property has three houses on it, one is relatively new, and in the case of the two original houses, have had major remodeling projects. All of these projects, especially a landscaping and pool project on a property directly in back of me, cost well over a million dollars. I can’t wrap my head around the kinds of expenditures involved in these houses owned by people who don’t live here full time. Several summers ago a massive prefabricated swimming pool was brought here on a flatbed truck and driven up another one of the surrounding properties. One of the owners of the property behind me stood guard over her property that bordered the property where the swimming pool was delivered and complained to me that she was being vigilant about any damage done in the process of delivering the huge pool. These happenings are too unusual to even begin to imagine.The property with the newly installed prefabricated pool saw a dinner party take place at the height of the pandemic that was boldly shown on a Facebook post. That was when common sense precautions were in effect to stop the spread of the Covid 19 virus.From a middle-class perspective, I can’t begin to imagine the conspicuous consumption that has been plowed into these homes, and not a single homeowner, at least as recently as in 2025, lives here full time or pays state taxes on income. I can’t imagine the income level that is required to maintain these multiple homes.One of these properties, the one located directly behind my property, has a local property manager who thought nothing of spewing antisemitic remarks at me about an issue involving eight months of heavy construction taking place on that property. For a local economy without much for ordinary people, that person was protecting what could be called self-interest and with antisemitism part of free speech in the US, there was absolutely nothing I could do about that egregious slander. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

A menorah on the third night of Chanukah.“Light One Candle”*It was late in the summer season of 1967, and I was working in the young men’s department at a Sears store in central Rhode Island. I loved the job because I had great coworkers, and although Sears was not especially known for an avant-garde line of either young men’s or young women’s clothing, their inventory was quite nice from my perspective. The school I attended in Providence, Rhode Island, had a dress code, soon to be abandoned considering the times and the youth movement, but the sports jackets at Sears were really nice, and I got a great discount as a worker there.One afternoon during the time when parents bought back-to-school clothes, a man accompanied by his young son got really irate about the fact that Sears’ line of white shirts had only one shirt out of about five or six shirts that was made in the US. The latter was of particular importance in the area where the Sears store was located because the area had been known for its textile industry. That industry had left the area for the US South, where wages and weather were better suited to that industry’s needs. Textile manufacturing would soon leave for the Far East in yet another attempt to reduce costs. I knew these issues personally because half of my family had come to this area of Rhode Island because of the textile industry. My maternal grandfather was the superintendent of his brother’s textile mill nearby that produced synthetics and some lace. The former would become important during World War II.A few years after my Sears summer job, I first learned that Dow Chemical produced napalm that had first been used in World War II but was put into use routinely in both Korea and Vietnam. The photo of the girl running down a dirt road in Vietnam, her flesh burned by napalm, was one of the visual images that made the war come home in a powerful way. Of course, Dow, which soon abandoned its production of napalm, was not the only industry involved in the products used in war.December 14, 2025, Sunday, is the first night of Chanukah. My family is made up of mostly secular Jews, and we are proud of our heritage. This year, the candles that burn in our menorah, the symbol of the resistance in the ancient story of the festival of lights, were not produced in Israel.“Chanukah commemorates the Maccabean Revolt in the 2nd century BCE, where a small Jewish army, the Maccabees, fought against Greek-Syrian oppressors who had defiled the Second Temple in Jerusalem by outlawing Jewish practice and installing Greek idols” (AI).Many Chanukah candles are produced in Israel. Although my family’s purchase of candles made elsewhere to mark this celebration is only the most symbolic of acts of resistance and of little impact on the Israeli government as it continues to wage war and repression on the people of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, that small act is at the heart of Jewish values in refusing to do to others that which a person would not want to be done to himself or herself.In the spring, another major holiday in the Jewish calendar will take place, and we will use unleavened bread, what Jews call the bread of affliction, to mark the story of the Jews escape from captivity in Egypt. That holiday is Passover. The bread we use, called matzoh, will not be produced in Israel. This is not part of the formal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is a separate subject, but it’s what we can do in a very personal way to register protest.Israel is not the only country producing goods that have a connection to doing harm to others. From the Vietnam War era, I learned what commonly made items are produced by companies that do one kind of harm or another and avoid those items in purchases. These acts might be called small potatoes, but they’re my small potatoes and allow me to live with at least a little less guilt at some of the horror I see around me.“Light One Candle” (1982) written by Peter Yarrow. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Published at CounterPunch on December 11, 2025.From a Small New England Town to the Dictates of EmpireI grew up in small-town America. Specifically, in a place where my family was a tiny minority. Agree with the stereotype or not, Jews in that town were primarily occupied running small retail shops of one kind or another. These shops ran the gamut from a small retail store with pretty much empty shelves to very successful clothing stores. Our small community within a town that had depended on textiles to provide jobs for workers had already seen an exodus of a few of its second-generation children leaving for more prosperous settings and occupations that required advanced educations of different kinds. The textile industry left for the US South and then for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Far East.My mother, Sylvia (Tales of an American Shtetl, 2011), who was a very political person, was the cochair of two presidential campaigns at the state-wide level. There was a card-playing group that met in a round robin kind of setting at bridge players members’ homes. One of my first recollections of any hostility and the clash of values within that group, made up entirely of women, was a next-door neighbor, whose son was a psychologist, and went on to become an advisor to a national daytime television show that had a segment on which children appeared.I don’t know the exact year of the clash, but I recall that it was over the Vietnam War. Our neighbor and bridge player defended the war and my mother was vehemently opposed to it. Looking back across all of these decades, it seems likely that the success our neighbor’s son had achieved in the television industry put that neighbor firmly on the side of US war policy. I can’t remember the issue of communism coming up around the disagreement, but the fallout lasted for at least a period of several months or more before my mother and our neighbor made amends and the bridge club was back to its full complement of players.My mother’s opposition to the war carried over to my family’s coffee shop located in the downtown section of our community. Another family member observed that she believed my mother went into the shop to fight over the war and some of the arguments I remember were quite heated. The town was a working-class town, and wide opposition to the war was years away, and in any case, a guess is that a sizable part of the people in town supported the war through its end in 1975. I’m surprised looking back that there was no retaliation against my