The Yanks are cooked (and cooking the rest of us)

At no other moment in history has the leader of the world’s most powerful empire, mid-genocide, addressed a gathering of global dignitaries and boasted of the merch sales of a personal line of baseball hats. “I’m really good at predicting things,” Trump said to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. “During the campaign they had a hat – a best-selling hat – ‘Trump was right about everything.’ And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.” 

He hasn’t been. The American Forever War wages on, dumber, deadlier and merchandised to a depraved degree. American authoritarianism is both an eerie echo of tyrants’ past and its own unique perversion: shrouded in goldleaf, ski masks, and utter bullshit, set to a chorus of shrill, educationally malnourished capitalist politicians calling each other communists. 

Earlier that day, the escalators froze on the way to the UN chamber, causing a mildly awkward moment for the POTUS. Trump complained to the Assembly. “If the First Lady wasn’t in great shape she could have fallen. But she is in great shape.” And then he smirked. That’s America’s ass, sir! *Salutes*

Fox News’ Jesse Watters responded to EscalatorGate with a typical MAGA sense of proportionality and calm: “They sabotaged them! And they could have hurt the First Lady. Trump would have fallen and gotten back up… Then they sabotaged the teleprompter! This is an insurrection. What we need to do is either leave the UN, or bomb it… It’s in New York, though, right?” 

Nevermind beating the Russians in Olympic ice hockey or sending a rocket to the moon, this is the zenith of America. This moment in time could be narrated by Tom Hanks and Taylor Swift eating feedlot beef and orange cheese on top of a rodeo bull on July 4th inside a secret prison in a Latin American dictatorship that got CIA’d for trying to tax rich people, and it still wouldn’t be more American than this right here, right now. Yankee fascism is crosses and stars and ICE and colonial genocide and fucking merchandise, merchandise, merchandise. Please, exit the concentration camp through the gift shop. 

“You have to end it now, I can tell you,” Trump continued to a room full of world leaders recalculating how supremely fucked everyone is. “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to Hell. In America, we’ve taken bold action to swiftly shut down uncontrolled migration.” 

Trump is, of course, referring to the masked and violent ICE raids that have terrorised American suburbs and Home Depots since his second term began, gestapoing university students, McDonald’s employees, and gardeners into diplomatic limbo, deportation hell, or just straight up disappearing them. All of this, when stripped of the MAGA narrative, for the twin crimes of being brown and having an origin story elsewhere. People lower down the rungs of the West’s acceptable collateral damage scale than a white, male late night TV host are living in fear for their lives. The Miami Herald is reporting that two-thirds of the 1,800 immigrants who were held at “Alligator Alcatraz” (merchandise available) in July have gone missing from ICE’s database. Their families are unable to locate them. 

They can, however, select from a vast range of racist t-shirts depicting their relative’s last known location. ‘Mericaaaa, fuck yeah! The standard of justice accepted with Guantanamo Bay abroad has now come home. Political theorist and solid-understander-of-fascism Hannah Arendt refers to this inevitably as the “Imperial boomerang”. The rot has spread, and the decline is terminal.

Starwipe back four days to Glendale, Arizona, to Charlie Kirk’s memorial, where one of countless American Reichstag Fires burned bright through the evening. Charlie Kirk, a man who said horrible things and was murdered in the grotesque world he helped create, has unnaturally quickly become a martyr for American Christofascists. Texas House Republican August Pfluger and ​​Arizona’s Abe Hamadeh are moving a bill to have Kirk’s likeness on newly minted $1 coins. Few things have Horst Wessel’d as hard as this.

The murdered YouTube supremacist’s memorial was televised to the nation; an arena spectacular of crosses, creepy things, and statements of war against a nebulous, ominous other – an other that in time will come to represent anyone that resists Trump’s putsch. 

Kirk’s widow Erika forgave his assassin, which was mighty big of her. She then embraced Trump and rubbed up against him. Given the stuff I’ve heard about his best friend, I just wouldn’t ever advise this.

The quality of any collective ebbs with time: consider the cycles of a past-it football team, or a rock band clasping onto a spandex world that was grunged out of existence. The same is true for America’s/humanity’s ruling class, which today runs the gamut from your techbro Lex Luthor types that dream of turning the world into a digital shopping mall/drone warfare laboratory, to your inbred medieval Lords from a decaying line, ruling over rot, ordering witches burnt at the stake and soap excommunicated from the state church. Trump has both sorts in his inner circle. 

