Editor Note: This piece was drafted before the empire and its vassal state escalated into all-out war with Iran. We have kept the language the same. For more info on our analysis and position on that subject, see our article, “TURN THE WORLD WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR”.

On February 24, 2026, the goblin-king of the high petty bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the settler labor aristocracy took the podium in the heart of the Burgerreich to deliver his paean to US military and economic power. Amidst what has become an all–too–typical celebration of US empire, the chief executive officer of the imperialist plunder machine delivered a few remarks that we should pay attention to. Yes, his rambling, often unfocused speech was full of little misrepresentations and outright lies,¹ but more importantly, it was filled with signals about class policy.

We have to remember the intended audience for big events like this. It’s televised and scrutinized by the politically active members of the US labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie and sometimes analyzed by the ruling class of other countries for signs about presidential plans.² This isn’t the imperialist bourgeoisie talking to itself; this is the executive branch of government setting out its bait for the masses of labor aristocrats. We have to keep that in mind when assessing the truth of the regime’s claims. This isn’t a board meeting, but rather an advertising campaign.

So what did the Burgher King say?

He was less combative in defense of ICE and CBP than he has been in the past – in fact, he didn’t mention any DHS agency by name. This reflects the government’s awareness that the federal occupation of Minnesota is deeply unpopular. Trump’s regime has been widely unpopular with the middle and lower petty bourgeoisie, but it can only continue its course with support from the labor aristocracy and upper petty bourgeois elements.³ Trump himself must be seen to bridge the gap between the ruling class and the reactionary labor aristocracy in order for the right-fascist coalition to maintain its integrity. 

The speech was peppered with shout outs to members of the US imperialist armed forces,⁴ and “victims” of immigrants as well as a handful of labor aristocrats who, thanks to the Burgher King, have finally managed to become landed property owners and fulfill the American Dream of owning a plot of land. Kissing the dirty boots of this sovereign, every parasite can be a franchisee – to every roach, a toy with their meal. 

Yes, Trump also thanked some members of the ruling capitalist class by name (Michael and Susan Dell and Brad Gerstner) while at the same time sounding the false populist drum of the Stop Insider Trading Act.⁵ The goal of this rhetorical move, of course, is to contrast the “good” ruling class (capitalists) with the “bad” ruling class (politicians) while obscuring the real relation between them, that members of Congress are the servants of the capitalist class.

By far the bulk of the speech was devoted to nativist fear mongering about immigrants. It also included naked threats issued to Iran, demanding the Iranian state surrender its nuclear weapons program or suffer an invasion.⁶ There was a token reference to the policy of trans genocide (inverted, of course, as “saving” children). In its entirety, the speech was clearly aimed at stoking the traditional US middle-class militarism and strengthening the regime’s basis among the labor aristocrats they have been alienating with their Minneapolis operation. The Burgher King attempted to negotiate this while downplaying the fault-line he has opened with the US vassals in NATO.⁷

The regime’s rhetorical commitment to the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie remains loud and steadfast. Trump referred to: a state college savings program for children designed to increase class mobility, a federal pension program for private employees to maintain government savings accounts and putting them on the federal dole,⁸ his success in keeping mortgage rates down to make housing affordable, and keeping property rates high for the value of housing and land to remain a viable path for investment and class ascension to the labor aristocrats.

In the wings, the imperialist bourgeoisie are slavering for war in Iran, occupation of Venezuela, and increased pressure on the US working class.⁹ The main media outlets, which deliver news to the vast majority of the US population, have neither attacked nor defended the speech except to note where it was factually inaccurate. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Democratic “opposition,” stood and applauded when the Burgher King called for war in the Middle East.

As long as the labor aristocracy stands by the side of the big imperialists, the revolutionary situation will never mature fully. There is an opportunity, here and now, to break this connection. As the Trump regime moves into territory ever-more-fervently desired by the big bourgeoisie, our window for the wedge grows wider. We must break the complacency of the labor aristocrats away from the imperial bourgeoisie; the only way to do that is to build up the revolutionary consciousness and organizational level of the real proletariat and force the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie into a reckoning with its material complicity with the terror-regime of Washington.

1. The rate of inflation has been 3% and 2.8% for the first two months of this year, not “the lowest level in more than five years,” even if you take just the CPI. ︎
2. Nielsen estimates that 36.6 million people viewed the SOTU address and 70.7% of those viewers were 55 or older. https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2026/32-6-million-watch-2026-state-of-the-union-address/ ︎
3. The MAGA approach has been to try to fuse the labor aristocracy (the middle and upper ranks of the imperialist proletariat) with the high petty bourgeoisie. ︎
4. Buddy Taggart, a WWII soldier; Sarah Beckstrom, the West Virginia National Guardsman who was killed in DC; Andrew Wolfe, another Guardsman; Eric Slover, one of the Special Forces animals who kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela; 10 other unnamed special forces dogs; and navy murderer Royce Williams, who fought against the self-determination of the Koreans in Korea and the Vietnamese in Viet Nam. ︎
5. He named Nancy Pelosi by name as a corrupt politician. ︎
6. “[T]hey were warned… yet they continue starting [the program] over…. We are in negotiations with them…. But we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘we will never have a nuclear weapon.’” ︎
7. See, for instance, “Too late, Trump envoys try to reassure Europe,” in The Economist. ︎
8. Direct payments to the labor aristocrats for their loyalty! ︎
9. The Wall Street Journal recently published the articles “Violent Militias Stand Between the US and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches,” “Trump Hails an Economic Turnaround Many Voters Don’t See,” and “America’s Bills Will Come Due.” ︎

In the weeks leading up to the confrontation, Venezuela armed its entire working class, distributing guns and calling up its militias to repel a threatened US invasion. On January 3, US war planes bombed the capital of Caracas. Shortly thereafter, clown-president Trump announced on his personal social media app that President Maduro and his wife were kidnapped and removed from the country.