mother’s anti-war views, but a guess is that my family had been part of the community for so long that her opponents may have had a live and let live view of her. Her frequent letters-to-the-editor, commentary pieces, interviews, and especially the political office she set up during the McCarthy for President campaign in 1968, never brought a reaction greater than those heated coffee-shop disagreements. One member of the local police force harassed teens hanging out at the McCarthy headquarters and even arrested my next-door neighbor. My mother was furious and rushed to the police station to win the release of our neighbor.It was during the McGovern campaign for president in 1972, that Sylvia brought her ability as a political organizer to her role of getting McGovern elected, at least in our small corner of the world. My childhood home was filled with voter computer sheets from the campaign. The Nixon campaign portrayed George McGovern as a radical, while political reality was on the side of traditional New Deal liberalism. Years before, as a kid, I saw Sylvia’s early skills as an organizer in PTA activities. Our home, sometime in either the very late 1950s or early 1960s, was filled with huge sacks of peanuts of every conceivable variety as she took school fundraising very seriously.Sylvia’s electoral activism had roots in street protest. She was visible at local marches in support of the United Farm Workers grape strike (1965-1970). I remember her at marches and rallies such as the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in October 1969, when 10,000 people gathered at the state house in Providence, Rhode Island to push back against the Vietnam War. My family’s liberalism was as far from contemporary neoliberalism as the Earth is from the most distant light coming from galaxies at the edge of the visible universe.Fast forward to today with an eye in the rearview mirror of history. The US was one of two superpowers during the Vietnam War, the other being the former Soviet Union. The US role as an imperial empire grew following the post-World War II era with the so-called military-industrial complex rising exponentially. When I look back at the town where I grew up, it seems incongruous that the dictates of empire could affect the people there, but it did in very real ways. The US government took less than one generation for Ronald Reagan to bring back war. Of course there were always clandestine operations such as the CIA carried out. But Reagan got the war ball rolling once again with low-intensity warfare in Central America that has implications today in immigration. It was Reagan’s vice president, then President George H.W. Bush who destroyed the Vietnam Syndrome, the hesitancy of the general populace of the US to send troops far away to fight wars. His success in the First Gulf War led to a series of wars, many of those proxy wars as in Syria, and in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Libya, the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Few would buy the argument that it was the US proxy war fighting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, in answer to the Soviet presence there, that led in a straight line to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Many people in the US don’t want to hear any of those facts, and since few had skin in the “game,” few cared outside of rousing patriotic music and hero worship. It may be of some interest that the recent murder of a National Guard soldier and the wounding of another in Washington, D.C., had direct links to the nearly two-decade old US war in Afghanistan and the blowback that is part of US military operations, both direct and through proxies. I’ve often cited the late William Blum, whose work, Killing Hope (1995 and later editions), covers US direct and proxy wars around the globe making the world safe for a dictator like Trump, who in all likelihood, cannot even find the places quickly on a map where we have wars or plan for war. It’s the price of US imperialism and empire and we have many who are willing to give aid in the epic battles of our empire. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Photo credit: Wikimedia CommonsPublished at CounterPunch on November 26, 2025.For those who either remember or have read about the Vietnam War, the idea of strategic hamlets will leap off the page at them. Strategic hamlets (Strategic Hamlet Program) were a program of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) to take people, peasant farmers, away from the villages in which they lived and relocate them to places where they were supposed to be immune from the influence of the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong was the communist guerrilla force supported by North Vietnam fighting in South Vietnam. They were also supported by the North Vietnamese Army and fought from 1954 until the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.The strategic hamlets, a “project” of the Diem regime in the south, were colossal failures and actually helped forces from North Vietnam and the Viet Cong recruit fighters and supporters. Try to imagine an organized military force of regular fighters, guerrillas, with the authority of the US government ordering masses of people to relocate and live within regulated areas in the US. The US is far removed from being an agrarian society, but the issue of relocating masses of people away from their homes and work is an example of how outrageous the Strategic Hamlet Program was.Many of sound mind may have believed that the idea of strategic hamlets was long since abandoned in the dustbin of history. But this is not so with the Trump administration, Netanyahu’s government, and allies of both governments. Try to forget about the genocide in Gaza for a moment, the ongoing subjugation of the West Bank by Israel, and all of the attendant war crimes of the Gaza war and try to imagine a plan similar to strategic hamlets being considered in Gaza (“US Plans Compounds to House Palestinians in Israeli-Held Half of Gaza,” New York Times, November 25, 2025). The Trump administration is “pushing for the rapid construction of residential compounds to provide housing for Palestinians.” These compounds will be called “Alternative Safe Communities” and are planned for the Israeli-held eastern half of Gaza controlled by Israel since the faux ceasefire. “U.S. officials hope Palestinians will be encouraged to move to the new compounds, drawn to the prospect of greater security, freedom from Hamas, job opportunities, and a chance to rebuild their lives.”These so-called “Alternative Safe Communities” are recycled strategic hamlets envisioned in an area devastated by two years of war, decades of embargoes, and repression. It’s a kind of mayhem and madness that is a part of the US empire, US allies, the US client state, Israel, and the projection of power in the Middle East.The compound program in Gaza could involve between 20,000 and 25,000 Palestinians and would have ancillary services attached to them. Much of this plan looks strikingly similar to parts of the failed “nation building” in Afghanistan and Iraq.“Mr. Lightstone, the Trump official leading the effort, was a top aide to former Ambassador David M. Friedman, the president’s first envoy to Jerusalem. His team includes an eclectic, fluctuating group of American diplomats, Israeli magnates, and officials from the Department of Government Efficiency — the sweeping Washington cost-cutting effort overseen earlier this year by Elon Musk” (New York Times).“The team operates out of two luxury beachfront hotels in Tel Aviv, the Kempinski and the Hilton, where rooms regularly run over $700 a night, brainstorming ideas and sketching out diagrams of what the new Gaza compounds should look like” (New York Times).“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” as the great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra said. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

