The International Criminal Court (ICC) is being threatened by US president Donald Trump, who sanctioned nine ICC staff members, including judges and prosecutors, and Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has issued warrants for ICC staff. This is one of the most glaring examples of conflict between the old, competing imperial powers and a contemporary voice of accountability, liberation and justice.
With the world outraged by US support of Israel as it commits a horrific genocide in Gaza, and the brutality of the Russian war on Ukraine, I cannot help but think of a quote by the late Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
We are at the confluence of epochs. As late capitalism rips apart our world for every last coin, a new voice is crying out for an end to its tyranny and violence. In the meantime, we suffer with the malevolent machinations, avarice and mendacity of the monsters among us who still have control over the levers of power in this world.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t care that young Jewish students were moved by videos and photos of the firebombing of families huddled in their tents after their homes were reduced to rubble, or the bloated bellies of children being starved to death by Israel’s deliberate policy of famine, or the murder or scores of doctors, nurses and paramedics, or the blatant killing of more journalists than any other conflict in the world, or the rape of a Palestinian prisoner, or the complete and utter decimation of nearly every structure in Gaza, or the coldblooded killing of 5 year old Hind Rajab who was shot 335 times by Israeli soldiers as she sat in a car surrounded by the bodies of her dead family.
What Hillary Clinton does care about is that some of these young Jewish students couldn’t tell her which river or which sea was being referred to in the popular chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
To her, this is all “TikTok propaganda.” Never mind about the scores of genocide scholars who have declared this to be a genocide. Never mind that Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem said their country is committing genocide. Never mind Doctors Without Borders, or Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch. Never mind UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. It is all just social media from the “Chinese communist party.” Apparently, those Israeli politicians who talked about their genocidal plans openly and the IDF soldiers who posted their crimes were all “propaganda” from TikTok and China. This is her metric.
And why is this so important? Why do we need to keep talking about what Hillary Clinton said? Because it is the same metric and coldblooded calculous that every Western, liberal Zionist apologist has used to justify Israel’s genocide. A metric that involves ignoring a “wall of carnage,” as former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz so aptly put it. Or the endless “Dead Gaza Babies” as liberal icon Van Jones bemoaned.
It is a metric of breathtaking arrogance, staggering apologetics and nauseating sycophancy. A metric that extracts the humanity of the Palestinians from the entire equation to rationalize and excuse their annihilation.
Western liberalism is even more dangerous than the far right because it has the effect of normalizing state violence in the name of “humanitarian intervention.” It lulls decent people into complacency by using pacified and watered down rhetoric about human rights, inclusivity and equality, so much so that these terms becomes utterly toothless and devoid of any power. And it provides a veneer of respectability and civility through platitudes and bromides, masking its true imperialistic nature. It has also played the role of handmaiden to Trumpian fascism.
And it doesn’t stop in the US. Liberal leaders like Justin Trudeau, Kier Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen and Frank-Walter Steinmeier have all used their positions to justify and support this crime against humanity.
The genocide in Gaza has done what no other atrocity in contemporary history has been able to do. It has revealed to us just how depraved and twisted most Western political leaders and media figures are at their core. It showed us that if they can allow, aid or even applaud what Israel is doing, then they can easily do the same to us.
Kenn: Phil, I see you have been under a deluge of hate and mockery from online Zionists after a few of your pieces on the genocide in Gaza. What do you think is behind such a reaction? I am suspecting that there is a real fear amongst these groups that they are losing control of the narrative and are getting desperate. What are your thoughts?
Phil: My recent Facebook post on the subject did provoke a thousand-plus invasion of highly agitated Zionist trolls. They made the desert bloom with seething hate.
By the evidence, your insight regarding Israeli propagandist’s fumbling of the narrative is dead-on accurate. To wit, after, for example, witnessing the uniformed thugs of the IDF live-streaming their war crimes it was inevitable that large segments of the people of the world were going to grow incredulous to Israeli hasbara.
AI generated definition of the term hasbara: Hasbara is a Hebrew word that means “explanation” and is used to describe the Israeli government’s public diplomacy and public relations efforts to shape international opinion about the state of Israel.
How is it possible for Zionist propagandists to believe that ever proliferating images of bombed out hospitals, murdered doctors, medical personnel, aid workers, journalists, as well as entire families blown to bits in their homes could be explained away as acts of self-defense in behalf of little David Israeli facing down the looming Palestinian Goliath threatening a new, impending Holocaust?