This flagrant violation of international law comes just days after US vassal-state, israel, announced its diplomatic recognition of a breakaway region of the Republic of Somalia as “Somaliland,” the only country to do so since its split from Somalia in 1991. This has been trumpeted in imperial mouthpieces like The Telegraph, applauding genocidaire Netanyahu for a “tactical masterstroke” and likening this breach of international law to a “powerful riposte to the West’s recognition of Palestine.”

This is, of course, the way the US empire and its crony-states have always  handled themselves on the world stage: the bullies of the international community, using bombs and terror to impose their will on the peripheral countries and ensure their continued compliance with the “international order” — or, in other words, with the interests of American capital.

In the days following the US invasion of Caracas, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was sworn into office by Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice as acting-president. Trump and his cronies have already begun to lick their chops and demand the re-entry of American capital into Venezuela to seize the country’s oil-wealth, but the Bolivarian Revolution is not beaten yet. The colectivos and workers’ militias continue to patrol the streets and seize pro-American agents on the ground. Colombia’s ELN has pledged to resist Yankee imperialism in Venezuela with armed force, and Cuba has promised to do the same.

Trump’s meeting with Yankee oil executives in Washington this week wasn’t promising for the aging imperialist mouthpiece. The big oil firms expressed their disinterest in investing in Venezuelan production because of its “commercial frameworks, legal system, and hydrocarbon laws” in the words of Exxon CEO Darren Woods. However, the oil ghouls did hold out a path for Trump to win their investment in his geopolitical play: breaking the Bolivarian Revolution.

He won’t find it easy. We must make it even harder by organizing real friction here in the imperialist center and physically opposing government policy with material opposition. As always, the predicate to that opposition must be the establishment of real organizations capable of formulating strategy and tactics and analyzing the results. We have half a century of examples of mindless “action” to warn us of the danger of unorganized opposition. Indeed, the Red Clarion just published “A Structureless Movement,” in which solidarity actions taken in an unorganized fashion in the Pacific Northwest were analyzed and the same conclusion drawn. We urge all readers who do not have a robust, Marxist local organization to use this as an opportunity to establish one. Agitate around the Bolivarian Revolution and the possibility of increasing imperialist friction through action; draw in potential members, educate them, and then act.

It falls to us. No one is coming to do the hard work of organizing for us, and we cannot rely on any of the organizations we have inherited. We have an obligation, not only to act, but to organize!

At this point, we must take stock of the situation. We must ask ourselves what is going on, and we must be prepared to understand the motivations of the Trump regime in the context of an overall strategy that has been pursued by the ruling class for at least twenty years. In June of 2000, local US police departments had some 441,000 officers, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Local Police Departments 2000.” As of 2024, there are now 808,700 local police officers across the US, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The growth of the domestic Phoenix Program (see the Clarion article, “State of Control”), “cop cities,” and the surge of police budgets ($65.7 billion in 2000, $176 billion in 2024 according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis) indicates something is going on.

The federalization of law enforcement isn’t a one-off, and it’s not an accident. The domestic Phoenix Program was consolidated under Bush; Trump’s first term saw the widespread deployment of the National Guard to protect the regime from domestic rebellions in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy “places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow,” according to Paul McLeary and Daniel Lippman at Politico.

The official targets of the D.C. occupation — ie those who are being arrested — are the undocumented immigrant population and young New Afrikan men. Nearly half of the arrested are immigrants lacking citizenship. For New Afrikans in D.C., the occupation is an intensification of the same criminalization they always experience from the white oppressor nation. Young Black men have been the most criminalized national sub-group in virtually every U.S. city since the partial victory of emancipation exchanged the New Afrikan experience from outright enslavement for Jim Crow Terror and genocidal mass incarceration. It starts with a pretextual stop over minor offenses which whites are rarely if ever stopped for. Traffic violations, alcohol containers, marijuana smoke: these are some of the crimes New Afrikans were arrested for during the August 2025 occupation. There is also the continuous criminalization of New Afrikan gun ownership: 1 in 4 of the arrests involving federal goons included gun charges. 

By criminalizing entire blocks, the occupation targets the “minority” nations in the city as a collective. Thanks to the supreme court, ICE agents are now legally permitted to use “race” as a factor in detaining suspected immigrants. This was ICE practice since the agency’s inception, but discriminatory stops are now ratified by the highest court in the Empire. 

Over 80% of D.C. residents are against the occupation; thousands are protesting, but marching in the street will not dissuade those with machine guns and a federal mandate. Heckling fascists with “Hanoi Hannah” audio (“your government lies to you, GI”) will not convince them to drop the gun when there is no militant movement to back it up.  

The federal occupation of major US cities is a stress test for future deployments. The ruling clique in the capitalist class is intent on normalizing ever-escalating installations of occupying troops within the Black national territories and Black majority cities of the United States. We can only anticipate why: the eventual liquidation of the captive Black and Indigenous labor force and the pursuit of a “final solution” to the domestic danger to the ruling class these captive, subject nations represent.

Integration as a ruling class strategy in a white-dominated settler colony simply cannot survive economic downturns. Integration in the U.S. is a top-down process through which portions of the oppressed nations are brought into that segment of workers who gain the most material benefits from imperialism. This privileged class of workers is often referred to as the labor aristocracy. As a bloc, this group is more likely to align with imperial interests, against the interests of the global proletariat. However, long before there is a capitalist crisis brutal enough to shake white people out of their traditional class alliance, the labor aristocracy closes its ranks in protection of white class interests. Analyzing past recessions confirms this tendency; without exception, every economic “recovery” since WWII is defined by an increase in the employment gap between “minority” and white workers.¹

Rather than uplifting the oppressed nations as a whole into the labor aristocracy, integration promotes a few lucky individuals while placing more and more “minorities” outside the labor pool. The Empire’s own unemployment statistics are a severe underestimation of “minority” unemployment; they have been cooking the books since at least the 1980s. Their unemployment statistics do not account for those on public assistance or those in prison. Thus, the unemployment gap between “minorities” and whites is even larger than they are willing to admit.  

