Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When I was a “preteen,” maybe ten or eleven years old, I remember watching a sci-fi program on TV (maybe a Flash Gordon episode). It was about a society where criminality had become the legal norm. It was a land where the “strongest” prevailed simply because they could. For instance, theft was legal because those from whom things were taken were weak. So when the program’s hero (who, for some reason, was not aware of this weirdness) intervened to stop a purse snatching, he himself was arrested for criminal behavior. I remember watching and thinking this is so abnormal, it could never happen. Now, a mere seventy or so years later, I discover that I was wrong.

Things have gone downside-up. What was once wrong is now right, or at least admissible. In terms of foreign events, Israel (the “light unto the nations”) has given itself over to stark barbarism and quite literally taken on the criminal demeanor of its past persecutors. Having spent decades forcing many Palestinians into various sorts of ghettos, the Zionists hypocritically cry bloody murder because, on October 7, 2023, the land thief (standing in here for the purse thief of seventy years ago) was given a bloody nose. The Israeli Zionist response to their victims standing up for themselves has been to murder (to date) over 47,000 Palestinians—for which the Zionists call themselves justified and even righteous. The West stands by as if this is admissible behavior and the United States sanctions international courts that disagree. The best we can say about Israel is that it is having an extreme national case of a battered child syndrome. And the West? Things have gone downside-up.

Here at home, in the U.S., we are making what was legally and ethically right into something inadmissible and even criminal. It took over a century for United States to face its racist history and ratify the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. To supplement that action, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson (Democratic) issued executive order 11246. It “forbade federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It granted the Labor Department the power to enforce its provisions through a contracting standards office.” In other words, it told those doing business with the federal government that they could not be racist or otherwise discriminatory in their hiring practices. This is the order which Donald Trump has now summarily retracted. Now, what is forbidden is exactly what 11246 required. This is what Trump considers to be “freedom” reasserting itself.

In any universe where the principle of fairness as an ethical standard meant anything at all,........

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