The Empire Strikes Back...at itself

The delusion and dual loyalty that spawned Trump is bipartisan and media driven. We need to strike back at them with work stoppages, subversion of corporate media and a transformative reality check.

Non-partisan anti-war watchdog CODEPINK calls out Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his staunch dual loyalty to Israel. Jeffries and the majority of Democrats have committed war crimes and treason by prioritizing Israel’s interests over our own.

As Trump shocks the world by openly calling to escalate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, those of us who have been vocal in our opposition to the unholy US/Isreal alliance against the Palestinian people, and the xenophobia against Muslims in general, are shaking our heads. Because Trump in his typically unfiltered fashion is merely openly stating what Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and the cadre of Zionist ghouls have been covering up for the past fifteen months. Lying every single day about their “hard work” in negotiating a ceasefire being obstructed by Hamas, when in fact it was Netanyahu who openly stated he would never agree to a deal with Hamas and Jake Sullivan who stated “we don’t negotiate with Hamas,” Biden and his cabinet did everything they possibly could to supply Netanyahu with munitions that would destroy as much of Gaza and kill as many civilians as quickly and efficiently as possible. Biden sent Israel a record-breaking $17.9 billion in weapons from October 2023 to October 2024 alone, temporarily halting the shipment of 2000 pound bunker-buster bombs in May of 2024 but continuing the flow of all other munitions. Liberal media sat in briefing rooms listening to Biden, Bliken and Sullivan’s racist lies while the few brave journalists who called them out were escorted from the room. “Progressive” pundits like Thom Hartmann never even mentioned Gaza in their daily Substack updates, claiming what was happening in Gaza was not a genocide, taking over six months to ask his followers “Israeli Defense Forces shot down over a hundred starving Palestinians.... Can we call this an attempted genocide now? If that’s not sufficiently racist, others like Robert Reich played the “two-sides” game to minimize the political fallout for Biden during election season. Neoliberals from Pod Save America to 50 million dollar woman Rachel Maddow amplified party talking points like “Israel has the right to defend itself,” all voices joining together to lay the groundwork for Trump and Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing and the for-profit development of Gaza and the West Bank. In the time-honored tradition of bipartisan American Exceptionalism, one administration does the demolition for the benefit of war profiteers and another does the rebuilding for the benefit of US developers and contractors, enabled by a media fronting for a mercenary Zionist Democratic Party.

Did the flour kill all those Palestinians? Nationalist “progressive” talker Thom Hartmann ignored Biden’s genocide, rarely mentioning Gaza at all and telling callers he did not think what was occurring in Gaza was a genocide. Six months in he put his finger to the wind to see if his followers thought Israel was committing genocide. He didn’t mention the genocide in his Substack again, but Russia and Putin are daily obsessions.

Now we see the chilling effect of the bipartisan push to stifle free speech defending Palestinian humanity and calling out Israel’s undue influence on our government. More important perhaps is the blowback from the deafening silence of the media and the liberal base to the Biden administration’s violent and Islamaphobic response to anti-Palestinian protests and its daily lies about working towards a ceasefire and supplying humanitarian aid. Democrats joined Republicans in grilling university heads in the tradition of the House on Unamerican Activities Commmittee as to their allegiance to Israel and the Biblical fiction, resulting in the criminalization of anti-Israel political speech on college campuses and the threat of loss of federal funding. This unconstitutional gag order has enabled Trump to merge two of his favorite targets, immigration and progressive activism, and sign an executive order directing ICE to deport noncitizen college students and other international visitors who speak out against Israel. This includes monitoring of all educational institutions from kindergarten on up for what the White House would consider anti-semitic activity but is of course constitutionally protected political speech. Let’s not forget after hundreds of students were arrested at Columbia University in April of 2022 it was Joe Biden who said "I condemn the antisemitic protests. That's why I've set up a program to deal with that.” |His program was thousands of arrests, police brutalizing students and professors alike, and Soviet-style Congressional “investigative” committees making public examples of university presidents. There was precious little pushback from within the Democratic Party and full support of his actions from the liberal media now expressing outrage at Trump’s actions.