As communists, we recognize the intrinsic cycle of capitalist growth and crisis. Growth periods increase wealth disparities, concentrating capital into fewer and fewer hands, while crisis periods throw ever more people out of the labor pool. But there is something different about the next impending capitalist crisis in the west. Since WWII, or even WWI, the U.S. has been the dominating imperialist power; two World Wars, and especially the decades after WWII, captured unprecedented degrees of market and military dominance for the U.S. empire. While this wealth is not distributed equally, it does have an effect of ideologically connecting the oppressed internal nations with their oppressors. Yes, even “minorities” in the U.S. benefit from imperialism to a significant degree. Comparing “minority” wages in the Empire to wages from the “third world” confirms at least a short-term shared interest in imperialism. But there are limitations and exceptions to this generalized idea. For example, the material conditions on many Indigenous reservations are worse than in some areas of the periphery. Settler Communists should focus on strategies that can provide a support role to liberation movements originating from oppressed pockets, which are also present in the agricultural fields and the occupied inner cities. 

The factor that separates the coming recession is the same one that influenced the 2025 National Defense Strategy: the U.S.’ grip over worldwide imperialism is losing strength. The aircraft carriers and bombers are not as effective as 20-30 years ago. They will continue to murder millions of people, but the oppressed nations now have countermeasures of their own. “A $1,000 dollar drone can take out a $100 million dollar jet.” This could be a positive development for the Eastern hemisphere, but a violent development for Latin America and the oppressed internal nations in the U.S. Empire. At the time of this writing, the U.S. military is staring down Venezuela in the Caribbean, threatening an imperialist invasion to secure the largest oil reserves in the world. The occupied nation of Puerto Rico serves as their forward operating base, reducing the island and its inhabitants into an unsinkable aircraft carrier. 

Their goal is genocide: the ultimate criminalization of the oppressed. It is the last, downward step on the ladder into white supremacist Hell on Earth, defined by work-extermination camps overseen by demonic security forces. If genocide is the last qualitative stage, occupation and ethnic cleansing are the precedents. To be clear, these processes of white supremacy have always been in motion to some degree since the arrival of white settlers on Turtle Island. The U.S. itself formed on the basis of genocide, brought into being over the bodies of the Indigenous Nations and the death-labor of slaves from Afrika. For New Afrikans, slavery gave way to ethnic cleansing. The slaves were “freed” by their northern white oppressors, only to be left exposed to the white supremacist Jim Crow Terror. What bourgeois history refers to as the “great migration” of New Afrikans from the south to northern cities was really ethnic cleansing through lynching and outright exclusion from the labor pool. Today, this ethnic cleansing has flipped on its head, with New Afrikans now being pushed out of the cities through gentrification. Trump’s occupation will only quicken the rate of this ethnic cleansing (dubbed the “great remigration”). How embarrassing it is that the major “communist” parties continue to prioritize “worker unity” in the face of open white supremacy.  

We should expect military occupations to spread across all major cities in the U.S. over the coming months and years. Temporary deployments will give way to a permanent, localized occupation force in charge of brutalizing the “minority” nations. Two weeks into the D.C. occupation, Trump signed an executive order directing the pentagon to create a “rapid response” network of national guard to crush incipient uprisings in the cities. It is likely that the national guard will not be up to the task; they are committed to the Empire, but lack the ideological fervor to carry out the full white supremacist campaign. Instead, the mantle will pass to local white supremacist militias and those security forces showing commitment to the white supremacist project. This article makes use of several statistics and historical references; the conclusion of all of them is that national oppression is the principal contradiction on Turtle Island. National liberation of the oppressed internal nations is therefore the correct organizing line. Remember the perennial words of Comrade George Jackson when taking a peek at what the future will resemble: 

“We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A. to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.” 

Within our Lifetime! Organize, or lose. 

1.  MIM (Prisons), Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary Nationalism, page 42 ︎

However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

The plan has ignited an uproar among liberal media outlets. In an analysis piece, CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson called the proposed ban “a crackdown on academic freedom”, while the New York Times ran an opinion column by Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” about Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with the university. Neither the prim moralizing nor the attempted psychoanalysis understands the true nature of the Trump administration’s decree. The move is just another instance of squabbling among factions of the coalition running the United States government.

The Republican wing of the U.S. government believes (or at least claims to believe) that all non-U.S. citizens are leeches on U.S. society and must be rooted out and removed. In a remarkable show of obviously transparent projection, Republicans consider the very presence of non-citizens in United States society to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus, they view the removal of such “undesirables” as a necessary inoculation against the chaos of a world gone mad.

Harvard and other elite universities have long been bastions and promulgators of United States soft power. The elite university boasts the scion of power holders from around the world among its alumni and student body, as well as the best and brightest students from around the world, incorporating the fruits of their labor into the U.S. empire and depriving so-called “developing” countries from researchers and innovators of the future. While on campus, students rub shoulders with the next generation of U.S. business leaders, intelligence officers, media executives, and politicians. These relationships further the United States’ expansion into every nook and cranny of the planet.

Massive resource extraction deals and colossal concessions, counterrevolutions and covert operations, the wholesale mortgaging of the future of entire nations in the interests of United States capital — the bonds formed between ruling class members at universities for the privileged run like veins throughout the capitalist world, sending blood money back to the heart of empire.