1950s-1960sConnections between the staid 1950s and the glory of a generation coming of age in the 1960s would have been impossible to comprehend from the perspective of the former. But those decades were inexorably woven one to the other. There were neighborhoods and people who interacted and knew their neighbors. I lived the high life with a paper route near the end of the 1950s and had varying personal relationships with all of my approximately 52 customers. The internet, that repository of much information and the source of separating millions of people, just from a US perspective, was not even a dream. Those staid days of duck and cover, Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, a fairly vibrant economy for most, not discounting the role of racism, sandlot baseball, and a million available hobbies all pointed in the direction of the great changes for the baby boomers and much of the rest of society. I like David Halberstam’s The Fifties (1993) for a primer of the connections between the 50s and what was to come. What seemed staid was to be transformed into anything but a Father Knows Best scenario. Authority at all levels came to be questioned. And over 50 years later we occupy a nation that has astronomical levels of income inequality, works against providing enough food for all, is about to screw millions of people out of medical coverage, and has a lust for war and the preparations for war. An imbecile leads the field.What was to come in the 1960s was nothing less than earth-shattering. I seemed to move effortlessly from the days of the lucrative paper route, I made about $12 a week and was in the money, to an unremarkable high school experience, except for a nasty bully, and a conservative college where even there the youth movement and the peace movement coalesced, though in the shadow of lousy academics and a penchant toward militarism. I had no idea in those heady days of youth that long-lasting animosities could continue unabated to the present. When I stopped off at the office of a college roommate from my senior year while canvassing for Bernie Sanders in 2016 in a small city in the Litchfield Hills of northwestern Connecticut, quite a beautiful natural setting, those axes were still fresh and well ground. I think those axes were sharpened at the stone of war, in that case, the Vietnam War.The thoroughly atomized society today is a reverse reality compared to the Vietnam era. It is like another dimension, and not a pleasant one. Politics, the economy, and social interactions often look like something from a parallel and foreign universe. That the political system has degenerated into something almost unrecognizable is difficult to accept coming from the epoch of great changes both in the US and around the world.Jobs left for other places, neighborhoods where people interacted vanished, money for some, especially the dyed-in-the-wool careerists became the raison d’être, we watched the environment tank with almost no concern amid our accumulation of things and those ugly storage units littering the countryside and elsewhere, and the people, at least millions who would knowingly vote for a dope, could care less about injustices and war.There’s a beautiful escarpment in the northern Catskills that I’ve climbed a few times. It’s a hiking treat. A few years ago, I learned that the writer on totalitarianism spent many summers in the rural mountain town where the hike is located. Her name was Hannah Arendt, a philosopher and political theorist, and she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The book is a well-done primer on how human beings and societies move toward fascism.Greeting a former member of al-Qaeda at the White House is hardly the mark of a normal society. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Editor’s note: There are several editing changes in the written version of this article that do not appear in the recording.The Woman Standing Near the Strip Mall and a Critical MassI live in an area that, despite reflecting a moderate median income, has lots of very well-to-do people in a financial sense. Second homes abound, and these people are not counted in the aggregate of income for the area. These homeowners also do not pay state income tax, which in the case of those very well-off is a boon.I sat in my car waiting for a family member to shop at a local supermarket. The fact that food prices have shot through the roof was a footnote, although an important one, to the woman holding a sign who stood at the edge of the strip mall’s parking lot. The sign noted that she was in need and the mother of four children.It’s okay to label me a do-gooder. I have been a do-gooder my entire adult life. I can’t stand the reality of kids not having enough food to eat, or people cast alone and ill, homelessness, or wars that rage around the world killing masses of innocent people. I am, however, far removed from my most significant days of protest as a war resister during the Vietnam War. I have gone out into the streets again and again since those heady days of protest, but a critical mass and effective protest, about which Abbie Hoffman said: “The young must be there” is absent. The power elite will concede nothing without a struggle. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s words on resistance were prescient: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”Decades later the anarchist Emma Goldman’s words on the overarching nature of protest and revolution are also significant: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Goldman also comes to mind for those on the left who may flock to the Democratic Party’s camp: “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.”During the period after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the young and others have been there, but the repression from governments… local, state, and federal, has also been there, and those forces are more organized than ever with the blessing and involvement of the fascist Trump regime in Washington, D.C. Look to the repression that both Trump, universities, and police brought against pro-Palestinian protesters, and the story is easy to comprehend, but impossible to swallow.It’s significant that the Vietnam peace movement recognized the plight of the Palestinian people. I can’t recall, however, the Nakba, the removal of about 750,000 people during Israel’s founding in 1948. As Jews, among others, we were fed the myth of Israel being the “land of milk and honey.” For the Jewish supremacists in Israel, I suppose it was the land of milk and honey. The violent removal of indigenous people was not reserved for the founders of Israel. Colonial powers have been historically guilty of land-grabbing.The far right has weaponized antisemitism and used it to squelch freedom of speech. No matter that large numbers of pro-Palestinian protesters on and off US campuses were Jewish.I did not travel to the Refuse Fascism ongoing protests in D.C. I did attend the last No Kings rally in a neighboring town, which coincidentally drew nearly as many protesters as did the first Refuse Fascism protest in D.C. on November 5, 2025. I do not take heart in that fact, but the last time I travelled to D.C., the person with whom I was supposed to travel with did not show up at the gathering spot for a bus in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was left to my own devices for the entire protest. When I compare anti-war demonstrations from the Vietnam War to today’s protests, I can see that “The young must be there,” and that we do not have anything near a critical mass of protesters. Perhaps it was because we had skin in the game during the Vietnam War that gave rise to a critical mass of protesters. I certainly did!I have no idea where all of this is going. The move toward fascism is like a tsunami. It might be true that 70-year-olds don’t make revolutions. I see many gray heads at protests and that is good. I know I was part of one, a revolution, many decades ago. I see the woman at the edge of the strip mall’s parking lot and I awaken a day later to the news that the Supreme Court, where a Refuse Fascism demonstration took place yesterday on November 7, 2025, allowed Trump’s partial rollback of supplemental food assistance to stand. If someone magically could have dropped down into the past and told me on the way to a gathering of 10,000 in the first Moratorium demonstration in Providence, Rhode Island against the Vietnam War (Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam) on October 15, 1969, that this would become a nation that denies hungry people and kids food, I would have said they were deranged. I do not believe in magic, but rather in human action.Those involved in protest need to realize that when they become a threat to the fascist regime, official violence will be brought to bear against them from agencies as disparate as ICE, the FBI, the military, and the police. The power elite never has, and never will, allow protest that threatens their hold on the economy and the political system to succeed. That elite was forced to end the Vietnam War and they learned many lessons in how to combat protest since then. Coffee klatches on the left will never bring about change. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