Zionist apologists were, per always, playing victim as, all the while, Israeli government leaders and rabbis were, in full-throated fury, summing up the Old Testament, blood-crazed spirit of Amalek.
“When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” — Deuteronomy 25: 19
Hence, Zionist true believers found themselves in the (impossible) position of attempting to term their massive war crimes (to the point of a genocidal rampage) as being acts of national preservation. When, as time passed, it became apparent that what was retailed as a war against terrorist aggression was, in fact, a new facet of Zionist land theft i.e., the Israeli version — cue cringe-inducing irony — of Third Reich era Germany’s concept of Lebensraum.
My night terrors include the thought: How are we Jews going to survive the self-destructive conflation of Judaism and Zionism as weaponized by the Zionist ethno-supremacist state and their confabulation-prone apologists? As noted, the Zionist state’s version of Lebenstraun.
Lebensraum (noun): The (coveted) territory a nation state believes is needed for its natural development and crucial to national notion of self-determination e.g., God, in the Zionist worldview, has ordained that the Biblical era lands of Judea and Samaria are the birthright of the Zionist settler-colonialists.
Yet archaeological evidence and medical science confirm the following: The Jews of the ancient Levant closest ancestors are the Palestinian people.
My DNA reports my ancestors were of German, French, Dutch and Spanish (the latter via the 1492 Jewish expulsion during the Spanish Inquisition) origin. I also harbor 4% lineage from Northern Iraq/Iran. Thus the claim is risible that the so-called Promised Land was promised to me.
Among the hasbara fairytales believed and parroted, we diaspora Jews returned to our ancestral homeland and “made the desert bloom.” In reality, we have drenched the soil with the blood of the rightful inhabitants of the land and rendered our collective mindscape into a wasteland ridden with a soul-defying architecture constructed of casuistry and false, noxious mythos.
The world has looked on and asked, isn’t the Zionist worldview somewhat on the Nazi-adjacent side of the political/societal spectrum?
Your thoughts on the matter, Kenn?
Kenn: I think that the parallels of Zionism to Nazism are so striking, that it is staggeringly difficult for most people to comprehend. For 80+ years, Zionist propaganda proliferated with the assistance of the West, primarily the American Empire. So many crimes and atrocities were whitewashed by the Western press and politicians, that the public at large simply did not know the scale and, up until recently, remained ignorant of Israeli barbarism.
Education around the Holocaust played a large part in this. It began the project of conflating Zionism, a political ideology, with Judaism. Thus, the only safe place for Jews following the Shoah was in historic Palestine. The Indigenous population had to be removed, demonized and erased, both literally and figuratively. Israel’s so-called founding father, David Ben-Gurion, said that “the old will die and the young will forget.” This was the hope of many early Zionists who deluded themselves into thinking that the Indigenous people would simply move on and accept their displacement. They ingested these lies based on their Western colonial counterparts, who viewed the Indigenous populations they ethnically cleansed or tried to exterminate as imbeciles who could be manipulated into forgetting their own history.
Portrayals of the so-called “Indian War” that are an analog of Zionist propaganda involving Islamic terrorists
Now, we see this kind of major disconnect from reality among Zionists, who are largely older, white Americans. These are the ones who were the most propagandized. They saw what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe (as well as countless other groups), but they did not take away some universalist message of solidarity. The slogan “never again” was uniquely applied to Jews. The mere inference that others could suffer from similar atrocities was taken as offensive and absurd. And this is of course racism.
What I found interesting about the reaction to your posts was this narrative of the “self-hating Jew.” And it reminded me of how early Zionism utterly loathed Jews who appeared weak or ill. Israel turned away thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe who did not fit the new Jew mythos. Ironically, this new mythos bore a striking resemblance to the Aryan archetype of the perfect man and woman. A fascistic portrayal of the human being.
Phil: Kenn, you apprehended a (tragic) truth regarding the misapprehension of the nature of strength. Wilhelm Reich, who fled Nazi Germany due to his grasp of the dangers of fascism, explored the nature of the pathology he termed “narcissistic armouring.” In short, a chronic rigidity of thought manifested in both psyche and body resultant from the psyche being overwhelmed by the trauma inherent to the excesses of authoritarianism.