The revocation of the privilege of elite education for the foreign bourgeoisies will shake networks of power that keep capitalism going. Cooperation across international borders is seen as weakness by chauvinistic, vapid U.S. politicians, who seek a greater consolidation and concentration of power among themselves and their allies, even at the expense of alienating the very facilitators of the imperial riches and success they enjoy. Members of ruling classes in the periphery judge strength among themselves by the level and quality of their connection to foreign capital and imperial power, and even a nonessential change in the dialectic of imperial oppression will prove to be a severe shock to them.

Base infighting for power is nothing but a flailing attempt by the ruling class to preserve a past that is slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. They are losing control, and while they may not foresee the tailspin into which they are headed, the brutish, panicked actions undertaken by the Trump regime should not be seen as anything other than desperation. The ruling class’s own greed is knocking out the foundations of the very state that provides them with the power they crave. 

Donald Trump is promising deportation on a mass scale not seen since the Eisenhower administration. Right on cue, liberals have opened their tired old playbook and started to bleat on about “the xenophobia of Trump,” failing to understand that the current hostility being shown to undocumented immigrants is neither unique to this president nor to this particular time in U.S. history. The ruling class provoking animosity toward a group defined as “other” dates back even further than the founding of the republic itself, and serves a vital purpose in maintaining unity among the oppressor classes. 

The Settler and the Indigenous

Since the arrival of the first Europeans to what is now the United States, settler colonists have used any and every excuse to expand their territory and to pillage and plunder, either by direct military conquest, lying, cheating, or a terrible combination of all three. In search of land and riches, colonists invaded the North American continent and found seemingly endless land that, if put to European methods of cultivation, could yield enormous profits. The settlers expanded out from original landing sites like a virus, squatting on “claims” (sometimes) made in the name of the king and paying no heed to those who lived there. The violent pushback visited upon the settlers by Indigenous groups was given by the settlers as justificatory evidence not only for increased settler war against native populations (and subsequent settler expansion), but for the categorization of the native by settlers as a racially subaltern group. A Declaration of the state of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia categorizes Indigenous people of the region as “beasts,” “treacherous,” and, crucially, “wicked Infidels,” among other epithets. Englishmen of the Virginia Company saw the Indigenous as people in need of a Protestant salvation, people who lacked the moral character necessary to obtain the individual prosperity so coveted by the settler, and thus in need of “civilizing” — which in practice meant subservience and a tranquil acceptance of expulsion and extermination. The never-ending thirst for land led to even more ousting of the Indigenous — the “other” — clearing the way for more expansion, exploitation and murder by the settlers.

Bacon’s Rebellion is an early example of European unity against the Indigenous “threat” — a threat wholly instigated by settlers appropriating Indigenous territory. Nathaniel Bacon — a white landowner — instigated the rebellion as a response to his exclusion from the inner circle of the Virginia plantocracy. He leaned on both the settlers’ desire to expand their holdings and their fear of the Indigenous people fighting against the occupation of their land to whip the disenfranchised among them into a frenzy. The rebel mob was a multiracial coalition, and Bacon promised instant freedom to any enslaved or indentured laborer that joined his cause. While Bacon and his ragtag regiments managed to take Jamestown and burn it to the ground, the arrival of 1,000 English soldiers under the command of Herbert Jeffreys pushed the rebels to a hasty acquiescence. In an attempt to smooth things over, Jeffreys pardoned the insurrectionists and agreed to a treaty with the local Indigenous peoples. 

But the plantocracy was not so quick to forget their close call with revolution. Watching enslaved Black laborers march side-by-side with poor whites shook the planters to their very core, and as a result Virginia society underwent a significant restructuring. In 1705 the Virginia government passed an act reinstating the headright system first enacted in the Great Charter. Each free white settler was now guaranteed 50 acres of land to be exploited for their own use, and as the planter class refused to subdivide their own enormous holdings, the land was thus expropriated from Indigenous people. Tribes were relocated again and again to make room for the crushing hordes of white hopefuls desperate to get their grubby hands in the tobacco business. The burgeoning mob of settlers slashed, burned, scarred and destroyed land that for millennia had been carefully managed to provide everything necessary for survival and happiness. Blind greed for hogsheads full of stinking green narcotic profit pushed the Indigenous farther and farther away from the places they had called home as far back as they could remember, as the land itself was bent to suit the will of colonial capitalism.  

The Settler and the Enslaved

To kidnap someone — to take them to a ship in chains, manacle them naked below decks for almost the entirety of a three-month voyage and, upon arrival to port, to sell them at auction to the highest bidder — requires a most severe differentiation between oneself and those forced into enslavement. To purchase said human beings at auction — to transport them to one’s home or place of work, incorporate them into a building crew, set them to toil as a domestic servant or install them in any other position as may exist in the settler’s business concerns, and work them until they die — likewise requires an extraordinary rationalization. Thus Africans, captured, sold and sent — many to remote concentration camps isolated from most of society — and given a life sentence of work without having committed a crime, had to be considered not only as property, as cargo, as a price, as a means to wealth, but to be somehow deserving of said treatment. 

But the settlers’ collective Christian conscience  —  so worked upon by Calvin, Locke, and eventually by the brothers Wesley — pricked them yet, and the consequences of their sins could not help but be made clear to them. The Stono Revolt, the Maroon Wars in Jamaica, the panics in New York City in the 1740’s all fired a (well-founded) fear both in slave-owning and non-slave-owning settler whites of a mass slave revolt. Dread hung in the air of every colonial port, town and plantation, and while settlers were able to make the connection (obvious as it was) between slave revolts and the whippings, rapes, and genocide that scarred the life and conditions of enslaved Africans in the British Atlantic colonies, others were unwilling or unable to do so. Just as settlers blamed the consequences of their violent expansion into native territory on the Indigenous themselves, so also they put the consequences brought about by their countless abuses, their innumerable crimes against both their fellow man and the God they claimed to follow, upon the Africans themselves.