<Biden’s “program” to deal with “antisemitic” protests calling out his partnership in Israel’s genocide was to have police trap students in university buildings, beat them out of the media’s view and then embark on mass arrests. Sounds just like something Trump would do, but liberals supported Biden’s demonization of college students and his violent shutdown of protest, making it even easier for Trump to stifle free speech.>

So as our executive branch and Congress have openly launched a treasonous bipartisan dual loyalty campaign, with the revolting Pennsylvania buffoon Democrat John Fetterman stating that his “voice and his vote” are with Israel, it is no surprise that Trump can take Biden’s lead and call for the ethnic cleansing and remodeling of Gaza. It’s what both parties have supported for decades when it comes to Muslim countries. It’s what then-Secretary Clinton proposed at a 2011 at an “engaging roundtable discussion on investing in Iraq with senior executives from 30 U.S. companies and senior representatives from the U.S. and Iraqi governments” when she said, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.” Clinton specifically mentioned JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, both of which signed deals with the U.S. government—JPMorgan to run an export-import bank in Iraq and ExxonMobil to redevelop Iraqi oil fields. And all this while she was Obama’s Secretary of State, but nobody seemed particularly concerned at the time apart from journalist David Sirota who broke the story. The vast majority of Democrats towed the party line during Biden’s 15 month genocide, viewing the destruction of Gaza as an inconvenience during an election year. Now that Gaza is 75% destroyed, Trump can legitimately describe Gaza as a “demolition site” and begin his “redevelopment” program. Biden and Bibi have transformed Gaza into a hell even worse than the one the world ignored for the past 75 years with the consent of both political parties, their bases and the corporate media. Biden and the Democrats have bulldozed Gaza for Trump’s redevelopment program, fully endorsed by AIPAC and the people of Israel.

Two bloated criminal pigs stand in front of the media announcing plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into resort property. Wanting to keep their jobs and access, apart from one isolated shout all media members remained silent and asked questions about the legality and logistics of the plan, treating criminals as if they were respected heads of state. It’s time for a new media that has now been deaten down, consolidated and commoditized.

But now of course Democrats are aghast at the notion of the ethnic cleansing they fully supported. We are forced to sit through the spectacle of a pair of criminal caricatures in a performative press conference smirking about the displacement and annihilation of two million people. Trump and Netanyahu fielded questions from a comfortably numb media about the logistics and legality of moving Palestinians to other Arab countries while developing Gaza as vacation property for yuppies and oligarchs. The prosecution of whistleblowers by Obama and Biden, bipartisan grilling of Tulsi Gabbard demanding she call Edward Snowden a traitor, and ejection of journalists who spoke out for Palestinians from State Department press conferences cast a palpable pall over the proceedings. Apart from an isolated shout or two, the press sat silent and obedient, acting as if the proposal of ethnic cleansing was as routine as any mundane White House press briefing. And in a tragic way it was. Because the same press supports the notion that Edward Snowden is a traitor, focusing on the premeditated theatrics of Democrat hypocrites like Mark Warner and Micheal Benet instead of pointing out that Snowden was a hero who proved that our intelligence agencies are treasonous in their warrantless spying on Americans and push for war under false pretenses. The same delusional security state groupthink applies to Israel. Israel is a democracy with the right to defend itself while Palestine is and autocracy led by a terrorist organization. The reality is that Israel is a terrorist theocracy which has been an illegal occupying force in Palestine for 75 years and was consequently met with resistance from Hamas. Biden repeatedly claimed Israel’s assault on Gaza was “targeted” against Hamas, yet the reality is their attacks were and are wholly indiscriminate leaving Gaza in ruins with at least 62,000 dead and hundreds of thousands maimed.