A Narcissistic ClownIt was not a parody by a comic, or a skit on a comedy show. The President of the United States stood nearly motionless as a participant collapsed at a ceremony at the White House to mark the announcement of the lowering of obesity drug costs (“White House guest faints during Trump event in Oval Office,” The Hill, November 8, 2025). The video of the incident flashed around the world and could be used as the illustration next to the dictionary definition of narcissism with the President of the United States as the symbol of that affliction that now grips this nation. Outside the walls of the White House, well at least the walls away from the East Wing, millions worried about whether or not they could continue to eat in this the wealthiest of nations. Income inequality is skyrocketing while the billionaires, and maybe a newly minted trillionaire, wait breathlessly for the new ballroom’s completion. There may be plenty of food available for guests when the ballroom is completed, or at least those can hope with the means.A person can’t make these scenarios up. Even comedy writers, or the creators of modern horror stories, couldn’t dream this up. Here is the grotesque uncaring nature of those designated by the power elite to put on the costumes to play democracy in a nation that is moving away from ethical norms at the speed of light. One man or woman, one vote, may have to be cast, if indeed fair elections continue, but the outcome is often hard to bear. And breakfast and lunch program at schools for kids… Do those in power really care?For readers who haven’t seen this spectacle in motion, here’s the video clip from The Hill on YouTube. A person can hope that the man, Gordon Findlay, the drug company executive, who collapsed, is fine. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Editor’s note: There are several edits in the written version of this article that enhance the recording.This article appeared at CounterPunch on October 31, 2025.Environmental RuinThe secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, does not mince words in the Guardian: “Devastating consequences now inevitable but emissions cuts still vital, says António Guterres in sole interview before Cop30” (October 28, 2025). The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the highest United Nations decision-making body for treaties on the environment.Artificial intelligence gets climate destruction right:The main causes of environmental degradation are human activities like deforestation, pollution from fossil fuels, unsustainable agriculture, overfishing, and urbanization, driven by factors like population growth and economic patterns. These activities degrade land, water, and air quality, while natural disasters can also lead to significant environmental damage. What common Google searches won’t tell the reader is that the military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels and producer of carbon emissions. The US is not alone in that respect.Both Google searches and the use of artificial intelligence are huge users of fossil fuels.According to research of the Costs of War Project at the Watson Institute at Brown University about fossil fuel use and the military, the US spends more than any other country on military outlays and keeping the military supplied with fossil fuels is a great part of that cost. In 2011, General David Petraeus said, “Energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting [sic] capabilities.” In fact, the Department of Defense, now war, “is the world’s largest user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gasses in the world” (November 11, 2019).Recall the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and how private security forces unleashed vicious dogs against protesters fighting the fossil fuel debacle of the pipeline (NPR, February 22, 2017). All but milquetoast demonstrations against environmental destruction have been met with official draconian pushback. Violent repression of protest goes back in time from the 19th century into the present.An observer might take offense at current military spending with its attendant use, or misuse, of fossil fuels. For FY 2025, $895.2 billion is budgeted and being spent, with an additional $150 billion under consideration. That total is nearly $1 trillion! Contrasted beside this obscene spending, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits are soon to be harmed by inaction of the government shutdown, with the availability of medical care potentially reduced by millions of people in the US. The old guns vs. butter equation is at play here, as it has been in the past. In 2023, those SNAP benefits helped 15.4 million children. The guns vs. butter equation also includes the bodies that pile up as the result of wars.An empire is a very big expense! Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

The Lawn Workers Next DoorIt’s still somewhat dark on the morning I write in New England as the Earth tilts away from the sun with the increasing move into autumn. The maples here are putting on a foliage show, late by long-term standards, but it’s pretty spectacular among the Taconic Hills that form the meeting place of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. A few days ago when I picked up family members from the New York Metro North station in Wassaic, my grandchildren got a kick out of the colorful paraglider wings contrasted against the red and gold of the Taconics where the three states meet. In an insane world, there are still moments of sanity and awe.The two men who are mowing a neighbor’s lawn in the slowly increasing light are both bilingual and perhaps multilingual, not unusual among the many workers in the area who cut lawns, work for tree-service companies, plow driveways in winter, keep local motels going through their housekeeping work, repair many house issues, and staff the kitchens of an untold number of restaurants in the area peopled by tourists and locals.I wonder what it’s like to experience the kind of stress many of the people are feeling doing the necessary work to keep the area going. The closest I can come to that feeling was my experience as a war resister during the Vietnam War era, and that resistance had a positive outcome. What I see around me now is not a positive outcome for many.A relative, who works in human services, told of the husband of a former co-worker who was taken away by ICE and faced likely deportation because of a past legal issue.At the beginning of the summer, I trained as a rapid response volunteer. I’m on-call with hundreds of like-minded volunteers in the area, who have agreed to respond to local ICE actions. Over the summer, there have been many false alarms, but because of the immigrant presence in the area, it’s only a matter of time before an actual raid takes place. The last raid I know of during the late spring seemed almost surreal because of the number of people who filmed the incursion. The filming made the raid feel as if a person watching it was a bystander. The militarized nature of heavily armed and masked ICE agents and their drone, which hovered above, seemed as if it was unfolding before me.The Pew Research Center records 51.9 million immigrants living in the US as of June 2025. These people make up 15.4 percent of the population. Believing any statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, in my opinion, is like making an offer should Donald Trump list the Brooklyn Bridge as being for sale. This is what that federal department says about Donald Trump’s success in his frontal attack against immigrants in the US: WASHINGTON –”On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or have self-deported since January 20.