The wages of their sins having been made manifest, the Christian slaveholders launched a desperate attempt to postpone their payment. The settlers convinced themselves that the victims of their violent enterprise were in fact the instigators of their own misfortune, thus blaming the enslaved for the deeds of the enslavers. In the settler’s mind, the African was born to follow orders from the white man, and failure to do so constituted a break with the natural order, characterized as “insolence” from an “inferior” race. So slave codes were tightened, punishments became more severe, and even free Africans fell under suspicion from terrified settlers. As the crackdowns continued, so too did slave revolts, which augmented panic among whites to a hysterical pitch. The latter reached a crescendo in 1775 with Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation that all slaves in the colony of Virginia that aided the Crown during the colonial rebellion would be liberated. The settlers howled, wailed, and eventually won their war with the help of France and Spain. But the colonists — now “free men,” citizens of a country of their own making, did not see fit to resolve the issue that provoked so much fear throughout the former colonies. 

The vaunted founding fathers wrote screeds about freedom and man’s right to seek his own happiness, but when it came to the men and women they enslaved, the great men dithered, hemmed and hawed, and excreted the most pitiful, paltry excuses imaginable. They stammered about inconceivably abstract futures, far, far removed from their own time, when the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery would be banned or would have disappeared of its own right. Jefferson and Madison and all the rest of the hypocritical lot spoke of liberty while raping and whipping the enslaved on their own plantations; they pontificated on supposedly universal human rights but couldn’t see their way to sacrificing even a fraction of their own material comfort that others might have the “freedom” about which they blathered on so incessantly. So Stono gave way to Gabriel’s Rebellion, and Nat Turner’s Revolt, and eventually a bloody civil war, all while settlers still considered the enslaved Africans “insolent” and lazy. In the settlers’ minds the Africans still embodied all the faults and vices of the settlers themselves. 

The Settler and the Undocumented Immigrant

The turn of the 20th century marked the so-called “closing” of the frontier, as settlers proclaimed a supposed “end” to the centuries-long extermination campaign visited upon the Indigenous peoples. As the domestic frontier closed, the international frontier opened, and U.S. soldiers were shipped to foreign lands, to oppress and exploit, to force other peoples, societies, and economies to bend the knee to the interests of U.S. capital. Sons of white Southern sharecroppers mingled with the sons of white Northern shopkeepers, and they were led by officers hailing from families of industrial capitalists, factory supervisors, and monied planter families. American troops, united in their racial identity, plundered the vaults of Port-au-Prince, toppled the government in Santo Domingo, and partook in atrocities that were hauntingly familiar to those their forebears committed upon enslaved Africans and the Indigenous. Massacres, wanton executions, violations and an extravagance of bloodshed followed in the wake of the U.S. military wherever it went. Wholesale looting ensured that factories back home, kept churning by a never-ending flow of cheap immigrant labor from Asia and Europe, never ran out of raw material. International plunder ensured astronomically high profit rates for an all-American oligarchic capitalist class. 

This brutal, rabid expansion continued throughout the 20th century, picking up steam in the 1950s with the advent of the Cold War. A restructured world in the process of jettisoning the old boots-on-the-ground European colonialist template provided a wealth of new opportunities for the capitalist kingpin country. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Angola, Burkina Faso, Yemen, Indonesia, and both sides of the Korean peninsula are only some of the most notable manifestations of the United States’ unquenchable thirst for accumulation.

But reckless growth across the globe has come with a price. The constant upheaval and instability that follows in the wake of imperial capitalist expansion has resulted in a tsunami of people shut out of any hope of achieving prosperity in their home countries by whatever flavor of capitalist brutality is local to them. The tentacles of American hegemony are long and deeply rooted, so migrants have flooded northward — a frenzy of dreamers hungering for the life that was plundered from them to feed the American labor aristocracy and their oligarchic overlords. At first, the lords of American capital were all too willing to manipulate the new immigrants to their own advantage — using the immigrants’ unstable legal situation to drive salaries to pitiable lows. However, a justification was required to explain the blatantly unfair treatment received by the undocumented worker. Thus, in the same way that enslaved Africans were said to have deserved their subservience to the ruling slaveholding class, as Indigenous peoples were said to have deserved their genocide and expulsion at the hands of the ravaging settlers, the ruling class and its flunkeys assert that the immigrant that finds work due to settler unwillingness is in fact stealing jobs, that asylum seekers fleeing political instability in their home countries are in fact the cause of said instability, that those who have seen their homelands corrupted and defiled, those who have seen their hopes, dreams, loves and lives ground into the mud by the jackboot of capitalism are in fact the true corruptors and defilers of the pure American settler state. In short, the immigrant is abused and exploited simply because, to their abusers and exploiters, they are inherently inferior, and thus deserve inferior wages. When the immigrants have fulfilled their duty to the capitalist overlords, they can then be discarded, as the whole world can see now.  

However, it is here that a break with the past becomes evident. The tactic used by the ruling class when faced with a crisis of their own making — blame the oppressed for the faults of capital — has always been accompanied by a tangible benefit for a certain subset of the petit- bourgeois population (usually an exclusively white coalition). Designated members of this “in-group” could then be counted on as loyal foot soldiers in the expansion of oppression. The settler invasion of Indigenous land was not only fought to bestow more land upon the plantocracy; lower-class white settlers were also able to stake their “claim” to the newly-emptied lands, thus ensuring lebensraum for the planters themselves. African slavery resulted in a phasing-out of white indentured servitude and a host of economic and social benefits opening up to members of a newly-named “white” class. U.S. economic and hegemonic expansion has likewise resulted in a glut of well-paying job opportunities for the American settler petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy both at home and throughout the world. 