A lack of empathy and a tendency towards excessive rage when threats, real or imagined, are extant are defining traits of the pathological condition. To wit, we can consider that the Zionist state suffers — and causes all within its reach to suffer — due to a collective form of narcissistic armouring. In the mindset of those thus armoured, on an emotional basis, signs of weakness are viewed with disdain yet any sign of strength, even in a defensive posture, of those considered adversarial in nature, is viewed as an existential threat that must be annihilated. I suspect this explains the odious mindset of pro-Zionist — and authoritarianism-rancid rightwing — social media trolls.
Then there is this regarding the phenomenon of collective forms of narcissistic armouring, on a nation building basis: Israel was founded by campaigns of ethnic cleansing and, as the world has witnessed because of its massive war crimes in Gaza, is prone to genocidal rampages. Therefore, as hideous as it sounds when spoken aloud, unnervingly large segments of the Israeli citizenry regard even Palestinian infants as future terrorists and act as apologists for their massive extermination. A mindset, once again, analogous to the actions of Third Reich era Germany where Jews were viewed as genetically inferior to their Aryan race betters but were seen as a dangerous presence, fatal to the common good, that must be first expelled, then isolated, then exterminated.
Below the surface of Israel’s self-justifying lies, the nation’s Ashkenazi elites sense the unsustainable nature of the Zionist project: they are heading for the exits in droves while hyper-authoritarian religious zealots go full-force Brownshirt in the West Bank. Israelis might embrace the mythos that they have trudged through the desert and arrived in the Promised Land. But by means of the narcissistic armouring they manifest — they have become Pharaoh’s army.
Kenn: The idea of narcissistic armouring explains so much regarding Zionism’s constant reframing and battle. One of the ways it manifests is this notion of Israeli food. Of course, this is ridiculous. There is no Israeli food. There is appropriated food from various nations and ethnic groups in the region, but it is all stolen and rebranded.
And it is fascinating to me to see this real time dissolution of the original Zionist project into a kind of a hyper-religious form. As you mentioned, thousands of Israelis of Ashkenazi descent are fleeing Israel. They have been buying up property in Cyprus, Thailand, Portugal and elsewhere. These are the descendants of the secular Zionists who manufactured a kind of quasi-socialist utopia for Jews in historic Palestine. Of course, the only way to realize this dream was to erase the original inhabitants and invent a story of origin for themselves, even though we know from a variety of historians that this is a complete farce. But where is this “connection” to the land that they insisted they possessed? Where is the promised safety for Jews in Israel if they are leaving en masse?
In “The Invention of the Jewish People,” Schlomo Sand dismantles the Zionist mythology of a common people. Many of the Jews we see in Europe have absolutely no origin in Palestine, but are the descendants of converts to the faith early on, well before Christian authorities outlawed such proselytization. Even David Ben-Gurion believed that the Palestinians were the direct descendants of ancient Jews who had remained in the land after the Roman expulsions and converted to Islam over the centuries. This was, of course, very problematic for the European Jews who had no real connection to the Levant outside of religious mythology.
But it is interesting to me that so many Zionists feel it is imperative to erase the Palestinians simply on the basis that they do not possess a “nation.” This was exactly what has been done to Jews for thousands of years. Nationalism itself is a relatively new idea, only seen in recent centuries of human history and emerging in Europe. Imposed on the world via colonialism. So, to think that nationhood is the pinnacle of a people’s existence is rather trite and silly. But the racism is thick in this too. Imagine saying that there was no such thing as the French or the Spanish or the Czechs, because they are all just Europeans. In this same way, they are saying there is no such thing as Syrians or Egyptians or Lebanese because they are all just Arabs.
It is a feat of enormous delusion that so many Zionists think they will succeed in erasing the Palestinians. The first time we see the term Palestine is in The Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. He mentions it as a district of Syria. And I was recently reading a book on Pompeii and found it fascinating to discover that the ancient city that was buried under molten ash had traded with Palestine. So, it is rather odd that these modern day Zionists try so hard to erase Palestine from the historical record. It is an impossible task for them, yet they persist in trying.
But this is what colonialism is in a nutshell. The Europeans did it in the Americas, Africa, Asia and beyond. Razing Indigenous temples and cities and erecting cathedrals on their foundations. Erasure of a people is nothing new. It is the lynchpin of all colonial projects. And much of this is psychological warfare. Constantly harping on about this obviously false notion that Palestine never existed or that there is no such thing as the Palestinians is meant to demoralize or mock people, especially ones that are being ethnically cleansed or genocided like the Palestinians.