“Recall that the Department of Homeland Security is a creation of the post-9/11 era and has and is subject to cooptation for propaganda purposes. Most readers recognize the fact that the origin of the word “homeland” has its roots in far-right regimes of the past. Suffice it to say that masses of immigrants have been targeted in the past, with the issue of immigration and immigrants becoming highly politicized under Trump. He began his first campaign in 2015 with a descent down the stairs of one of his buildings with an attack against a particular group of immigrants, in that case, those of Mexican heritage, with the wide brushstroke of criminality.Since its inception in June 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has become a political football, like the vast majority of the patchwork of immigration law. Many recipients of the DACA program, which allows those who arrived in the US as children continued protection, has left those with that status in a kind of fearful limbo as the wide fight against immigrants continues.Unless a descendant of Mayflower or Jamestown settlers, we have a recollection of our immigrant past which runs up, full steam, against the myths we have learned. My family history is best expressed through the stories told by grandparents, aunts, and uncles. My mother captured some of that history in her short stories when she tells of an immigrant who traveled from Ellis Island to a rented bed in a crowded tenement in the Lower East Side of New York City. The crowds, the unsanitary living conditions, and the low-wage labor were a given within the generation of those who came to the US as immigrants during the first quarter of the 20th century. This was not the romantic notion of immigrants inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty in “The New Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus. “Give me your tired, your poor…” Though well-intended, Lazarus offers the reader the stuff of fiction.The Immigration Act of 1924 was supported effectively by the nativism that has been present in US civil society over decades. That history included the Know Nothings, intolerance toward successive waves of immigrants to the US, and the needs of business and industry. When cheap labor was in demand by growing industries, immigration was supported, at least at a governmental level; in periods of economic distress or the cooling of the economy, immigration was limited. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

The First StoneI can’t recall the person who said that as a society we need to hold a large mirror above us and pay attention to its reflection. Had this simple practice been done decades ago, then the end of even the remnants of a weak republican democracy that we see before us may never have happened. However, a person and a society can’t account for the massive level of ignorance that pervades society. Lots of fingers could be pointed in the right direction: “Don’t do this, do this,” but it could be that we’d end up in a fascistic state that we’re now witnessing anyway.Not to throw the first Biblical and symbolic stone, but sometimes a well-placed symbolic stone may need to be launched. I have a serious flaw in romanticizing the experiences and people from my past. My perspective has always been on the political, economic, and social left. This perspective immediately places a person in the crosshairs of the far-right society we now have before us with a destructive duopoly and a narcissistic so-called leader who is bringing the curtain down on the whole show. A perceptive casual observer could have seen this coming from the top of Mt. Everest long ago, but ignorance and chauvinism blinded many, and many would in any case never be able to see. A guess is that in terms of ignorance and lack of education, Donald Trump, a figurehead for the power elite, could not pass an eighth-grade general knowledge test. That elite would rather have a Joe Biden, Mr. Supporter of genocide of Gaza, and a law-and-order maven beholden to the banking system that tanked the economy in 2007-2008, or Kamala Harris, than the ignoramus-in-chief we see before us today. But now we have full-blown fascism in the making by the ignoramus-in-chief. I have read an account by a cognitive developmental psychologist from an elite US university who holds that Donald Trump is intelligent in some ways. That Mr. Trump’s ability to read the political, economic, and social winds is advanced may be due to a type of social intelligence, but used for no good, in fact evil, is not intelligence at all, or at least intelligence with extreme cruelty attached to it. Trump is well able to do that, read crowds, just as was Adolph Hitler.Three friends and I travelled to Ontario, Canada on a road trip in 1971. It was during the July 4th weekend, which was a welcome relief from the weight of fighting against the Vietnam War in the anti-war movement. Years later, one of the four friends on that trip, Jane (a fictitious name), would condemn my writing about the trip and give me the cold shoulder for a positive take on that trip. Jane, like my best friend Lawrence at that time, would both make the conversion from dyed-in-the-wool radicals to consummate careerists within a few years. This, in terms of my friendship with Lawrence, would be an Abbie Hoffman-Jerry Rubin moment, with Rubin making the seamless conversion to capitalist entrepreneur without missing a step and shedding his radical anti-war past.Ron, a childhood family friend, was building a house in Ontario after becoming something of an expat. He built in a rural area in Ontario next to a river, and in that summer the setting seemed idyllic and a reflection of the best in the expat movement, a movement that was made easier by coming from a monied family, which Ron did.With huge gaps over the years, Ron and I have kept in touch. He recently sold his house in the US and left for a second time for the same place in Canada where he built his homestead in 1971. I have no idea why Ron confided in me about the work he had done since originally leaving the US, but it caught me by surprise. Again, this is not the throwing of the first stone.Ron used his brother’s undergraduate transcript from a prestigious university in the US and altered it to appear as if it was his own. He then submitted that transcript to gain acceptance into a master’s program at a Canadian school. That degree allowed him to work in Canada over the course of many years, which would have meant at least one more use of the fraudulent transcript. Almost the stuff of fiction, which is reminiscent of how the fictional character Homer Wells became a physician in the novel and movie “The Cider House Rules” (1999).When Ron told his story, I thought of the four years I spent getting an undergraduate degree and the commitment to study and time that endeavor took. The liberal arts degree I earned had the effect of beginning a road of inquiry and critical thought that is at the heart of learning. I was floored hearing Ron’s story and the relative ease with which he had been able to make a living for decades on entirely fictitious grounds.Some stones are difficult to lift and refrain from throwing, while others, even symbolic pebbles, are difficult to swallow. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Published at CounterPunch on October 21, 2025.Impressions of a Local No Kings RallyI’m not an expert in assessing crowd density, but a half hour before the scheduled No Kings demonstration in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, hundreds had already gathered on Main Street. An hour later, the number seemed to be in excess of 1,000.I was hesitant to attend the rally, but it’s become second nature to demonstrate after so many decades. Sitting and sulking in the face of the Trump dictatorship was not an option. The crowd was happily noisy with a range of signs noting the revulsion of demonstrators to the Trump administration’s increasing fascism. Besides the anti-monarchist bent of No Kings, there were signs attacking the Trump administration’s penchant for supporting war, his attacks against immigrants, the fundamentalist reaction against women’s rights, along with support for medical coverage for all, among the other sentiments against outrages of the government in Washington, D.C. There were no speakers at this rally, and sadly, no marching among the tourist crowds that gather at this, the most popular small town in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. About a half hour into the demonstration, a fairly large gray-white drone hovered above the crowd and moved away about 100 yards north on Main Street. I have no idea of the source of the drone, but it did not look like an inexpensive model. I thought that the lack of privacy and the ability of all kinds of official forays into private information allowed many government agencies to know exactly who was at this particular demonstration. That’s a daunting reality!My wife Jan and I did not carry signs and stood close to the front of the crowd bordering Main Street. Someone approached us and asked if we’d like materials to make poster-board signs.