Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong.
If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough and governments did what’s in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.
You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more you learn about the way the world works, the more insane it all looks to you.
Have you ever had to explain war to a young child? It’s terrible. If you’re actually honest with them about what war is and why it is waged, it completely shatters their understanding of the world. They look at you like they’ve suddenly been transported into a strange alien universe where everything is backward.
Their reaction is correct. That is the sane and normal way to look at war. All the freakish mental contortions we do to try and normalize it is what’s crazy.
Everything about this dystopia is like this. If you could see it all with fresh eyes, you would scream in horror. The only reason anyone finds any of this tolerable is because we have become desensitized and accustomed to the madness.
Seeing somebody sleeping on the sidewalk should feel like a punch in the stomach. Seeing children killed by bombs on your social media feed should stop your whole world.
The fact that there are plutocrats profiting from war and militarism.
The fact that billionaire corporations are integrating surveillance technology into every facet of our society.
The fact that we’re destroying our biosphere and driving families into poverty to maximize shareholder value.
The fact that oligarchy has turned democracy into a sham where our votes don’t make any real difference.
The fact that there are people in the global south who are living like slaves so that those of us in the imperial core can have cheap bread and circuses to keep us docile and distracted.
We all know deep down inside that these are intolerable abuses, but they’ve been so normalized and compartmentalized in our psychology that it all just fades into this kind of eerie dissonance in the background of our attention.
The more conscious you become of what’s going on in the world, the more that dissonance moves into the foreground, and the less tolerable this dystopia becomes for you. As Terence McKenna said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
And that’s a good thing. Injustice and abuse should not feel tolerable. We should allow our discomfort with this intolerable situation to drive us to action and resistance.
And as uncomfortable as it can feel to stare into the unmasked face of the empire in all its beastly fury, this clarity also brings with it a degree of relief, because when it comes online you finally understand why nothing has ever felt right about this civilization you were born into. You understand that your intuitive discomfort and revulsion you felt as a child at the madness you were being indoctrinated into accepting was one hundred percent accurate, and that everyone who taught you to accept the unacceptable was wrong.
Trust that childhood intuition. You’ve always had the truth inside you. Let it guide you as you read and inform yourself to help your mind catch up with what you already know in your heart. Let your heart inform your mind, let your mind inform your actions, and let your actions help awaken humanity to the truth we’ve been hiding from ourselves all these years.
During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.
These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.
Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.
Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.
All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XVI-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.
Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.
The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.
Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.
Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.
Trump employs the U.S. military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”
These eight characteristics are:
1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.
2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.
3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.
4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.
5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.
6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.
7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.
8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.
Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.
Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.
Cults are characterized by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.
“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in “Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace.” “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children. If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”
Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”
“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:
He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.
The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralyzing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.
“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot – it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”
It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.
The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters. Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.
The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy. This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programs to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.
There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invaliding or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.
Many people are saying that Donald Trump is insane. He may be. So too Benjamin Netanyahu. But if so, it is a form of insanity that includes the calm sanity of Adolf Eichmann and Harry Truman as they went about their business of mass extermination.
Crazy, to use the vernacular, is an elusive word nearly impossible to define, especially when an entire society can be crazy, as Erich Fromm, the German-American social-psychologist, has argued. Obedience is a much touted virtue, not only in overt police regimes but in so-called democracies – but obedience to whom? To mass murderers?
Obedience can be imbibed through osmosis. I remember Regis, my Jesuit high school’s motto – Deo et Patriae, for God and country – and how it linked obedience to God with obedience to the United States. I am certain that such a linkage would be denied by school authorities, but of course the Jesuits are known for their guile. So it didn’t surprise me when I was applying for a discharge from the Marines during the Vietnam War and was being questioned by a group of Marine Officers and one starting screaming at me: “What the hell kind of God are you talking about? I’m a Catholic, too, and my God supports the Marines and the war in Vietnam.” It was hard not to laugh sardonically, especially as he gesticulated with his large cigar for emphasis. I was then sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation who told me, to my great surprise, that he agreed with me and that the country’s leaders were insane.
Adolf Eichmann was declared “perfectly sane” by a psychiatrist who examined him when he went on trial for his routine daily tasks of carrying out Hitler’s orders to exterminate Jews. It was just another day at the office for Eichmann.
Harry Truman was not examined after he ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he was assumed to be sane in committing these satanic crimes of mass murder. Just another state executive doing his duty by carrying out the orders of his puppet masters.
Those were the good old days when everyone knew who was sane and who was nuts. Now we seem very confused. Perhaps Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. have discombobulated many minds about who is sane or not, who is a mass murderer, who evil and who good, depending on which functionary is in the White House. Perhaps not.