Jeff Bezos, Peter Tiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are all in their own ways usurping entire economies, purchasing collective minds, time, focus and perception, refining the distraction, surveillance and weapons technology that will forever ensnare working class subservience to these dweeby pricks. Greek economist and former politician Yanis Varoufakis calls the Nerd Reich’s eclipsing of capitalism and democracy “technofeudalism”. And in RFK Jr., Trump can lean on the wisdom of the descendant of a once-respected line of born-to-rule hornbags, a man spending his crumbling political capital on resurrecting polio and exorcising the devil out of Tylenol for its not-at-all documented autism-spreading abilities. 

The richest man on Earth owns X. The third richest owns Facebook and Instagram. The fourth richest owns The Washington Post. In Peak America, the corporations we do the bulk of our shopping with, or who own the socials spaces we hang out in, or the media that shapes our reality – their “side hustle” is developing the technology that makes Israel’s infanticide more efficient, or the policing of protesters domestically more oppressive and invasive. The world’s oligarchs are well and truly aboard America’s supremacy express, and we need to ask ourselves at what technological level of weaponry and deft manipulation of the addictive propaganda systems does mass resistance become impossible once and for all? The Tech Pharaohs will turn every gear at their disposal to enrich themselves at the expense of our future, while trying to ensure they go un-eaten as long as possible. 

And into this quagmire, this unmitigated shitstorm, stepped up little Anthony Albanese to the UN plate. 

For a man who has mastered the art of appearing to stand for something while doing fuck all of the sort, his address was predictably vague where it needed to be specific. In refusing, still, to acknowledge the genocide, Albanese came across more as a beauty pageant contender wishing for generic world peace and trying not to get yelled at than a serious person. And when he did get specific, he couldn’t help but let his inner colonist out, demanding that the rubble and mass graves whose statehood Australia now recognises not be allowed to defend itself against the oppressive force creating the rubble and mass graves. 

He even had the gall to declare that, “We can build a future where instead of children in Gaza dying in pain, living in fear, or being taught to hate – they can go to school”. Motherfucker, all their schools have been blown up! And they are not taught to hate – they grow up in a concentration camp that is routinely exterminated, and then learn lessons accordingly. They are the victims of genocide, perpetually tortured by a Nazified Israeli military and weapons industry that Australia – this week! – made yet another multi-million dollar deal with. The mainstream will paint Albanese’s statement as a humane move; in truth, it could not be more cynical. 

As Francesca Albanese has pointed out many times, in becoming the 150th nation to recognise Palestine at the UN, Australia is playing the role of “good colonist”, distracting attention and narrative from the slaughter that has not stopped one iota. This is a political move without serious cost, precisely because it doesn’t impact the Netanyahu-Trump plan for a “Gaza Riviera”.

Mercifully, there was evidence of hope, of there still being a smattering of adults in the room at the UN. Adults willing to be direct and name this depravity for what it is. Leaders bolder, more humane, less complicit than ours are finding their voice. 

President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, gave an all-timer, declaring: “There is no superior race. There is no ‘chosen people of God’. It is neither the United States nor Israel. The ‘chosen people of God’ is all of humanity.” 

Slovenia’s President Pirc Musar said, “We did not stop the Holocaust. We did not stop the genocide in Rwanda. We did not stop the genocide in Srebrenica. We must stop the genocide in Gaza. There are no excuses anymore. None.” 

Finnish President Alexander Stubb called for desperately needed reform to the UN’s operations: “No single country should have a veto in the UN. A Security Council member should also lose its voting rights for a fixed period if it violates the UN Charter.”

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was equally firm: “There is no solution possible when the population of one of those two states is the victim of a genocide. We are all well aware that the only hope that civilians in Gaza have is that of knowing that the world does not forget them.” 

It’s not all words, either. Spain and Italy have sent naval vessels to protect the Sumud Flotilla, presently heading towards Gaza carrying citizens from 44 countries, six Australians, food, hope, and humanity. It is being attacked by Israeli drones as we speak.

Italy joining the side of this humanitarian effort is a direct result of Italians shutting down their entire country this week for Gaza, in one of the most heartening (and effective) nationwide general strikes the world has ever seen. (Americans temporarily cancelled their Disney+ subscriptions to save Jimmy Kimmel, and that, while being significantly less impressive, worked too.)  

Indonesia has committed to sending 20,000 troops to Gaza if other nations stand beside them. China even raised the bear’s sleepy eyebrow, stating more directly than ever: “Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, and is an inseparable part of the Palestinian territory”. 

American Imperial decline has been rolling for decades. Indeed, what else is the entire neoliberal era? Nothing but the moral, logical rot that birthed today’s fascism. These are the death throes of the most violent empire in existence. And now, in and around Peak America, the humane and less depraved citizens of the world need to ignore the global superpower establishment, navigate against its imperial slaughter – and its quisling allies like the UK and Australia – to attempt to stop this holocaust. Watch this space.

***