By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera-Colon, re-posted from social media

A Few More Notes on the Present Conjuncture

1. The Right’s Counter-revolution or Revolution (pick your nomenclature) is beginning to show cracks in its propaganda machinery at the meso-level. To my mind, the most prudent assumption is that this means we are entering a new phase of lethal political repression, ideological institution-scrubbing, and geopolitical violence. The Right doubles down when it smells an internal crisis. Its retort is to displace these contradictions unto its designated domestic and international enemies. Expect the cracks to turn into more extreme political action and rules breaking. We are at a point where we should retire the word “unprecedented” from our political vocabulary.

2. Local and state repressive apparatuses controlled by Democrats in large cities sooner or later will enact an armed intervention against Trump’s ICE militias which are drawn from various federal law enforcement entities (e.g., DEA, FBI, ATF, etc). The local and state police “professionals” are beginning to chafe at ICE’s disregard for even a simulacrum of protocols and procedures. Traditional policing is suffering its deepest legitimation crisis since the BLM uprisings. Expect bullets to fly soon. It is not unheard of for cold and hot civil wars to accelerate from within the state apparatus itself and then spread into the broader civil society.

3. Before Renee Good’s assassination, her wife advised one of the ICE fascists to deescalate: “I say you get you some lunch, big boy”: in that little phrase, she exposed one of the core elements in the relentless campaign of persecution against immigrants and their allies. The ICE agents are entangled in a cis straight masculinity that longs for a “big boy” status through which they could subordinate the rabble that has taken “their white country” away from them — its rightful owners and citizens. Attend to their swagging and penis-centered form of ambulation: the real Trumpian phallus is only available to them in their moments of violent abusive action against state-designated others.

4. Trump and his minions are enacting a hostile amendment to US ‘foreign policy’ by demarcating the Americas as their unquestionable domain. Repetition is the progenitor of all fascist polity. The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife being the first gambit in this new great game of blood and lucre. To impute madness to this new turn is to misread the moment. Clearly there is no normative rationality that US imperialism recognizes. Rather, we are entering an invigorated era of instrumental rationality wherein annexing Greenland, attacking Cuba even more intensely, and subordinating states in Latin America to US economic blackmail will be routine. The unipolar world is over. One has become three or four depending on how you measure it. You can imagine who the other global powers are now.

5. All of the above is made possible by what can be called the “Palestine Method”: what was exceptional is now an emerging baseline in which genocide, mass starvation, built environment destruction, and engineered population health disasters are now toolkits of preference for US and European elites protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. The babble of human rights, international law, and democracy are tantamount to political white noise machines deployed by shrinks to avert the attention of those waiting outside the door where the real talk is happening. The Palestine Method or some kind of multi-strategy people’s war. That is the binary choice now. The time for speeches is over. Let the bodies enjoin the machinery until the wheels stop grinding. G-d help us all.