If Trump is insane, how did he twice become the president of the United States? Do “sane” people – the well-adjusted ones? – not realize that Trump is the nominal head of an immense system whose history is one of mass murder from Wounded Knee to the recent U.S. slaughter of hundreds, mostly young girls, at the elementary school in Minab, Iran.
Trump gave the orders, but he did not launch those missiles. Nor did Netanyahu massacre Palestinians with his own hands. These fat boy killers prefer to keep their dainty hands clean of blood – to have their functionaries do the killing. I think of other functionaries and the names they gave to the atomic bombs they dropped on Japan: “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” And we talk about sanity.
The “sane” obedient ones do the killing; the soldiers who carry out orders. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his profound book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable, in 1966:
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.” The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless.
Our problem, as the historian Howard Zinn once said, is civil obedience, surely not civil disobedience, that people everywhere are so submissive to authority that they will dutifully obey the orders of people like Trump and Netanyahu. Such obedience, all false rhetoric to the contrary, is drilled into us from birth through overt and covert methods of fear inculcation.
My dear departed mother’s father was a New York City cop. When she was young, he made her and her mother, trembling with fear, sit at the kitchen table, upon which he put his revolver, and warned them to obey him or else. Such tyrannical behavior was slightly mitigated decades later when he and my grandmother lived with us. When he heard that any of us eight kids were misbehaving, he, old, feeble, and long retired, would don his police uniform and stomp down the stairs waving his long baton to frighten us. I never got to ask my mother why she tolerated this. Such is the long life of fear.
There are reports that by April’s end the U.S. will have 60,000 troops in Iran’s vicinity. If Trump gives the orders to invade Iran, how many will refuse? How many will refuse to send missiles into more Iranian schools and homes? If Trump gives orders for a nuclear strike, can we expect military individuals with consciences to disobey? Will any heed Pope Leo’s voice about this war? That it is immoral.
It takes a system to wage war, and civil and military obedience to support it. That system – what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has adroitly named MICIMATT: The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank system – is so deeply woven into American society and therefore the hearts and minds of its citizens and military personnel that one can only hope against hope that Trump’s orders will be disobeyed by many. It is a desperate hope, I realize.
War Is A Racket, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler once put it. It is waged for the tyrannical oligarchs and always kills mostly civilians. Over ninety percent now, probably more. Innocent people, little girls at school, babies in their mothers arms – it is organized state terror. War is immoral. It is not complex. It is simple. Like the gospel message the Pope is conveying.
Like all tyrants, Trump is surrounded by sycophants, fearful little people like Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Peter Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, Jr., et al. The whole crew groveling at his feet are implicated in his war crimes. To hear Kennedy defend Trump’s war on Iran, his Ukraine and other policies, by claiming his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, and his uncle, President Kennedy, would agree with Trump is to pass through the looking glass. Kennedy, also a staunch defender of Israel and its savage policies, makes me shake my head in wonder. Was his political conversion, like St. Paul’s, from a light from heaven that sent him to the ground where Trump’s divine voice asked him to hop on the MAGA train? Or was the voice more insidious and subtle, a quiet call from someone else late in the night? However it happened, it is complete, and he is now fully marching to the drums of war along with Trump’s ass-kissing entourage. I, once Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s ardent supporter when he announced his run for the presidency, feel like a fool.
Let me recommend an important film – Terence Malik’s A Hidden Life – about a different type of man, Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant farmer from an isolated small mountainous village who refuses to take an oath to Hitler and fight in the German army. He knew that his refusal would not stop Hitler; but he also knew his conscience came from God and not the state. So he said no. NO! I will not follow orders, despite everyone telling him to do so. For his refusal, he suffered terribly and was beheaded. In my review of this film which I wrote six years ago as Joseph Biden was three weeks into his presidency, I said:
While Franz is eventually put on trial by the German government, it is we as viewers who must judge ourselves and ask how guilty or innocent are we for supporting or resisting the immoral killing machine of our own country now. Hitler and his Nazis were then, but we are faced with what Martin Luther King called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’
Many Americans surely ask with Franz, ‘What has happened to the country that we love?’ But how many look in the mirror and ask, “Am I a guilty bystander or an active supporter of the United States’ immoral and illegal wars all around the world that have been going on for so many years under presidents of both parties and have no end? Do I support the new cold war with its push for nuclear war with its first strike policy? Do I support, by my silence, a nuclear holocaust?’
The questions still linger. Let first Thomas Merton and then the twenty-two years-old Bob Dylan have the last words:
“For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest and most ridiculous of all the false gods. We can call ourselves innocent only if we refuse to forget this, and if we also do everything we can to make others realize it.“
The ongoing war of words between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV is unparalleled in modern history. It’s not new for popes to speak out on political issues, historians of religion say, but Trump’s insults toward the pope are without precedent.
The direct nature of Pope Leo’s responses as well as him being the first American pope are also playing a role in how the exchange is being interpreted by the public.