The Nakba, then and now
Israel is falling apart. Mental health in the country is spiraling downward and thousands are weighing their options for getting out. And when they leave, what will become of the state when you only have rabid extremists and religious nutcases rampaging in the occupied territories? Do you see this as the beginning of the end for the Zionist project and if so, what is the future of Jews and Judaism in the wake of Zionism’s brutality and lies?
Religious zealot land thieves, under the protection of IDF uniformed thugs (i.e., de facto Brownshirts) perpetrating the Zionist form of Lebensraum
Phil: Years of participation and complicity in ethnic cleansing, perpetual aggression directed at their neighbors, and the Gaza genocide is inflicting a psychological toll on the citizenry of Israel.
“Israel is experiencing what experts describe as a severe “mental health tsunami,” with around two million people in need of psychological assistance as addiction rates climb and social cohesion weakens,” according to the news outlet Yedioth Ahronoth.
But don’t expect a reckoning of national conscience to take hold in the Zionist ethno-supremacist state. On an historical basis, in regard to modern nation states, a form of collective psychological affliction causes the populace to seek psychical remedy in the palliatives administered by authoritarian demagogues e.g., in the case of Israel, rightwing/religious death cult leaders such as Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Political and religious zealot demagogues are adept black magicians in the art of displaced resentment and the psychological projection of the collective dark side of a culture unto the alien other and treasonous underminers in their midst.
In short, events will careen towards calamity. The process of cultural/national truth-resonant reckoning does not unfold, if ever, until a collective bottom is hit.
Hence, Zionism is manifested as a psychotic episode, including evincing homicidal impulsiveness, in the form of a nation. Of course, the pathological proclivity has existed since Israel’s inception but now the affliction has lapsed into a state of exponential runaway.
The Zionist leadership has become, as is a general rule with leaders of authoritarian states, inmates in an asylum for the criminally insane — who now run the asylum.
As a result, the general population is suffering a collective nervous breakdown.
Carl Jung diagnosed the root cause of their pathology: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
In short, the Zionist state’s path to recovery would be the recognition of the internal carnage they inflict on their own souls due to the suffering they perpetrate on all within range of their blood-drenched belligerence.
“None of us are free until Palestine is free.”
That is the declaration provoked a troll swarm to descend upon my comment section, raging, in essence, “genocide=freedom.”
A Third Reich-adjacent reaction, wouldn’t you say?
Hint: The 1000 Year Reich lasted 12 years.
My mother, her father arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, escaped Nazi Germany by Kindertransport. She lived until 92 years of age. Her very life is a testament to the deathscape of ash and dust that is the fate of genocidal nations.
Israel is coming apart at the seams, both on a cultural and political basis. The Ashkenazi elite are headed for the exits as the religious zealot settler class are inflamed with the death-besotted mythos of Amalek.
History reveals, nations that beat their plowshares into weapons to wage genocide hasten their mortal return to inevitable dust.
Pictured my (Phil Rochstroh) mother, Erica Meyer and her older sister, Gisela, both Children of The Kindertransport that delivered Jewish children into the homes of strangers in the U.K.
Bari Weiss made a career out of whining and complaining about so-called “wokeness.” And after leaving the New York Times for being out of her depth, she founded the “Free Press.”
Weiss then used her small platform “Free Press,” which was a colossal failure, to downplay Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She published pieces that claimed that children suffering and dying from Israel’s imposed famine in Gaza had “pre-existing conditions” as if this made it okay. As if their lives were less important. And she did this knowing full well that the sickest people in society succumb faster than others in such conditions. She did this knowing full well that this was the same excuse that the Nazis used to justify their barbarism.
Weiss also targeted Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was then murdered by the Israeli military in Gaza. Before he was killed, Alareer said that if he were to die, Weiss would be to blame. Sadly, he was correct.
Now, after succeeding in becoming Editor-in-Chief of CBS, Weiss is banking on the prospect of Paramount purchasing all or part of Warner Bros. Discovery. Because she wants to “run a combined CBS-CNN” operation. Weiss said she wants to “redraw the lines of acceptable debate.” In other words, she wants to control the Overton Window. Essentially, Weiss is a living example of manufactured consent.