“What we are seeing from the Democrats is some spine,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a key organizing group, told the Associated Press. “The worst thing the Democrats could do right now is surrender” (“Millions across all 50 US states march in No Kings protests against Trump” Guardian, October 18, 2025). But the reality on the ground today as the No Kings rallies took place was that the Democrats, mostly spineless and doing the bidding of wealth, power, and the warmongers, paved the way for the far right we see frighteningly clear before us. Only a small number of Democrats across the US dare to step out of line and fight power and wealth.Just three days before this rally, I celebrated the anti-war Vietnam era’s first Moratorium Against the War demonstration that took place 56 years earlier. Twelve hours later, I would be on a plane carrying me to basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. There was a brief stop at the reception station at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where the anti-war physician, Dr. Howard Levy, had been convicted of refusing to train special forces members who were destined to take part in the Vietnam War. He would be jailed for several years for his act of resistance. I marched down College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, with a contingent of students from Brown University, although I was a senior at Providence College about five miles across the city. Trying to hold the idea of both demonstrations in my mind proved difficult because the October 15, 1969, rally took place at the peak of the anti-war movement, and demands for peace were far more strident than at today’s rally. One person at the Great Barrington rally held a sign that read “Member of the radical lunatic left.” The Trump administration and its far-right allies had been libeling and slandering milquetoast liberals over their criticism of Trump and his policies. Trump used the wide brushstroke of hate to symbolically tar and feather critics. There was a definite similarity in that message to the 1960s attacks against protesters. Recall Richard Nixon’s slander of the martyrs from 1970 at Kent State as “bums.”This from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” I tried to keep that thought in mind with the two October rallies in view.Rallies are great, bringing people of like sentiments together, but Douglass was onto something. Looking at the likelihood of the last remnant of the 1965 Voting Rights Act being decimated by today’s far-right Supreme Court, it seems that power on the far right likes to take back that which it once conceded. The civil rights movement was based on faith groups, to an extent, but today’s religious fundamentalists are far removed from any sense of a moral compass or the trajectory of history bending toward the good and the right arc of justice. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Gaza, Celebrities, and Presidential ElectionsIt took less than a nanosecond in all of the celebrations to forget that a genocide has taken place in Gaza and that repression of the tattered West Bank is a given. Recall that genocide is the crime of crimes. There is revulsion at the use of the genocide of the Holocaust to bolster Israel’s military forays all over the Middle East. It’s an accomplishment that there is the beginning of a ceasefire, but who knows what will come next? Biden could have had the same agreement a year ago and a Nobel Peace Prize, but chose the deadly and ignorant course of calling himself a Zionist and acting accordingly with massive munitions and dollar support of Israel.In terms of Jewish identity, I’m certain where this genocide has left me and the draconian push to end dissent against this genocide across the US and especially on US campuses. Zionism was long ago weaponized against critics of Israel’s wars and I can’t join my almost lost concept of positive Jewish values from my youth and young adulthood with what I’ve seen on the ground. I’m horrified!Within all of this I’ve looked at the place of celebrity in supporting the duopoly, both Republicans and Democrats, in their march in support of genocide in Gaza, either by commission or ommission.The PBS News article “Do celebrity endorsements matter? A look at the role of pop stars in modern politics” (September 15, 2024), is an excellent discussion of what celebrity means in US political races. The article traces the history of the appearance of celebrities in politics over about 100 years. The major question of the piece is whether or not those appearances make a difference in the outcome of elections? The major thrust of the article is the discussion between the interviewer, Lisa Desjardins, and the author, Mark Harvey. He wrote “Celebrity Influence: Politics, Persuasion, and Issue-Based Advocacy” [2018].As far as our [sic] what we know she’s the exception to the rule. That’s not to say the celebrities don’t make a difference at all. It’s difficult to measure. However, in the specific case, we can demonstrate that Oprah Winfrey probably made the difference in maybe a million votes or so in the Democratic primary, back in 2007 to 2008 that brought Barack Obama to become the candidate… And so, she really had that kind of unique — that unique credibility at that particular moment.The article concludes, however, that in general, celebrity has less of a significant impact on elections than may be thought.During the 1968 presidential election, I had a birds-eye view of celebrity and the election. Dustin Hoffman came to Providence, Rhode Island in support of the candidate Eugene McCarthy, who would go on to lose the nomination to Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey would lose the election to the warmonger Richard Nixon. In effect, the Vietnam War, and larger wars in Southeast Asia, would be passed from one militarist, Lyndon Johnson, to another militarist, Nixon. Hoffman was great at the auditorium where he spoke, and he seemed to be almost in character, displaying many of the traits from his recent portrayal of the character Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967).My next in-person experience with celebrity and presidential campaigns came in the Kerry campaign in 2004. A well-known celebrity appeared, and John Kerry led off the rally with the words: “First, we’ll kill all the terrorists,” referring to the post-9/11 epoch.Following Bernie Sanders’ defeat at the hands of the Democratic Party establishment in both 2016 and 2020, I gave up any dibs on seeing celebrities in-person, but there were many in those campaigns. During this time, I began tracking the net wealth of these celebrities who showed up at political rallies and found that their exponential wealth removed them from many of the worries that ordinary people have. I recall a comment about a celebrity and protest, and I paraphrase here, but the observation was accurate in noting that a celebrity came and left a particular rally in a limousine. No further comment is needed in that regard.In 2024, just as Kamala Harris’ disastrous campaign got underway, a local celebrity appeared at a rally for her in the area where I live. I had long since abandoned the Democrats as the other side of the coin of duopoly, and I shrugged my shoulders at that appearance, but was not surprised to learn that the celebrity who appeared and supported Harris was “worth” tens of millions of dollars. How we love to be entertained in the US while democracy has been pissed away! And it may be that celebrities in general, whether their candidate wins or loses, still get increased exposure that may or may not lead to the enhancement of their net wealth. The inequality of wealth and influence has its fingerprints all over this scenario.Although there are performers on the political left, there are so few politicians on the left that this subset, though noteworthy, does not compare to those in the arts who support the establishment with its “safe” limits of criticism. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Published at CounterPunch on October 13, 2025.Note: There are many edits in this article that don’t appear in the recording.