The reality is that a religious organization has already taken over our government. It has reinforced a bipartisan state of belief akin to opposites day and paved the way for another religious organization, the Christian right, to spread its influence and further subvert governmental institutions. Wealthy white men stand in front of us smirking and scolding while they spout malignant nonsense dreamt up by belligerents in the military and intelligence agencies. Despite always being proven wrong, both political parties and their media do not question the inverted logic of our military intelligence complex. While Democrats and their media took offense to Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza, they barely raised an eyebrow as Biden and Bibi massacred tens of thousands of innocents over 15 months. In fact, in the world of Democratic Party opposites day, it was more important not to mention Biden’s genocide for fear of electing Trump. The narrative was that Trump would be worse, but Biden did nothing but support Netanyahu’s racist massacre, providing political cover and weapons for him to kill as many innocent Palestinians as was possible in the shortest amount of time, Party leaders and their media convinced the liberal base to ignore history and reality in favor of Zionism, just as they used and are still using McCarthyism to project blame onto Putin as a distraction for their own utter incompetence. One half of the electorate still believes that Putin and Trump are in cahoots to overthrow American “democracy,” while Russiagate has been thoroughly debunked and Trump like Democrats is apparently run by Zionist donors and Israel. We already have been subverted by a foreign power, as Zionist fascism crushes what remained of the resistance on the left and persuades millions of liberals to not only remain quiet about but support a real-time, blood-spattered, IDF-sponsored holocaust against the women and children of Palestine. No excuses like Vietnam “oh we didn’t know until we saw the pictures” or Iraq “oh we thought there were WMDs because George W Bush said so.”

Once an anti-gun activist assimilates into the Democratic Party they become ardently pro-war and anti-diplomacy. The DNC hired David Hogg in an attempt to appeal to young males, but most young males are anti-war and have little interest in anachronistic Cold War propaganda. And Zelensky has asked Americans to come to Ukraine to fight, so if Hogg really believes this he should strap on his AK-47 and save Poland.

In the most fundamental way, the manner in which the horrors of Gaza have transpired proves how in their souls both parties align when it comes to guarding the myth of American Exceptionalism. At the beginning of February, amidst all the turmoil over Trump’s dismantling of government agencies and Elon Musk’s access to federal payment systems, it was Hakeem Jeffries who asserted that Iran was weak and the U.S. “can’t take its foot off the gas until Iran is brought to its knees” using “all available mechanisms.” This warmongering against Iran was part of the DNC’s 2024 platform, echoing Lindsey Graham who has been making the rounds warning against Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Both parties are engaging in rhetoric identical to that which led to the war in Iraq, perpetrating propaganda unchallenged by their ahistorical bases and the media at large while stirring their bipartisan pot of intoxicating nationalism and Islamaphobia. In the midst of the reality show theatrics pitting Democrats against Republican cabinet nominees, both parties are crawling all over one another to prove their unwavering commitment to Israel, with Democrats who are expressing outrage at Trump’s calls to develop Gaza into resort property plastered across the website of the Democratic Majority for Israel, their cheery head shots supported with attestations like “The message I bring to Israel is this: you may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself—but as long as America exists, you will never ever have to.” The only difference between Democrats and Trump in the matter of Gaza is optics. If Biden were in office and Netanyahu were to announce the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Biden would condemn the move warning that Netanyahu had crossed a red line and then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it. Trump is impolite in his open support for the notion of ethnic cleansing, forcing the establishment media to feign outrage at the displacement of those they failed to stand up for. So delusional are Democrats and their media that on February 9th the Washington Post editorial page headline read “Democrats, forget 2024. Defending democracy in 2025 is what matters.” As if a political mafia that twice was unable to defeat a reality show buffoon will suddenly face of the learned helplessness they have been paralyzed by after so many decades of having their work done by lobbyists, state-run consolidated media and the military/security complex.

The Washington Post exemplifies the fantasy world our representatives have been coddled into insulating themselves within. They are playing pretend, hapless buffoons who show more decorum than their ultra-right fascist counterparts but who unlike Trump and his henchmen are ineffectual and performative. Democrats were already faced with a crisis and their response was to show allegiance to another country, to far more devastating results than anything that actually materialized out of the propagandized threat of a Trump/Putin partnership. In fact, after the countless hours of energy put in by Rachel Maddow, Thom Hartmann, Pod Save America and the rest of the faux nationalists who helped Trump get into office, it turns that Trump’s primary allegiance thus far is identical to that of the Democrats. Maddow to this day is telling her judgment-addled viewers to “just wait” for the moment she has been obsessing about for eight years when Putin and Trump take over the US and the world. That is not to doubt that Trump admires autocrats like Putin, but someone needs to tell party-run media that Russiagate is old news, and that Trump has spoken to Putin about ending the futile war in Ukraine. Opening up the diplomacy that the Biden administration shut down with a nuclear superpower is a good thing. It’s the lack of diplomacy leading to war that is a bad thing. Opposites day again. Working against the interests of Ukranians and the American people alike by pushing for a continuation of a war that Ukraine could never win.

