Generals gathered in their masses/just like witches at black masses/evil minds that plot destruction/sorcerer of death’s construction
Opening lyrics to War Pigs, Black Sabbath
Why do I feel under siege? It seems that our government is at war with half the country. Since inauguration day, Trump and his goons have engaged in asymmetric warfare against childhood vaccinations, the civil service, the Constitution, freedom of the press, higher education, immigration, law firms, law and order, medicine, museums, public education, pluralism, public health, science. And that is just the domestic war. He is also at war with the world, welding missiles and tariffs and now extrajudicial killings, making us a country with zero friends, and many enemies. Now he is going to war against the people, not just institutions.
I don’t recall a time in modern American history when a president threatens war and destruction against its own citizens, even jokingly. The Chipocalypse Now meme of the president overseeing an attack on Chicago is insane, equating deporting people to napalmed bodies. Trump is acting very much the war pig.
In response to Trump’s post, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, in the understatement of the year, said that Trump’s threatened war with an American city was ‘not funny. Not normal.’ When questioned about his meme and comments, an irritated Trump berated and belittled the reporter.
Given his past actions, I don’t think Trump is being the comic. He wants to provoke an incident – a blue on green shooting or something similar – to invoke the Insurrection Act or perhaps even martial law. We have, I think, slipped from proto authoritarianism into autocratic rule, even as the lower courts fight a losing rear-guard action. Two courts issued a series of rulings over the past two weeks regarding his deployment of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles and the imposition of universal global tariffs. “Illegal” is the operative word used by the judges.
The attack on, and sinking of a ship, allegedly carrying drugs and the murder of her 11-man crew is another example of Trump’s war mindset, displaying to domestic audience his willingness to kill. I think Trump does not see a difference between domestic and foreign ‘enemies.’ Caught up in his own warped rhetoric and inability to distinguish fact from fiction as his mental state of mind deteriorates rapidly.
Thank you, Chief Justice Roberts. The blood of those who died in that attack are on his hands as much as Trump’s and Hegseths’. Given this administrations propensity for outright lies and bullshit, I don’t believe the purported intelligence of drug smuggling, and the timing is suspect. They were sacrificed on Trump’s altar.
Even if the crew was smuggling drugs, it’s a law enforcement problem, not a military one, and certainly not an excuse to engage in extrajudicial killings. The White House defended the murders by claiming fentanyl kills tens of thousands in the U.S. and taking out the ship and crew was a righteous act of war. Well, if that logic is true, shouldn’t American pushers of opioids like the Sackler family be targeted for a drone strike? Add the modifier terrorist and Trump claims a license to kill. He isn’t helping end the drug epidemic he is making it worse.
After several years of declines in opioid related deaths, however, the number of deaths in 2025 is ticking upward, according to the CDC. This uptick parallels the economic dislocation, stagnation, and uncertainty brought about by Trump’s policies:
- Job growth is at an all-time low not seen since the pandemic. A meager 22K in August. Even Sleepy Joe did better than that.
- Unemployment is rising, up to 4.3 percent.
- The average hourly earnings (wages) grew 1.23 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2025, according to the Brookings Institute. This rate is below the average hourly earnings rate growth of 1.56 percent in Biden’s final year (2024).
- Overall, wages are still trailing post-pandemic inflation. The Trump job market slowdown won’t help bridge that gap.
- Trump fueled Inflation is on the rise and is expected to get worse as the full impact of tariffs are felt.
- Grocery prices are set to rise as Trump mass deportations impact harvests and meat processing plants.
- Manufacturing has lost 75,000 jobs under Trump’s Tariff regime.
So instead of focusing on the economy, Trump decides to rebrand the Department of Defense the War Department. This rebranding is more than just a distraction, it is also a symptom of a greater evil brewing in the White House. Traditional boundaries of keeping the military out of domestic politics ….. and domestic law enforcement is eroding.
The South was militarily occupied after the Civil War. Something the South still bristles at: Humiliated militarily and occupied. The Union Army was used to suppress white terrorism against African Americans in a period called Reconstruction. This included the army policing the rural south and ensuring elections were relatively free from violence against voting African Americans.
However, as Reconstruction waned, the South wanted Army troops out. The Army appropriation act of 1878 banned the use of the Army to enforce laws, known as the Posse Comitatus Act. The Army withdrew from policing and protecting African Americans, resulting in a surge in terrorism and violence against African Americans that persisted well into the mid 20th century.
Paradoxically, this southern white supremacist inspired law banning the use of the military to directly conduct law enforcement duties, e.g., arresting people, became a cornerstone of American civil society and rule of law. The National Security Act of 1947, which created the Department of Defense (and the Central Intelligence Agency), further codified the military from acting directly as law enforcement officers enforcing civilian laws. It is in fact a felony to ‘knowingly and willingly’ deploy active-duty military in direct law enforcement actions unless authorized by law (for instance the Insurrection Act) according to federal criminal law.
State National Guards, which are controlled by the governors, are generally excluded from the Posse Comitatus Act, when mobilized by the State’s governor, are vestiges of state militias. The original intent of the Second Amendment was for states through their militias (now National Guard) to defend themselves from a powerful and tyrannical central government and its standing army. In a perplexing and bewildering perversion of our history, the second amendment crowd is in league with our increasingly tyrannical central government. Go figure that so many of these gun toting self-appointed defenders of liberty and freedom are stepping up to crush liberty and freedom for all.
A federal judge in the northern district of California ruled last week that Trump’s federalization and deployment of units of the California national guard and active-duty marines in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. It is a victory for the rule of law; however, I believe a temporary one.
The decision will be appealed and eventually reach the Supreme Court. I suspect the Supreme Court will side with Trump, handing him even greater power: A complete monopoly to domestically deploy the state’s immense power of violence contained by the military against civilians for any conjured-up reason.
In another very recent example of the Supreme Court taking Trump’s side, yesterday in a 6 to 3 decision they ruled (without explanation) in another emergency docket case to permit ethnic profiling of Latinos for citizenship purposes. That is using ethnicity as one of several factors as reasonable suspicion to conduct investigatory stops to determine whether someone is in the country illegally. It’s crazy that the Supreme Court conflates ethnicity with non-citizenship and illegality. The ruling also sounds eerily like the black laws in the post-civil war south where blacks were rounded up for, you know, being black. Given Trump’s criminal record, stopping, big white, fat orange tinted fucks at random is also permissible, I suppose.
Another week, another round of setbacks for democracy and America. Where do we go from here? Now’s not the time to sit on the fence. Get mad, get angry, get busy. The extrajudicial killings off the coast of Venezuela, Trump’s war memes on American cities, the conflation of ethnicity as a legal marker of citizenship and determinant of criminality, and his evolving uncontained police state should give all Americans pause as the country slips into the penumbra of authoritarian rule.