“There’s a man with a gun over there…”In “‘No Kings’ protests give badly needed spark of optimism to Democrats” (The Hill, June 18, 2025), readers are either left or led to believe that the “Democrats have been looking for a jolt of energy since their devastating November loss of the White House to President Trump…” “Millions marched… raising their voices and signs against President Trump and his administration’s policies, particularly on immigration.” The “No Kings” coalition plans more marches and rallies on October 18, 2025. And exactly like the June protests, absolutely nothing will change. Trump will continue his wars, both proxy and covert, with the weapons manufacturers laughing all the way to the bank just as the compliant military remains mostly silent. Prices will continue to climb, millions may lose what they do have in medical care, the environment will continue to burn up, job statistics will be hidden from plain sight, and immigrants and their supporters will have the shit kicked out of them. And those who think that the mass murder, yes genocide, in Gaza and repression in the West Bank will lead to a just peace, well, don’t hold your breaths since Israel may again be at their endless wars in the Middle East bankrolled by the US and weapons manufacturers. The jury is out on whether or not the ceasefire in Gaza will lead to anything that materially benefits the Palestinian people after two years of genocide. An educated guess is that an occupation may be draconian and may free Israel to attack Iran at a time of Israel’s choice. Israel is a rogue nation and does the bidding of projecting US military power in the Middle East. It remains to be seen if the world order will change after the Israeli genocide in Gaza and a diminished role of the US as the world’s only superpower.The Democrats are the other side of the coin of duopoly and have been on a slide away from an equitable society since the end of the New Deal. Some may say that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society continued the thrust of the New Deal, but Johnson lost that battle in Southeast Asia.These lyrics are from the rock group Buffalo Springfield: “A thousand people in the street… Singing songs and a-carryng signs… Mostly say hooray for our side” “There’s a man with a gun over there… A-telling me I got to beware…” (“For What It’s Worth,” 1966). The past is more evident in the present than ever on the streets with guns, both carried officially and unofficially.Nothing will change on or after October 18th, but the “Refuse Fascism” nonviolent protest planned for November 5, 2025 in Washington, DC, which strategists hope will begin the fall of Trump’s fascism offers some hope for change. Here is the call of the Refuse Fascism protest: “Surround the White House. Surround the Capitol. Surround the illegitimate fascist-packed Supreme Court. Come back again and again.” Those are noble words and plans that deserve wide support, but a host of issues and dangers may be involved in the just cause of fighting fascism, that Refuse Fascism rightly holds is “upon us.”The question for November 5, 2025, is to what extremes the US government will go to quell protest? The military presence in DC and elsewhere may be a harbinger of what’s to come. So far in the second Trump administration, groups on the far right seem to be somewhat content with Trump’s draconian actions in terms of protest, immigrants, and the creation of a far-right martyr in Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s murder is another example of how violent many here are. Some will even murder young children in schools, and the best the radical Second Amendment mavens can do is offer “thoughts and prayers.” Will the Trump administration seek to make martyrs out of those going to DC to protest fascism? The Trump administration has attempted to label Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, a leftist. The governor of Utah “paraphrased Robinson’s mother as having said that “over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” (CNN, September 20, 2025). So, the conclusion is that Robinson became concerned about some issues, which seem to be on the liberal side. When Thomas Jacob Sanford set fire to a Mormon church in Michigan, his far-right history was quickly forgotten by those of the same ilk. Trump seems ready to cross the tripwire and create all-out chaos with police and military repression on the streets of the Capitol city. And what’s to restrain him with a compliant Supreme Court, Congress, and the US military? During the height of the anti-war movement, Richard Nixon was not nearly as out-of-control as Trump is today. To what degree is there growing resentment among some ordinary people at fascism in the US? Trump’s professed love of ordinary people is not reflected in inflation, a weak job market, and a system that favors the very rich over those trying to make ends meet. Trump seems to never have met a war he doesn’t like.Trump, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance have made the White House a platform against a perceived radical left, often railing against the so-called boogeyman of Antifa, at best an amorphous group that can’t begin to compare to the far right and its destructive firepower and propaganda. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Published at CounterPunch on October 7, 2025.Pure EvilI haven’t seen a family friend, Steve, for a few decades, but we’ve kept up a conversation over the past several years. Steve recently returned to Canada, where he had lived for many years after the Vietnam era. It struck me, while trying to make sense of all the political chaos around me, that it was my last visit to his homestead in Canada in 1971 when I considered moving there. Steve seems a fairly middle-of-the-road person. He supports Democrats too much for my liking, as many do who see the horrors all around us gather in Trump’s dictatorship. The Democrats have not provided anything near an adequate response to the extreme far right. Democrats paved the way to hell for Trump and his supporters, the oligarchs of the corporate elite. The reversals of the New Deal began almost immediately after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Not surprisingly, attacks against workers and the insanity of McCarthyism began during the Truman administration. The Democrats have always been the patina over the political and economic systems in the US, which gave us empire, war, and the off-shoring of jobs that gutted the working class and large segments of the middle class. Income inequality and its discontents were among the factors and Democrats helped facilitate the long decline that led in a direct line to today’s political, economic, and social debacles.A few nights ago, I attended an informational meeting in a nearby city to learn how Massachusetts is reacting to the disaster which is the war against immigrants. It was part of my own education in preparing for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that have taken place in Massachusetts and are expected to continue. The shocks to human dignity and decency from the federal government’s attacks against immigrants seem to be nonstop. Last night, I received a message from the response team of which I’m a part that outlines a Trump plan to bait immigrant children 14 and over to get them to relinquish their right to remain in the US. The communication below was written by a lawyer according to the person who posted it at the response site:We learned today that ICE will launch an operation reportedly named “Freaky Friday,” [October 3, 2025] targeting unaccompanied children aged 14 and older of all nationalities. What we’ve learned:Children detained and released will be sent a “threat” letter from ICE threatening indefinite detention and immediate transfer to ICE upon age-out if they do not waive jurisdiction under the TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act] and withdraw applications for relief.Children will be offered $2,500 to return to their countries of origin.If children do not comply with the “offer,” the letter intimates their parentsin the US will be arrested.ICE plans to detain all age-outs, and they anticipate legal challenges.There are indications that the age threshold for this threat letter may be lowered to 10 years old.We understand they plan to first target detained children but will also target children released from custody.Can you please contact the minors (and/or sponsors) to let them know what is going on? (This communication has been edited for clarity.)A recent article at CNN Politics corroborates some of the information noted above (October 3, 2005) in “Trump administration prepares to offer money to unaccompanied migrant teenagers to voluntarily leave the US.”The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to offer unaccompanied migrant teenagers in the United States the option to