Sabertooth tiger skull and Bay Bridge, San Francisco waterfront. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

– Erich Fromm

Here’s Theodor Adorno at his sharpest and most relevant to our current dire predicament:

As we know, fascist agitation has by now come to be a profession, as it were, a livelihood. It had plenty of time to test the effectiveness of its various appeals, and through what might be called natural selection, only the most catchy ones have survived. Their effectiveness is itself a function of the psychology of the consumers. Through a process of “freezing,” which can be observed throughout the techniques employed in modern mass culture, the surviving appeals have been standardized, similarly to the advertising slogans, which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business. This standardization, in turn, falls in line with stereotypical thinking, that is to say, with the “stereopathy” of those susceptible to this propaganda and their infantile wish for endless, unaltered repetition. It is hard to predict whether the latter psychological disposition will prevent the agitators’ standard devices from becoming blunt through excessive application. In National Socialist Germany, everybody used to make fun of certain propagandistic phrases such as “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden), jokingly called Blubo, or the concept of the Nordic race from which the parodistic verb aufnorden (to “northernize”) was derived. Nevertheless, these appeals do not seem to have lost their attractiveness. Rather, their very “phoniness” may have been relished cynically and sadistically as an index for the fact that power alone decided one’s fate in the Third Reich, that is, power unhampered by rational objectivity. (“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 1951)

Like the Israelis in Gaza, the Trump kidnap-and-deport squad sure as hell isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing: “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

The Trump White House wants to spend $45 billion this year on facilities to detain noncitizens. Last year, the total amount of federal money allocated to ICE was about $3.4 billion.

I wonder if MAGA will be surprised that the noncitizens they accused of ripping off Americans by not paying taxes are now being haunted down for deportation by ICE using tax records provided by the IRS:

“The IRS agreed to share information with ICE to help locate people for deportation, court records show. This is a fundamental change in the IRS, which had gained the trust of migrants and encouraged them to file their taxes.”

Students are being deported for objecting to this: Israeli soldiers were ordered to destroy everything in the Gaza perimeter. “We’re not only killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs,” an Israeli officer said. “We’re destroying their houses & pissing on their graves.”

Only days after taking office as Columbia University’s new trustee-president, Claire Shipman personally terminated the appeal process of disciplined students and workers, including former union leader Grant Miner, crushing any hopes that she might at least allow due process for the students to make their case.

Martin Heidegger demonstrated more resistance to the Nazi takeover of Freiberg University than the Ivy League schools have shown against Trump–and he went so far as to ban his mentor Edmund Husserl from the library to curry favor with the Brownshirts.

Federal judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump Administration must return Kilmar Garcia from the El Salvadoran prison he was sent to through an “administrative error” back to the US:

“[Trump officials] do indeed cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike —to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian.’”

Andry José Hernández Romero.

Photojournalist Philip Holsinger on Andry José Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist, who was kidnapped, abused and deported to El Salvador by ICE for having a “Dad” tattoo on one arm and a “Mom” tattoo on the other: “He was being slapped every time he would speak up. He couldn’t help himself. Then he started praying and calling out, literally crying for his mother.”

In its report last weekend on Trump’s deportations, 60 Minutes could find no criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans the US sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador, meaning that 100s of innocent people have been incarcerated in a hellhole, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

The US is paying El Salvador at least $6 million a year to house in one of the world’s most notorious prisons noncitizens it deported–most of whom have no criminal record and aren’t wanted for any crime, many of whom have no ties to gangs. Why are those who’ve committed no crime being kept in prison? On what authority? What will El Salvador do with these poor people when the US stops paying the bill? If the US is paying the bill, why can’t it demand that El Salvador release the people it sent there “by accident”?

In a unanimous ruling handed down on Thursday night, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the El Salvadoran hellhole he was “accidentally” sent to by Trump’s ICE goons in violation of a protective order banning Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador, where his........

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