However, this most recent push to deport immigrants is missing any sort of increase in the economic position of the settler labor aristocracy or petit-bourgeoisie. While chauvinist social consciences will be eased, the capitalist or small business owner who formerly employed undocumented workers will find themselves with the same amount of work to be done, but a much smaller (and less-pliable) workforce. The reserve army of labor will shrink substantially. Another point: the current increase in profits for capitalists is being driven in large part by a mass pirating of middle class wealth within the imperial core by capitalists. Prices are skyrocketing, salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, and the smooth promises of the big bourgeoisie are evaporating like morning dew on a hot day. Even the exalted “American Dream” no longer fulfills its propagandic function, but has been reduced to a talking point for those who use it as a yardstick by which to compare all supposed economic, social, and moral failings of American settler society. In the face of capital’s imperative to grow at all costs, the strategy to manage, package, and sell that growth to the lower imperial social classes has fallen apart. 

The deportations are a feeble attempt by the settler bourgeoisie to bargain with the lower settler classes, to postpone the day of reckoning for the consequences of capital’s rapacious thirst for blood and land, its insatiable need to squeeze human beings like rags and wring out every drop of work and wealth. Eventually the bill comes due, and the more intelligent members of the capitalist class understand this. They hope to buy a little more time to increase military strength, in the hope that brute force can replace mass subornation of the white settler class as the primary impulsor for order. Heaping blame for current social ills upon undocumented immigrants and deporting them in a twisted attempt to sell the idea that the sins of capitalism are being deported along with the migrants might buy U.S. capital hegemony a little more time, but the days of glory for the majority of white American settlers are long gone, the last great capitalist plundering is on, and rifles and tanks are coming to replace the hideous amalgamation of sin-eater ritual and race-class bribery fundamental to the American settler project.

The haute bourgeoisie, i.e., the billionaire class, the big finance capitalists, have lately taken a heel turn towards transphobia, racism, and general reaction. Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos are the face of this movement. The corporate powers which make up the flesh and blood of the U.S. empire, threatened by anti-trust breakups of their monopolies, have now (in a transparent effort to kiss Trump’s ass) begun to cast off the friendly DEI mask they used to wear. Transphobia is now specifically and explicitly allowed on Facebook and its subsidiary platforms.

State after state is striking down trans protections, banning our healthcare, banning our public existence, banning speech advocating on our behalf. It is a fervent frenzy of fascistic reaction against our existence. The reactionaries, largely from the privileged middle class, call us child predators for the crime of standing up to protect trans children. They cheer when trans kids are murdered. They intend to push us back into the margins of society, out of employment, out of our apartments, to rot on the streets. They intend to murder us through homelessness, prostitution, suicide, gay bashing, imprisonment, rape. We will call this what it is: a systematic targeted campaign of extermination. This is genocide. Trans liberation activists have been warning us of this for years. 

When I chose to transition in November of 2023, I made that choice with the full conscious knowledge that this was on its way. In fact, I made that choice in part because I knew this was on the way. I have studied Marxist theory for my entire adult life, I’ve internalized its methods of dialectical and historical materialism, the methods of scientific socialism (the study of the development of human society). When I finally worked up the courage to admit to myself that I am a woman, I knew in that moment what this meant for me — transition meant discarding the privileges of the oppressor class and openly siding with the oppressed. I would no longer belong to the class of men and of cisgender people. I would be so much more vulnerable to the violence of society. I would experience hardship, suffering, perhaps death. I accept this eagerly. Trans children suffering under this regime need people like me to look up to and to advocate for them, and our history has shown us over and over that liberation only comes through struggle.

Many of us did not see this wave of transphobic reaction coming. It was unexpected and inexplicable, and so many of us are terrified. We’ve seen what they do to those who resist. We watched 15 months of live-streamed systematic industrial genocide against the Palestinians because they dared to stand up to oppression. 

But Palestinians know the truth of resistance: it is the only path for the oppressed to reclaim their humanity. They chose the path of resistance because the only alternative is deliberate submission to slow extermination. I will not submit!

What did the liberal trans rights movement bring us? Was all that effort wasted? No, it brought us consciousness. More of us are now more conscious of the conditions of our oppression than ever. Trans people are no longer a tiny minority, we are now a distinctive class. We have consciousness. We have community. We can take action.

The age of liberalism is over. The era of “trans rights” is over. The days of “tolerance,” “inclusivity,” corporate “diversity” are gone. And of course this was going to happen! We’ve been hearing all our lives “the middle class is shrinking,” and what did we expect? That cispatriarchy, our oppressors, would allow themselves to be squeezed out of their privilege alongside us? Did we expect we could remain among their ranks so long as we swore obedience to the empire, followed all the rules, obeyed and submitted? That’s exactly what we did when we lived and died in the closet, and that was so much more comfortable for them. Of course they want us to go back. And more will follow. We are only among the first to be subject to their rollback of imperial privileges. 

I refuse to go back! Moreover, I refuse to play by their rules any longer. I refuse to beg and scrape for “rights” ever again, I refuse to “debate” the merits of my existence, I refuse to allow their sense of entitlement to dictate the way I live my life and express my soul. I refuse to justify my body to their regime of death! 

It is clearer than ever that we can never attain liberation by appealing to the morality of our oppressors. The moment their comfort is threatened they’re happy to feed us to the machine of destruction that guards their lifestyle. Our struggle lies only with those who resist this global order of death. Our enemy is not merely one or another particular individual, and our enemy is not overseas! Our enemy is the system that empowers bigotry, reaction, and oppression. The system that devours the environment and humanity to feed its mindless accumulative drive. Our enemy is the international system of imperialist finance capital, with its heart in New York City and what passes for its brain in Washington D.C. Our liberation can only be attained by its overthrow! Our friends are all those who stand against the imperialist system, our enemies are all those who stand with it. 

If our friends don’t yet see us as their friends, it is because we have yet to build that relationship of mutual trust and support. 