Weiss has never garnered respect as a journalist. In fact, her “Free Press” platform had one of the smallest audiences among online platforms. The only reason she gained the position she has is because she was chosen by Zionist billionaire David Ellison to rebrand genocide apologetics for a wider audience.
I think it is safe to say that if this modern day Leni Riefenstahl gets what she wants, American mainstream media will become her and David Ellison’s personal loud speaker for the most biased propaganda the US has seen thus far.
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
So, is Israel committing genocide?
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the world’s leading academic association of genocide experts, passed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide.
Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, the University Network for Human Rights say Israel is committing genocide.
Two Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, have also concluded that their country is committing genocide.
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, said it is accurate to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as a genocide.
The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory say Israel is committing genocide.
Several Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, including 87 year old Stephen Kapos and 80 year old Agnes Kory say Israel is committing genocide.
Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli academic and filmmaker and the son of Polish survivors of Auschwitz and Belsen-Bergen says Israel is committing genocide.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, stated in a March 2024 report that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is committing genocide.
An independent international commission of inquiry for the UN concluded in a September 2025 report that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and that senior officials are responsible for incitement.
Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, South Africa and Spain say Israel is committing genocide.
Israel is also on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
And who denies Israel is committing genocide?
Israel and its primary benefactor and supplier of weapons, the United States, Kier Starmer and the UK establishment, the German government, weapons manufacturers, far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, neoconservative politicians, celebrities like Debra Messing, evangelicals, and Zionists. So, who are you going to believe?
Perhaps you’ve noticed something. The faces of so many celebrities and influencers are beginning to look, well, not human. There has been a noticeable shift in aesthetics in Western society. One that supposedly defies the aging process, but that has ended up being unsettling and rather frightening.
Full disclosure, I have had micro-derm abrasion, botox and other procedures in the past and I love facials and other similar services. Without a doubt, I do care how I look. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling good or enhancing your appearance. In fact, I have great respect for people who become aestheticians.
But this is about the beauty industry under late capitalism. It is an industry that preys upon the insecurities they foster. And their primary target is young girls and women. The saddest example I have seen of this were 15 and 16 year old girls buying “anti-aging” serums at Sephora.
In fact, the language that the beauty industry uses is telling in and of itself. “Age-defying” or “anti-wrinkle.” It is as if these things are medical conditions that must be treated before you die from them. Wars against time that must be fought by expensive procedures that literally alter the contours of your face.
And influencers peddle these ideas with astonishing speed and success. Watching them on the screens we carry around in our pockets, we are transfixed by both the spectacle and the soothing ASMR.
Hollywood also plays an enormous role, as an older female actor is constantly under scrutiny for her “youthfulness.” How many young women in the industry today have faces that appear less human because they fear being “aged out” of acting? Overly filled lips. Foreheads that do not move. Emaciated bodies. None of this is to shame or make fun of them. But to examine the pressure that people, especially young women, endure daily to conform to this specific aesthetic.
The significant medical risks involved in such procedures, from fillers to botox, should not be ignored either. I won’t go into detail about that here, since I would be out of my depth. But there is ample evidence of botched cases, infections and problematic health consequences one can find on a simple internet search.
The wellness movement under capitalism has adopted these tactics too, joining the beauty aesthetic to health and well being. If you are tired or your face is showing the signs of fatigue, it isn’t that soul-sucking, under-waged job you have to go to in order to live on this planet that is at fault. It is your face, literally. Essentially, it is shaming us for still being alive and showing the signs of that aliveness, while ignoring the real factors that cause a person stress.
There is also an underpinning of racialized aesthetics that should be addressed. Whiteness has always been elevated as the pinnacle of beauty in Western society. And it still resonates today. Actor and model Sydney Sweeney recently came under fire for her American Eagle jeans ad. The implication was that while she was selling the clothing product, she was also giving a racist dog whistle about her “superior” genes. And in a subsequent interview, she did not deny these accusations. The point being that there is a persistent standard of beauty in the West that glorifies white youthfulness while denigrating or disappearing those who do not conform to it.
The pursuit of youth and beauty is nothing new. We can see evidence of it throughout human history, and it has taken a wide variety of forms. But late capitalism has warped culture in a way never before seen. It cynically uses our deepest fears against us and promises us fulfillment through technology and spending lots of money. And that technology takes its toll on social interactions and cohesiveness in society.