When Trump does end it, and he will, Democrats will tear their hair out about giving land back to Putin that he already had and about how Putin is going to take over the rest of Europe and then the US. That is not a joke, for that narrative has been propagated on MSNBC as well as by the likes of Reich and Hartmann, who like the liberal base have become delusional in order to support a party drifting into the furthest corners of The Twilight Zone. The truth will eventually come out that Putin didn’t want a war, he just wanted NATO and the US to stop treading on his borders and to keep Ukraine out of NATO. And that will be the end result that Trump achieves, after Biden helped to destroy more than half of Ukraine and kill hundreds of thousands. Just as the truth is coming out about the fact that a terrorist nation like Israel has been running our country, infiltrating not only our government but our news media. It is Israel, not Russia as the Democrats would like to have their paranoid base believe, that has coopted out government. It is Israel that covertly used social media to spread propaganda and influence lawmakers and voters alike. In the real world, Democrats should be fighting against the extremely dangerous prospect of a direct strike on Iran from US forces, but in our opposites day universe it is Trump for now who is refusing to bomb Iran.

They bucked me alright. Propaganda at every level, the headline suggests that Democrats had not been offering unconditional support for Israel for decades. There is a pocket of resistance remaining on the “left” that prioritizes historical context, realism and humanity over jingoism and sophomoric partisanship. But as the article accurately observes it is a minority indeed.

As Democrats and their base are now George W Bush Republicans, they will show little interest in fighting against what could be a fatal war with Iran. Just as they dismiss concerns about dual loyalty to a terrorist theocratic state. Democrats can’t fight against the theocratic fascism of Trump and his henchmen because they are beholden to the theocratic fascism of Israel. They can’t fight against his dismantling of governmental agencies because they were fine staffing them with corporate stooges and agents of Wall Street, effectively neutering them into fronts for privatization schemes and the upwards transfer of wealth. They can’t fight against his defiance of democracy because Democrats know that democracy is an illusion as evidenced by their fronting for the corrupted intelligence agencies that exercise mass surveillance, extradite journalists who reveal their crimes against humanity, and themselves are delusional in their use of violence to “persuade” other countries to fall in line with our political demands. Such loyalty to a military/intelligence complex that has stripped away our social safety nets, whittled away our right to free speech and protest and persuaded so many representatives to play opposites day to protect it has led to a Democratic Party that is swatting at ghosts in its own oblivious reality show. Illinois governorJB Pritzker, in line with his hopelessly banal AI-infused speeches, puts out an unfunny “comical” video to parody Trump, presented as a “serious” press conference in which he announces renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Illinois and annexing Green Bay. It’s all a joke to Pritzker and most of the Democrats. As a billionaire, whatever happens to the rest of us, Pritzker is relatively insulated. None of these upper-level Democrats have to worry as the vestiges of governmental agencies that benefit us are canceled. They can continue campaigning and putting on “fiery” displays at nomination hearings raging against Trump’s cabinet picks while blocking none of them. Chuck Schumer can stand in front of the Treasury Building in protest of Elon Musk’s access to government computer systems chanting “We will win” as if he’s at a high school football game, while in action unrelated to the Democrats’ photo-opposition the courts have temporarily restrained Musk from access (which will not stop him).

<Starting his presidential campaign early, billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker feels it’s urgent to put out a moronic parody video in typically naive neoliberal style. More entertainment for pro-genocide Democrats who are impotent in their response to Trump’s immigration raids and dismantling of the government but will always take time out for a cheap laugh.>