voluntarily leave the country and receive a $2,500 payment, according to three sources familiar with the plans and an administration memo obtained by CNN.The Trump administration has already been offering financial incentives —including a $1,000 exit bonus— to undocumented adult immigrants in the US to depart the country. Administration officials have argued that self-deportation incentives are more cost effective, given the high price tag of immigrant detention and deportation.A notice sent to legal service providers Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services, seen by CNN, said the administration “will provide a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500 U.S. Dollars to unaccompanied alien children, 14 years of age and older, who have elected to voluntarily depart the United States as of the date of this notice and moving forward,” adding that the “benefit is intended to support reintegration efforts following departure.”The latest move appears to be an extension of ongoing efforts to repatriate migrant children in custody. In late August, the Trump administration prepared dozens of Guatemalan children to be sent back to their home country — a move that was temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Declarations from some parents of the children in Guatemala revealed that they were unaware their child was being deported and raised concern over their safety if returned. That case is ongoing (CNN).Who here is not the heir of immigrants? These attacks against human decency are personal attacks. One response of a local rapid response team administrator was to label the plan to continue to target children as “pure evil.” We are living in a society where evil is being normalized for masses of people. That is what fascism is about. I cannot place the attacks against immigrants in my head along with the memories I have of my grandparents, all immigrants, from Eastern Europe. They all were hard-working and decent people. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

This article appeared at CounterPunch on October 1, 2025.Sexual Assaults in JROTC and the Larger MilitaryDozens and perhaps hundreds of Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps instructors “have been accused of sexually abusing or harassing students in the past five years” (New York Times, September 26, 2025).JROTC operates in 3,400 public schools “where veterans teach teenagers about topics such as military history, life skills, and marksmanship to half a million students each year” (New York Times). Instructors have “limited training on being teachers.”In 2022, the Times reported that “33 instructors had been criminally charged with sexual misconduct… over a five-year period.” Students have often been “automatically enrolled into what is supposed to be an elective course.”“[T]he Trump administration and its supporters have laid out plans for expanding JROTC” as a means of increasing military recruiting.How does all of this reflect what’s happening with sexual assaults in the US military? According to a study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, “sexual assaults in the US military… [are] likely two to four times higher than government estimates” (NBC News, August 14, 2024). Here are some of the study’s estimates of military sexual assaults: “75,569 cases in 2021 and 73,695 cases in 2023” (NBC News).Why the surprise at sexual assaults in both the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Program and in the military itself? One of the unwritten rules or norms of militarism is that the spoils of war belong to the victors. The military reflects a kind of hypermasculinity. Combine these factors with national chauvinism, and sexual assaults can and won’t be far behind. Sexual assaults against both women and men in the military don’t only happen in war; they routinely take place on military bases. The case of Vanessa Guillén, killed at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2020, after being repeatedly sexually harassed, is telling (Newsweek, March 13, 2023).There was an argument over the past decade that the investigation of sexual assaults in the military be taken out of the hands of company commanders and given over to independent military investigators. The investigators, “called the Offices of Special Trial Counsel” (NPR, January 4, 2024), exist within each branch of the military as of 2023. In the far-right political climate that includes the military, independent investigations are perhaps beyond the contemporary symbolic horizon.The discontents of militarism are obvious. First, there’s the massive empire enforced from around 750 US military bases. Then, there are the weapons manufacturers and their investors. Third, there’s the sexual assault that comes from the hypermasculinity described above. Finally, there’s the massive production of carbon emissions from military adventures. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

“Tough It Out”Editor’s note: There are two editing errors in the recording that have been corrected in this article.The women’s movement was under attack from its inception. Look at what’s happened with reproductive rights and the Equal Rights Amendment that never was ratified. Patriarchy is something to watch. It wants to return women to the 1950s and even further back in time. Forget Rosie the Riveter from World War II. Now it’s all about “grabbing pussy” and worse.The Robert Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump team, the team of fools, who are anti-science, want to return us all, health-wise, back to the Medieval era. Forget the gutting of Roe v. Wade by the sycophants of the far-right Supreme Court; Trump and Kennedy don’t want women to have access to simple pain relief (New York Times, September 24, 2025) for fear of baseless claims about pregnancy. Kennedy and Trump link taking Tylenol during pregnancy to autism, an unproven claim.All of this is the face of fascism. Recall the Nazi treatment of women and their role in the Third Reich of producing blond and beautiful children to be used, in the case of males, for cannon fodder. I imagine part of the thrust of the deportation and criminalization of Latina women is because they don’t fit precisely into Trump’s plans for a new America.So, women of the US, be strong and don’t reach for Tylenol if in pain during pregnancy, even if that warning and admonition are not based on science. We need women solely for their role as bearing children, as mentioned above, maybe in professional roles and in other kinds of work, but always willing to bear the headaches of the fascists now in power… those working as committees of the power elite. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

Under Times SquareI saw something that even a short time ago could not have been imagined. Now, keep in mind that New York City is a place where a person can see a lot of things and sometimes serially. It’s a very interesting place where masses of people come together and all manner of things take place. In fact, only about an hour or two after the amazing sight, I got a laugh in the bathroom line at Whole Foods when I quipped: “This must be one of the few wealthy places in the world where bathrooms are almost impossible to find.” Maybe it’s by design: Lots of money and few public bathrooms and the private ones closely guarded. What a pisser!But the sight under Times Square in the subway tunnel sort of topped many of those things I’ve seen over many decades. I actually love the city, so I tend to take the unusual in stride because the unusual in NYC is the usual. Around 1970, while walking in the middle of the night through Washington Square Park, I was approached twice by people who walked me to nearby parked vans and asked where they could unload their cache of marijuana. The vans were full, top to bottom and from back to front with weed. Now, I ask readers, do I look like someone who would deal in illegal drugs? Why, I don’t even deal in legal drugs.The event… A man danced with a mannequin powered by Artificial Intelligence while music came loudly from a boombox located nearby. I won’t get into the clothing or hairstyle of the mannequin because those with a bent toward political correctness will be all over me faster than a basketball double team. But, there it was taking place under one of the busiest spaces on the planet, a guy and his mannequin dancing in pretty much perfect rhythm to boombox music while a crowd watched. Only in New York! Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.