How often have we looked at a face that does not seem real? That doesn’t emote in a way we can relate to? That doesn’t move? This kind of facial alteration severs the normal social dynamic we rely on for social cohesion, one that has evolved over millions of years.
Regardless of what the beauty industry says, aging is not something we must wage a war against. It is a fact of our existence. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with going to the spa, getting facials or even undergoing treatments or procedures that make us feel better, we should not feel pressured to do so or go into debt because of it. We should try to understand the forces at play that often make us feel unworthy or unattractive and the enormous amount of money being made from reinforcing those insecurities.
Aging isn’t always easy. But there are cultural attitudes that make it unnecessarily harder. In truth, we should be appreciated for how we look at any age. And we should not be mocked or rendered invisible if we do not conform to a largely unobtainable and incredibly exorbitant notion of beauty.
Even as we take care of our skin, we should not feel the need to hide its age by buying expensive concealers, deform it with risky fillers or numb it out of existence through paralytic drugs. Humans can be beautiful at any age, but most especially when they hold on to the very things that make them human to begin with.
The Supreme Court of Brazil is sending the notorious, fascist dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, to prison for 27 years and 3 months for trying to lead a coup after he lost the presidential election in 2022.
Bolsonaro, who had been lauded by many Western political leaders and capitalist rags like the Wall Street Journal, lead an unprecedented assault on Brazil’s biodiverse regions and accelerated the genocide against Brazil’s indigenous peoples for the profit of multinational corporations.
Backed by a cadre of evangelical fanatics, racists and homophobes, Bolsonaro tried to dismantle the remaining protections for the besieged ecosystems and communities of his country. He emboldened loggers, ranchers and mining interests with his fascist rhetoric, many of whom have threatened Indigenous peoples with violence.
One example was in the state of Amapá, where gold miners stabbed an Indigenous leader to death in a protected reserve. Other reports of attacks on Indigenous people, women, environmental activists and the LGBTQ community mounted and deforestation of the Amazon increased by 67% in the first seven months of his reign.
Bolsonaro’s sentencing is a bright spot in a world where the powerful seem to get away with their heinous crimes against the biosphere and the most vulnerable among us. Crimes exemplified by the Epstein files and the genocide in Gaza. So, if this causes any of them to shudder, even for a moment, then this is a very good day.
Like a bad penny (actually, a penny soaked in blood), Hillary Clinton keeps showing up when virtually no one asked her to. Making the rounds, Clinton has pulled out one of the things that made her presidential campaign such a gleaming success: elitist condescension.
On one particular panel, Clinton bemoaned the increased sympathy Palestinians are receiving for being the victims of a US-backed, Israeli-led genocide. She was bewildered at young people who, for some reason, don’t like seeing children being blown up with US munitions or being starved to death through a carefully curated policy of annihilation. And that young Jews, in particular, don’t like it being done in their name.
She said:
“We have done a miserable job teaching young people history. I had so many conversations, and frankly, they often started as confrontations with students, not just at Columbia, but elsewhere. Where were they getting their information? They were getting it from social media. They were getting it most particularly from TikTok, which is governed by an algorithm until — at least up until now, still largely manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.” – Hillary Clinton
Talking down to her constituents has been a hallmark of Clinton’s public persona since her early days of demonizing young Black men. Her and her husband, Epstein Island regular Bill “Bubba” Clinton, ruined countless lives with an excessively punitive and nakedly racist policy that targeted supposed “super predators.” A racist dog whistle that I am sure excited some of their white friends in Arkansas.
Clinton now joins her colleagues Van Jones and Sarah Hurwitz in the Hall of Genocidaires and their Sycophants. Like them, she isn’t outraged or even mildly upset by the “wall of carnage” we see every day in Gaza. To her, they are an optical problem. One that should be dealt with by some good ole fashioned American censorship.
Ironically, Clinton doesn’t seem to see the Israeli soldiers or politicians proudly posting their crimes online for the world to see. She is going to find it very hard to censor the criminals she supports when they simply refuse to shut-up about their atrocities.
Clinton’s “Chinese Communist Party” boogeyman is a particularly laughable remark, given that almost all of the mainstream media outlets in the US are now owned by a handful of corporations. But this is a desperate attempt to deflect from that, as well as the fact that they are no longer seen as the arbiter of truth. Turns out, you cannot keep lying or omitting facts to the public and not suffer some backlash.