The ongoing war of words between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV is unparalleled in modern history. It’s not new for popes to speak out on political issues, historians of religion say, but Trump’s insults toward the pope are without precedent.
The direct nature of Pope Leo’s responses as well as him being the first American pope are also playing a role in how the exchange is being interpreted by the public.
Vice President Vance, who is Catholic, also weighed in on the controversy on Tuesday night, saying the pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
“What we saw … is an unprecedented, unhinged attack by the president of the United States on the pope,” said Christopher White, associate director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. “It was clearly meant to intimidate the pope,” but, he added, “the pope’s response shows he is undeterred by the president’s broadside and won’t be distracted from his efforts to push for peace.”
The charged nature of the exchange is new, but many popes have been known for their political critiques. Here’s a brief overview of times when modern popes spoke out on politics, and how Pope Leo is different.
Popes have had political opinions before, but the response was diplomatic
Modern popes have never shied away from voicing political opinions, sometimes running contrary to world leaders.
“When the pope speaks, it’s not that he’s taking sides. He’s really pointing out the objective moral law,” said Michele Dillon, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire whose research focuses on the Catholic Church.
But prior interactions were much more diplomatic.
In 1965, Pope Paul VI was the first pope to speak before the United Nations, urging an end to the Vietnam War and famously saying, “No more war, war never again.” Paul VI pushed President Lyndon Johnson to “increase even more your noble effort” to negotiate for peace in Vietnam in 1967. Later that year, Johnson released a cordial statement after meeting the pope, saying “I deeply appreciate the full and free manner” of the pope’s opinions.
In 1979, Pope John Paul II spoke before the United Nations, focusing on human rights and peace. He advocated an end to conflicts in the Middle East, with a “just settlement of the Palestinian question” and the “territorial integrity of Lebanon.” John Paul II visited President Jimmy Carter in the White House, where they talked about the Philippines, China, Europe, South Korea, and the Middle East, according to Carter’s notes.
John Paul II, a Polish pope, was also involved in less-public political influence. He supported Polish opposition to the Soviet Union and has been credited with helping to bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. Later, in 2003, he spoke against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and also sent representatives to Washington and Baghdad to make appeals to avoid the war. Those appeals were ignored, but he correctly predicted decades of unrest in the Middle East, according to White.
John Paul II also voiced opinions on social issues with presidents — disagreeing with Bill Clinton on abortion and pushing George W. Bush to reject stem cell research — but neither president escalated the situation and both remained respectful.
And what lingers in these testimonies is not just what was done, but what it did to those who carried it out. Soldiers speak of shame, of dissociation, of an inability to reconcile their actions with any moral framework. The military calls it PTSD. But the soldiers—and some experts—call it something else: moral injury. Not fear of what happened to them, but horror at what they themselves became.
The official narrative isn’t just cracking—it’s being dismantled by the very people who carried it out.
In a devastating investigation, Israeli soldiers are now speaking in their own words about what they did, what they witnessed, and what their commanders allowed in Gaza. These are not secondhand accusations or political attacks. They are confessions—raw, detailed, and impossible to dismiss.
They describe opening fire on unarmed civilians identified only as “targets” on a drone feed. They describe prisoners humiliated, abused, and discarded. They describe executions—men surrendering with hands raised, only to be shot and later labeled “terrorists.” And they describe something just as revealing as the violence itself: a system where none of this leads to accountability.
What emerges is not chaos. It is structure.
This is not the “fog of war.” It is policy by practice—kill first, justify later, investigate never.
As we have seen in this country, the destructive effects of the “fog of war”—the brutal killings, the unjustified pushes toward empire—do not end on the battlefield. The damage lives on in the soldiers who are sent to carry it out. And too often, it feels as if those in power simply do not care. But we can choose something different. We can listen. We can create space for those who were there to speak honestly about what they saw and did. And in doing so, we can begin to confront the truth—not from the top down, but from the ground up—where real accountability, and the possibility of change, actually begins.
And what lingers in these testimonies is not just what was done, but what it did to those who carried it out. Soldiers speak of shame, of dissociation, of an inability to reconcile their actions with any moral framework. The military calls it PTSD. But the soldiers—and some experts—call it something else: moral injury. Not fear of what happened to them, but horror at what they themselves became.
Because moral injury doesn’t just indict individuals—it indicts systems.
