Jonathan Woolley, on Trump as the big-daddy boss archetype.

On the delusions of American exceptionalism.

In order for democracy to work, we have to fight the impulse to surrender our power. We have to take responsibility for our own lives, individually and collectively. That means making a practice of taking back power from those who we have surrendered it to—even when believe they are using it benevolently.

Once we advocate for Democratic principles, or any basic mode of co-existing on a planet with 8 billion people, we are bound to face situations where certain groups take their theories to a Dictatorial level.

Agreeing to dangerous terms and conditions of applications which track movement and seek to predict future movements of people like you infringes upon freedoms of whole segments of the world population. But there are even more profound existential threats to migrants upon arrival in Europe.

If you're unwilling to have a conversation about the tragedy humankind has been submitted to, and the individuals and institutions responsible for it, don't show up.

There has been a tug-of-war between those who want to use the Gods as tools of oppression and those who see them as a path towards liberation for as long as there has been reconstructionism.

In a world where politicians lie constantly, companies continue to wreck the Earth and our food is processed with things we can’t pronounce, we ought to think carefully about who has our faith.

Banning burkinis, the War on Terror and the US occupation of Afghanistan have nothing to do with improving the lives of women. Why, then, did Women’s welfare become central to any discussion about these topics?

“Bloodthirsty savagery”, which is often attributed to the Mayan people, far better describes U.S. foreign policy than any pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas. We ought to remember that the Mayan people still exist today, and they were and still are far from the backwards and underdeveloped stereotype propagated in mainstream media.

This is the lesson I learned after having my work co-opted by fascists: It’s not enough to articulate a critique of capitalism—as I did in my article about distributism. If we do not also clearly distinguish ourselves from the fascists, then we will end up losing the debate to both.

Whatever rules being imposed by the state or the parallel powers of organized crime, they seem to signify a blatant disregard for the lives of marginalized peoples.

“We mistakenly attribute the concept of vandalism to what is ‘marginal,’ and rarely to what is ‘central,’ when the term should apply to infringements against the integrity of public property in general. […] Vandalism is, therefore, the attempt to destroy property even in its abstract form — the body and identity.”

“These deaths were simultaneously brutal and surreal, horrific and childishly ridiculous. The modern face of fascism is a killer in a clownish Viking outfit, face painted and howling in mindless joy because he did something to get noticed.”

“Fidelity to the rule of law” may now be a sentiment that serves our fleeting motivation to get rid of Trump, but it will never rescue us from the pervasive toxicity of the global political landscape ‘American Democracy’ has devised.

If all that is true, Mother, how do you read the news?

If the media is out for its own interests,

Its benefactors and the status quo,

If the news does not give us the truth,

As you seem to uphold,

How do you know what to believe?

There are forces, powers beyond humans in the more-than-human world, for whom it is always election season. Forest fires in the western United States are casting their votes. A virus that inhabits and moves between our bodies is casting its vote. And the systemic impacts of climate change are casting their votes in myriad ways: through extinction, desertification, and dead ocean zones. Who or what are they voting for?

Just when White America is starting to wake up to its privilege, to its complicity, and yes, to its guilt and shame, voices on the Left are calling us away from a race-centered analysis.

Elections have the habit of making even the most radical among us elevate the project of democracy. If the United States were a true democracy, that would be a vast improvement over the present condition. But what this line of thinking fundamentally does is provide a simulacrum of arguments for equity.

The lobster who has never seen a kitchen before likely does not comprehend the meaning of the pot. But while lobsters in the ocean generally don’t have the means to educate themselves about kitchens, the American lack of understanding as to the mechanisms of fascism is not a matter of lack of means but willful ignorance towards something that happened far away and therefore, in their reasoning, would never concern or affect them.