The people of Palestine have been fighting and dying for their liberation for a century, and today they stand closer than ever to attaining it. The whole might of the empire and its international vassal states rained down on them for 15 months and they stood and fought and won. And the imperialists tell us “they hate queers” as if they’ve ever had a chance to even think on the question. They hate those who murder them, and they love those who stand with them. They have no time to give a damn about your gender. If any of them believe we’re worthless it’s because we are, because we’ve stood and watched for a hundred years while their land has been stolen and their children murdered. 

If you care about Queer people, you care about people all over the world who are oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Our failure to stand up for their interests has long allowed the left wing of capital to use mistreatment of our siblings overseas to justify regime change operations, sanctions pressure, and other hostile actions to violate national sovereignty. The right wing of capital has used this to claim that “gender ideology” is a tool of imperialism. This is how they divide and conquer us.

Put an end to it! Supporters of U.S. imperialism, american/canadian nationalism, NATO, zionism, and “israel” have no place in the Queer community! Participants in these institutions have no place with us, we stand for all human rights or we stand for none!

Today the heartland of the colonial system that began in Europe and which birthed the monstrosity of “israel” is the United States of America. The U.S. empire’s continuous ongoing genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this continent served as the blueprint not only for the establishment and expansion of “israel,” but for Hitler’s war of annihilation against Jews and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Hitler’s rabid opposition to Communism in turn paved the way for the U.S. empire’s so-called “Cold War” against Communism, in which it butchered millions upon millions of Natives of Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, West Asia, the African continent, and everywhere else the human struggle for community, cooperation, and liberation — in a word, Communism — stood up against the inhumanity of Capital. 

Did you know many of the Indigenous peoples of this land did not have gendered pronouns at all in their languages before colonization? They never had a reason to care. Colonists care because they want to enslave half of us to the other half to exploit us for our reproductive labor. It was colonists who imposed “gender ideology” on us, and it is those same colonists who today are tearing down our reproductive healthcare and our gender-affirming care. The end of capitalism requires the end of colonization. 

Trans liberation requires Landback.

You know the 2028 election doesn’t hold anything positive in store for us. The Democrats don’t give a damn if we live or die, and if it gets them more money from their rich donors they’ll happily kill us themselves. The system is against us, so we must be against it! 

The movement is growing: 2024 saw the establishment of the international All-Empire Worker’s League, which aims to build the conditions for international unity among all the oppressed, towards the forging of a revolutionary Party capable of going on the offensive to at last smash this system. The movement for liberation needs you just as urgently as you need it. Our biosphere is collapsing under the weight of the imperialist system. The people in this empire are beginning to rise up to meet this challenge, and standing at the vanguard of the movement are trans and other Queer people following the leadership of the nationally oppressed.

Every empire in history thought it would last forever, until it didn’t. We all feel the collapse of this empire in our bones.

It is with that that we must remember, they set the terms of this conflict: Transition or death!

We say in response: Communism will win!

Nonetheless, liberals are broadly treating the verdict announcement as a holiday — practically christened by the fact that it’s already been used as cover for imperialist war crimes, as the U.S. and U.K. empires bombed the Yemeni capital Sanaa during the same news cycle, hiding in the shadow of the verdict, and killing at least 16 and wounding 30, with more expected to die from critical condition. The capitalist mass media is flooded with inane updates on all things Trump, with virtually all social media sites replacing trending topics of Rafah, Palestine, Sudan, or Yemen (if they were ever even trending) with “TRUMP IS GUILTY” or “TRUMP IS NOT GUILTY.” Both sides have committed to the belief that whether Trump was found guilty or not, whether this represents an overdue triumph of justice, or a cynical sham, the trial and its consequences are very important. 

But we can’t accept this at face value. The question is: is this true? Will this alter the course of life for the millions of working class people within this country, the millions of colonized and imprisoned trapped in this prisonhouse of nations, and the billions more held at gunpoint by the same empire where such absurd soap operas play out? The answer is, of course, no.

What is this trial? It is the spillover of a protracted fight between factions in the ruling class. It is the brawl in the country’s high-end country club that has just happened to spill out onto the street. Yes, they often bicker over the little details of which method to use to maintain their power. What’s different about yesterday’s display? Merely that they’re using the very public machinery of the state, rather than backroom double-dealing. The faction of our enemy that currently holds power is the side that emphasizes decorum and state legitimacy, and is excited to give Trump his slap on the wrist and claim it as a symbolic victory. Extra emphasis on symbolic, as Justice Juan Merchan, the judge in charge of Trump’s sentence, has already admitted he won’t deliver any sentence that could impact the former president’s ability to run a campaign, like travel bans, house arrest, or a prison sentence. It’s more likely that Trump will receive a fine (the maximum amount he could be charged with is $170,000, or $5,000 for each charge) and be barred from voting for himself — though even that remains to be seen. 

The figurehead of the “Democratic” faction, Joe Biden, is likely to hammer the fact that his opponent is a “criminal” in the upcoming election. Yes, one becomes a criminal for embarrassing the “sanctity” of this country by financially silencing a porn star, but the gleeful commission of genocide goes unpunished by bourgeois law. That makes sense, as it is only the latter that is the sworn duty of all true presidents of this country. 

With all this in mind, what do we do? Ignore the pageantry of our enemies. Focus all attention and energy on what really matters. Condemn and organize against the imperialist war machine that such pointless noise exists to distract us from. Fortify the ranks of the student movement this summer, join it to the growing militant labor movement, form organizations of community awareness and education, and know now and forever that our salvation will not be won through an election between two fascists. 

Fight real battles. 

Seize real justice.  