MSNBC’s answer is for Democrats to stop associating with the “far left.” They are telling their viewers that “she <Harris> ran a strong campaign and drew even in the polls” and that “it’s now clear she was doomed from the start by politically fraught stances she took to appeal to the interest groups active in the 2020 Democratic primary.” Their conclusion is that “Democratic candidates should never again fall prey to the siren song of far-left groups who claim, without evidence, to speak for our coalition and offer a path to the nomination.” The key to electoral victory is to submit to the demands of right-wing media and Republican attack ads, not to stop conspiring against the public interest. Like all of corporate media, MSNBC’s message is to work directly against the public interest as long as it translates to electoral victory. “The irony is these positions — decriminalizing the border, instituting "Medicare for All," abolishing student loan debt, banning fracking, and more — were all losers even in the 2020 primary.” MSNBC will not face the reality that these ideas were unpopular because their own multimillionaire pundits and oligarch bosses made them that way. What lost the 2020 primary for Bernie Sanders was Obama’s conspiracy against Bernie Sanders, forcing all of the middling centrist candidates to drop out leaving just Sanders and Biden. But now MSNBC viewers will believe that Democrats need to lurch even further to the right, which is actually what lost them both the 2016 and 2024 elections. Now that Trump is talking about Gaza as an investment opportunity, CNN is suddenly showing a modicum of concern for Palestinians while during the entire genocide it almost exclusively presented personal accounts and reporting from ardent Zionists (Dana Bash comes to mind). It’s not that CNN suddenly sees the Palestinian people as human, or that Democrats are hesitant to see more women and children slaughtered in Gaza and The West Bank. They don’t care about the women and children in Gaza or about those here in the US. They care about putting Israel first, and the only reason they are expressing outrage is because it’s Trump who said the quiet part out loud.

As for the Democrats outrage at Musk/billionaires infiltrating our government, Democrats have been letting their oligarchs run the show for decades. Obama staffed his cabinet with Wall Street hundred millionaires like Larry Summers and Timothy Guytner who proceeded to bail out their buddies in the big banks and leave homeowners in the dust. The Clinton’s favorite billionaire is rabid Zionist Haim Saban who not only gave tens of millions to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and rebuilt the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill (among dozens of other “favors”), but wrote an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post in October of 2024 endorsing Kamala Harris over Trump, citing that “Since her early days as a US senator, in which the first resolution she co-sponsored sought to combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, Harris has demonstrated unwavering support for the US-Israel relationship and Israel’s security.” Joe Biden reassured his roomful of billionaires in 2019 not to worry because if he were elected president “No one’s standard of living will change,” but he lied as under his presidency the 100 wealthiest Americans gained $1.5 trillion in wealth with tech tycoons Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison leading the way. During his farewell speech at the White House in January of 2025, Biden pretended to be Bernie Sanders when he warned “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” In typical Democratic Party gaslighting form, it’s Biden’s policies (and Clinton’s and Obama’s) that have created the “dangerous concentration of power” that is now openly infiltrating our government. It was Barack Obama who in 2009 crowned Wall Street embezzler Larry Summers as his “Economics Tsar,” allowing Summers to run the Treasury without having to be questioned by Congress in a formal confirmation hearing. Sounds familiar no? The only difference between Summers handing out hundreds of millions in mortgage relief funds to his banker bros and Musk’s infiltration of the Treasury is the optics and the fact that Obama gave nice speeches and was compliant with corporate media.

Democrats are fighting in vain the ghosts of their dual loyalty, which is why their blows against Trump have no impact and their words mere wish fulfilliment serving only to placate idle liberal minds. Representing Israel and their billionaires leaves the liberal class naked in their wont to fight against the very things that they so loyally serve support. Both parties embrace deregulation, fossil fuel extraction, privatization of health care, mass surveillance, the private prison industry, Draconian immigration policy, rogue law enforcement agencies like ICE and CPB, the military/intelligence complex over journalists and genocide. Democratic Party leadership across the board is comprised of the most Zionist politicians in the country, not the least of which are House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. Their loyalty is to the theocracy of Israel at the behest of the billionaires that they are now “shocked” to see openly commandeering our government. They quote with indignance the accumulated wealth of Trump’s cabinet, ignoring that Obama had at least 15 Wall Street hundred millionaires in his cabinet and Biden has served the ruling class his entire career, representing Wall Street so loyally that he was nicknamed “the MBNA senator.” They were more discreet than Trump and his merry men, and their rhetoric was more filtered than Trump’s, but Democrats have allowed oligarchs to rob us blind for decades. Their allegiance has been to special interests and now to another country, prioritizing the demands of AIPAC and Israel over those of their constituents and preferring to lose to Trump rather than defy Netanyahu and stop killing innocents for his and Israel’s pleasure. How is it that only now liberals are so concerned about oligarchs, when it was Democrats and their oligarchs who crushed the presidential candidate who was actually going to take on the ruling class twice? How is it that “progressives” like Thom Hartmann are still writing propaganda about Ukraine and Putin with headers reading “No American leader has ever pledged loyalty to a foreign dictator — until now…,” ignoring the dual loyalty of the Democratic Party to theocratic fascist Netanyahu, an alliance that has had far more drastic consequences domestically than Putin’s largely factitious “interference” and/or “collusion” with Trump.