But no boogeyman she summons will obscure her own criminality. The record is clear. Clinton supported the war on Iraq, a country that never attacked the US. She supported the far-right coup in Honduras, a regime responsible for attacking and murdering countless Indigenous, LGBTQ and environmental activists. She was instrumental in the destruction of Libya, plunging it into turmoil and the creation of a new slave trade in Northern Africa. And she helped to draw up one of the most recent blueprints for the oppression of the Palestinians and the cementing of the Israeli apartheid ethnostate.
In the end, Clinton will go down as one of the most loathsome figures in the American political class. A friend to Kissinger, a champion of far right regimes and military interventions that have decimated the Global South, a supporter of Israeli apartheid and apologist for its current genocide. She lost the presidency to a narcissistic fascist with the morals of a botfly when even a damp, salmonella-tinged, kitchen sponge could have run a better campaign. And now she is determined to inflict her intellectual brain rot years after most of us thought it impossible or even necessary.
Hillary Clinton and most of the political elite class have lost control of the narrative, but don’t expect any ‘come to Jesus’ moment. I am sad to say that it is extremely unlikely she is done with her yawn-inducing “I told you so” tours for a long time to come.
There has been a lot of shade cast on Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo regarding their recent interviews for the movie Wicked. Apart from legitimate criticisms of vapid celebrity culture and the toxic nature of the Hollywood film industry, the commentary I have seen has taken a truly meanspirited turn.
Grande and Erivo are being called “cringe” with some influencers complaining that their public affection makes them feel “uncomfortable.” Unsurprisingly, their physical appearance is also being picked apart.
The two actors have apparently bonded. And in interviews, they have shown a lot of platonic physical affection toward one another. But whether or not it is sincere is beside the point.
Western culture has always hated femininity and softness. It has always portrayed it as weak, silly or even crazy. Thanks to the toxic influence of British imperial culture in North America, which touted “stiff upper lip” nonsense, any display of emotion in public is grounds for being lampooned and ridiculed.
Even Western liberal feminism has been a victim of this loathing of emotional displays that are traditionally associated with femininity. The implication is that women need to emulate the very worst aspects of masculinity to succeed. The “Girl Boss” being the most prominent example.
And the impact can be seen beyond this in such places as the INCEL movement. Alienated young men, divorced from their emotions and atomized by the loneliness of a truly abysmal late capitalist hellscape, have been conditioned to hate anything feminine.
Grande and Erivo’s public affection isn’t abnormal. It is also not cringe to people with a healthy sense of what it means to be human. To be in possession of a body and a mind and a soul. All of which not only desire affection, but need it to survive and thrive in this world.
So, the next time you see an influencer disparage them for this, ask yourself why are they so bothered by it? Why is anyone bothered by it? In a world where empathy and kindness are in terrifyingly short supply, why would such public displays of caring garner so much animus?
Whatever you might think of Marjorie Taylor Greene, her untimely exit from the cesspit of Washington is instructive. She didn’t go willingly. Anyone who thinks this misunderstands the dynamics of power in American Empire.
For all her flaws, and there are many, Greene ended up doing things no one is permitted to do. She demanded the release of the Epstein files and she demanded an end to US support for Israel as it commits genocide against the Palestinians. These two things sealed her fate.
She defied the order of powerful white men who rule the empire. And she dared to question the undying devotion it has to its primary colonial asset, Israel.
Greene had some genuinely insane and loathsome political positions. She peddled far right conspiracy theories, antisemitism, racism and transphobia. But in that sense, she wasn’t a grifter. She was truly deluded. She believed these loathsome things. And she was embraced for them by the cult of MAGA.
Her devotion to what she believed was the truth inevitably led her to some dark conclusions. And after that first press conference about the Epstein files, her life in politics was doomed. Since then, she has had to hire private security. And I think it was at this point she might have begun to realize what she had put some of her colleagues through.
Greene will likely make the rounds in the miasma of far right talking heads and insufferable blowhards for some time. She will likely go silent for a while to regroup. And maybe she will resurface down the road with a new brand and look.
But her time in the belly of the beast should serve as the clearest example of the banal evil of American Empire. Although it is in steep decline, it protects its interests. Those interests lie in the capital investments made by the most powerful and wealthy men on the planet. And they will do anything to preserve that status even if it means sinking the whole ship to the bottom of the sea.
Kenn Maurice Orfanos (Orphan) 