Representative Schiff has been at the head of Democratic lawfare efforts against the Republicans, which marked him as a target of the extreme right wing of the Republican party. He took charge of the 2020 Senate trial of Trump and also served as a long-time member of the dreaded House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the actions of the executive-branch intelligence agencies like the CIA, Defense Intelligence, FBI, and Homeland Security. It also has authority over the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State.

Schiff became a proponent of lawfare — the use of legal proceedings to wage political warfare on an opponent’s party — in 2018 with his “Open Letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” This was essentially a love letter to the FBI from Schiff, who had started his political career as a prosecuting attorney, a cop in a suit.

There is a narrow difference between the normal operation of the U.S. state regarding political corruption and the more aggressive lawfare that has been increasingly carried out by both parties since 2016. Only in periods of extreme internal dispute have the courts and intelligence services been used by one party against another. Examples of this escalation include Watergate and the Clinton impeachment. More and more routinely, on a more and more regular basis, both parties have begun using legal procedures to attack their ruling class opponents directly.

Schiff may have begun this last round of lawfare by opposing the Trump regime, but he now faces the sharp edge of the sword his party drew. The far-right clique in the GOP that has governed the party for the past six years brought a motion to censure Schiff; this resolution held that he should be fined $16 million if it’s determined he “lied, made misrepresentations, and abused sensitive information.” Although the resolution was voted down on Wednesday, it signals an increasingly sharp battle within the legal structures of the U.S. Empire. The ruling GOP clique alleged that he “purposefully deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people” and “used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars.”

Schiff warned that the motion represents a “clear attack on our constitutional system of checks and balances.” Although it’s usually a mistake to lend credence to the words of any bourgeois politician, Schiff is waving the flag in warning because he knows the Democrats are in danger of being outflanked. Their devotion to process and norms, to playing “within the rules” of the bourgeois republic laid down by the slave owning founders they revere almost as gods, has hampered the Democrats’ ability to respond to the far-right clique in the GOP.

This ruling clique is preparing a war on two fronts, and the lawfare front represents only one. The second front is extra-legal: the paramilitary and military wing of the ruling clique (we can’t yet call it a self-contained and actualized party) that exists in every police station and gun club in the Empire. This illegalist front has already flexed its strength once on January 6, 2020. It’s only a matter of time before these two fronts opened by the GOPs ruling clique — the legalist and illegalist — meet.

We can take some comfort knowing that the illegalist wing suffered setbacks in the wake of January 6, but those setbacks are temporary. The men who have been incarcerated are biding their time, strengthening their ties to active white supremacist militants in the prisons, and waiting while the legalist, lawfare strategy proceeds. Although the Congressional lawfare front is in the ascendent and dominant position, it won’t be long before these two frontlines switch places again.

Trump, worth some 2.5 billion dollars according to Forbes magazine, was ordered to pay 5 million dollars to Ms. Carroll. A settlement of this kind — undoubtedly soon to be subject to various challenges by his legal team — would reduce his net worth from 2.5 billion USD to 2.495 billion USD, hardly threatening him with destitution. In fact, this judgment is likely to further inflame his already ravenous right-fascist base and energize them in the run-up to the 2024 election. Ms. Carroll, on the other hand, has an estimated net worth of between $1–3 million USD. This would represent a substantial victory for her.

Of course we cannot discount the personal forces at work here: the trauma, disgust, and anger felt by Ms. Carroll and her personal investment in this suit. However, neither can we be willfully ignorant to the political meaning of the suit. Although the suit represents the righteous culmination of a decades-long campaign to hold the misogynist Trump accountable for his actions, it is also the theater in which the latest campaign of the war between the left-fascists and right-fascists is playing out. Although Ms. Carroll’s legal teamtime has made valiant attempts to keep the case from becoming a political dogfight, nevertheless — this is a right-fascist presidential hopeful, and the eyes of the ruling class are on him. Trump, along with the brutal right-fascist governor of Florida, DeSantis, represents the political ascendency of the largest and most reactionary monopoly capitalists: Sheldon Adelson; the ultra-Zionist, Isaac Perlmutter; shipping company Uline; finance capitalists at Blackstone; etc.

Newspapers and television stations have trumpeted the verdict. “A stunning result,” writes Politico’s Ankush Khardori, calling it a “new first – and a new low.” We know, of course, that this is far from a new low. President Clinton was a sexual abuser, and Nixon was a far worse criminal than either man; the sitting president, Biden, was credibly accused of forcing himself on staffers.

For Trump and his supporters, this has been the perfect opportunity to demonstrate his callousness, his “fitness,” to be the strongman that the right-fascists are slavering for. Even as the verdict came in, Trump’s campaign surged over contender DeSantis. What’s brewing on the left-fascist side? The blue-tie-wearing mummy Joseph Robinette Biden is as much of a cipher as Trump — he is merely the empty suit into which the ruling class pours their ambitions. Neither man is anything in-and-of-themselves. Despite the challenge to Trump in the courts, Biden still trails him by six points.

The ruling class is performing its behind-the-scenes calculus. We can see the results of their mathematics: despite the trial, they are swinging in favor of open right reaction. As for Trump, his trial strategy was designed to send a surge of energy through his supporters, through the most violent brand of fascists, and to play along the most reactionary lines in the country. He didn’t even show up to the trial, and his lawyers essentially abandoned any pretense of defense. This is typical strongman positioning, which Trump and his puppeteers must hope the ruling class will find appealing.

So far, they do. We must ask ourselves: how many ruling-class men see themselves in Trump? How many of them abuse the women around them wantonly, openly, and callously? Are Trump, Biden, Clinton, the outliers within the ruling or political classes? Or are they merely the standard, the white patriarchal archetype by which all ruling-class men judge themselves? We should be unmoved by the machinations of the capitalists. They are playing a game in which they alone are the victors. Trump, Biden, DeSantis, whoever they choose, will be the person that benefits their bottom line — and saving the bottom line of the capitalist elite means damning the rest of us.