Saving democracy in Ukraine. Since the start of the war, Zelensky has shut down thousands of Russian orthodox churches, prosecuted dozens of journalists who challenged his honesty, consolidated all TV news outlets into one state-run station and delayed elections through the imposition of martial law. One year prior to the war, Zelensky was already shutting down media outlets with opposing views.

More swatting at ghosts. More energy expended on an alternate reality while Democrats front for treasonous intelligence agencies in protection of their own vested interests under the false pretense of “national security.” More delusion that somehow a political party that prioritizes Israel’s demands and those of virtually every dirty industry over that of its constituency has any interest in humanity or democracy whatsoever. There are only the echoes of empty rhetoric and the stammering and joking of a compliant media to defend us against the threat of Trump and his henchmen. The courts can make their rulings against Trump’s defiance of the Constitutional order of things, but who is going to enforce those rulings? In matters of war, regime change, mass surveillance, torture, detention, and suppression of free speech and protest the Constitution has been irrelevant for decades. The slaveowners and rapists who wrote that Constitution, that sacred document of the founding of America, were oligarchs themselves, with an accumulated wealth thousands of times of that of their constituents. The core principles within that document enshrined white supremacy, human bondage and the absolute protection of capital as the law of the land. We now live a caricature of that document that is being played out as a performative struggle between two parties who share those core principles and jockey for power with little regard for our collective welfare, those “checks and balances,” the “separation of church and state,” and all the other lofty ideals that were window dressing for the building of an economy on the backs of stolen labor were never really enforced and have always been inconsistent with the concept of American Exceptionalism baked into a document intended to protect the capital of the ruling class at the expense of the indigenous people, the poor, the working class and a stolen black population.

The floundering fathers have just evolved into the robber barons, then the bourgeoisie and industrialists, and now the oligarchs. Trump is only going further down the spectrum of fleecing the American people and inviting oligarchs to openly infiltrate our governmental agencies, the result of which will be the continued upwards redistribution of wealth that has occurred under every president since Reagan. Liberalism mirrors Trumpism in its prioritization of socially divisive virtue signaling over intellectualism, historical context, sound public policy and transparency, creating an echo chamber that is purposefully insulated from the day-to-day struggles of the average American. Which is why Democrats are completely impotent in their “fight” against Trump—they are so bent on protecting the conjured demons of the identity politics driven by the managerial class that they have become purely reactionary. For all the talk comparing Trump with Hitler, Hakeem Jeffries now shrugs and rationalizes "They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It's their government." Seventy million-dollar man Chuck Schumer capitulates "We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights." Railway workers take note.

This brand of finger-to-the-wind, throw anyone under the bus political expediency is manifest in an appearance by Obama/Clinton campaign manager now Democratic Party consultant David Plouffe on the neoliberal party propaganda podcast Pod Save America. Plouffe was asked why Democrats didn’t fight back against a viral Trump campaign ad that stated “Harris is for them/they, Trump is for US.” His answer was that “It’s very easy these days to understand who has experienced an ad, so we were feeding a lot of digital ads to people who might have saw that spot. But at the end of the day, we were spending a lot of time with voters in these battleground states both quantitatively and quantitatively, and this trans ad was not driving votes.” If the test-marketing shows it’s not an electoral issue, the managerial class does not care. If Gaza is the intersectional issue of our time, exposing the dual loyalty in our political system imposed by lobbying and religion while proving how that inverted loyalty drives xenophobia, inequality, dehumanization, cancer capitalism and social division, then liberal media and the Democratic base that supposedly cares about racism, abortion rights and LGBTQ issues should have been challenging the party instead of reinforcing the integrity of its bubble.

There is a sense of poetic justice in a party that has reduced politics to consultant-driven sorcery, conjuring culture wars dog-whistles and inconsequential macroeconomic indicators, being defeated by their own misdirected avarice. Their core tenets of right-wing Zionism and DEI culture wars are mirror images of Trump’s right-wing Christian fascism and his DEI culture wars. They refuse to fight the private equity that is transforming our public institutions into subscription services while they double-down on their loyalty to Israel and the donors, subsidizing wars of choice and all manner of legislation in open defiance of the public interest. They are supported in their distraction of destruction by “progressive” media outlets like MNSBC, Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Pod Save America and Micheal Moore who continue to reinforce liberal delusional thinking, neutering the few authentic progressive voices who push back against the managerial state’s scolding of the working class for not complying with their culture wars bludgeoning. In their privileged economic status and insulation from the ravages that dual loyalty imparts on all of us, the political and pundit class must be working for the right people. It’s just so painfully obvious that those people are, as the Trump campaign ad accurately pointed out, not us.

Democrats are livid at progressives like me who would suggest their center-right turned right-wing politicking has not been effective and that they need to stand up for systemic change in order to stop Trump’s Christian fascist movement. Those of us who remain grounded in reality need to continue to expose both parties for the dual loyalty traitors that they are in all public spaces and forums. They must not only be humiliated, but in some manner made to feel the pain they have inflicted upon innocents around the globe and here at home. They are too comfortable. Too secure in their arrogance that they are protected from the imminent fall of the empire and too set in their cycle of electoral chicanery and lobbyist luxuriating to care about anything but their “messaging.” We have to do whatever is necessary to assure they get our message that our loyalty is to one another and not to them. Those of us left who have not been lulled into the cult of partisanship must coalesce as the opposition party, in agreement at the very least that neither of these dual loyalty political parties is willing to stand up for our actual collective needs, which are the opposite of massacring innocents overseas, supplying authoritarian leaders with weapons, weakening a Putin who can’t even take over 20% of Ukraine, sabotaging the Nordstream Pipeline, and privatizing virtually all of our public institutions and resources. Seek out accurate non-partisan information sources of information and use that information to disrupt the pundits Substack, social media and Youtube channels. Send letters and comments to corporate newsmedia with verifiable refutations of their propaganda, raising awareness that there are indeed some of us whose minds have not yet been snatched by the delusion that centrism, the middle-ground that lies between Christian oligarchal fascists and Zionist corporate fascists, is the ideology that will save us.

The bipartisan effort to whittle away with union membership has left us with a mere 11% of the workforce in unions, 6% of which are federal unions which are being further dismantled by Trump. Working class solidarity is the key to fighting the ruling class sociopaths who use deindustrialization, AI and privatization to diminish the power of organized labor.

If the proper diagnosis is delusion wrought by the deception inherent in dual loyalty, the treatment is a bucket of cold water in the face of the ruling class. So that when our government is rebuilt following the Trump administration’s haphazard deconstruction its foundation will be the welfare of humanity and the planet rather than the nostalgic white supremacist reveries of cancer capitalism and infinite empire. The potential for a second enlightenment offers hope in a time of terminal ignorance in which a society blighted by interminable streaming, binging, consumption, propaganda, attention-seeking and addiction will finally be shocked out of their Pavlovian scrolling and trolling by a Great Depression, civil war or coup that affects its citizens directly. Perhaps then those who keep pretending that Democrats are going to do anything meaningful to stop Trump will finally feel the anger and sorrow that progressives have at the sight of innocents being slaughtered, tortured and raped by our “friend” Israel. The impending collapse of empire will likely see casualties but has the potential to herald the coming of a better day when we face the truth that our country, America the Beautiful, is the one that has ravaged the planet and in doing so has denied its own population the services and support necessary for a civil society. The trauma of Trump might be the saving grace in forcing Democrats and liberals, and perhaps even some Republicans, into emerging from the Twilight Zone of dual loyalty and the propaganda that entails and returning to the reality in which the rest of us exist. We must heed the words of the great thinkers of the modern era, the philosophers and activists of the Civil Rights movement, to reset our priorities and objectively evaluate the priorities of our leaders. For it is Martin Luther King Jr who foresaw our dilemma when he said “Man is forever trying to escape the realities of life. He is forever trying to make the false seem true; the evil seem good; the ugly seem beautiful; and the unjust seem just.” Out of the ashes of false democracy and the unjust and ugly liberalism that defends it rose Trumpism. Only the upending of liberal dual loyalty and its malignant delusion will save us. And perhaps recalling not what it is to be Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative, but what it is to be human.