This is not a new phenomenon in Israel. The concept of “moral injury” has been studied for years, but what Israeli researchers and clinicians are now documenting gives it renewed urgency—and clarity. It names what many soldiers themselves are struggling to articulate: a rupture between what they did, or were ordered to do, and the values they believed they held. Unlike PTSD, which is rooted in fear, moral injury is rooted in recognition—the realization that lines were crossed, often knowingly, in the heat of revenge, chaos, and command pressure. Psychologists working directly with troops describe a pattern: soldiers firing on people later found to be uninvolved, approving strikes with known civilian casualties, or participating in actions they justified in the moment but cannot live with afterward. The consequences are severe—depression, shame, substance abuse, even suicidal thoughts—but the deeper implication is structural. This is not just about individual breakdowns. It reflects a system that places soldiers in situations where moral collapse becomes not an exception, but an expectation.
It exposes a military culture that normalizes dehumanization, a political structure that shields it, and an international order that enables it. It reveals a reality that cannot be dismissed as isolated misconduct or “a few bad actors,” but instead points to a pattern—repeated, reinforced, and quietly accepted.
And of course it may take years for the damage the understanding to take hold with Y Net Global reporting “One of the complexities of moral injury is that it does not always appear at the moment of action,” Levi-Belz said. “Sometimes it emerges weeks later, after you take off the uniform. Sometimes years later.”
“There is no doubt that among IDF soldiers and reservists there has been an increase in moral injury compared to routine operations,” he said. Based on clinical experience and preliminary samples, he estimates that 40 percent to 50 percent of soldiers, particularly reservists, encountered morally injurious events during the war.
And that is where the story turns outward.
Because none of this unfolds in a vacuum. The bombs, the cover, the diplomatic protection—all of it flows, in part, from Washington. The United States continues to fund, arm, and politically defend the very system these soldiers are now describing from within.
The facts are no longer hidden. The voices are no longer external critics. They are coming from inside the system itself.
So the question is no longer whether the world knows.
The question is whether it is willing to act—or whether it will choose, again, to look away.
Because when even the perpetrators are telling the truth, silence is no longer ignorance.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has accused Spain of an “anti-Israel obsession” for its criticisms of the US-Israeli war on Iran and its refusal to allow its airspace to be used in the onslaught, a perceived slight to which Israel has responded by banning Madrid from participation in a coordination center for the oversight of the so-called “ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip.
We’ve been hearing this “obsession” talking point from Israel and its apologists a lot lately. A recent article from the Jewish News Syndicate carries the headline “Why is the media obsessed with violent Israelis?”, bizarrely trying to argue that the western press likes to “smear Israelis” in order “to distract attention from Palestinian terror.” The other day right-wing pundit Meghan Murphy had a strange conversation with Tablet Magazine editor Jacob Siegel about our society’s “recent insane obsession with Israel,” speaking as though everyone just randomly began fixating on this genocidal apartheid state out of nowhere a short while ago, for no valid reason.
The argument, as I understand it, is that Israel is just a normal small country like any other small country, and any special focus on it suggests a sinister desire to single out Jews for discrimination.
But have you ever noticed how the same people who accuse Israel’s critics of “obsession” with a tiny insignificant country will also fall all over themselves to tell you that Israel is an indispensable ally whose interests are inextricably intertwined with the interests of western civilization?
When Israel is being criticized they try to frame it as unworthy of special attention; when alliances and military aid for Israel are being criticized they frame it as worthy of all our resources and energy. When Israel’s evil actions are making headlines, its apologists try to frame it as an itty bitty country the size of New Jersey trying to mind its own business while being victimized by obsessive hatred from the entire world because its inhabitants happen to be Jewish. When people question why their tax dollars and military resources need to support that small nation in west Asia, suddenly the argument pivots in the exact opposite direction: Israel is massively important, and is absolutely central to the wellbeing of the west.
You can claim Israel is a crucial ally in the middle east, OR you can claim it’s discriminatory to focus more on Israel’s crimes than the abuses of other countries. You can’t claim both are true, because they’re contradictory. Israel can’t be (A) immensely significant and intimately involved in the fate of our own society, and also (B) insignificant and unworthy of special attention. It’s either A or B. It can’t be simultaneously deserving AND undeserving of special treatment.
In reality, everyone in the world has every right to focus their attention on Israel — especially right now while its efforts to sabotage the ceasefire with Iran threaten to cause a global fuel crisis. You don’t get to cause a global fuel crisis and then act like you’re just an uwu smol bean who’s being singled out because of your religion.
But really Israel has always been worthy of critical attention in the west, exactly because it is so intimately intertwined with western power structures. Its genocide in Gaza is our genocide. Its abuses are our abuses. Its wars directly impact us. The aggressive push from its lobbyists to stomp out free speech throughout our society is taking away our rights.
Israel is our business, and it always has been. We are right to spotlight its criminality, and the complicity of our own western governments in those crimes.
Israel supporters will tell me “Oh yeah well how come you don’t criticize Egypt’s humanitarian abuses, huh? How come you’re not tweeting every day about the human rights violations of Iran? Something in particular about this one specific middle eastern country that draws your attention, is there? Perhaps you just HATE JEWS??”
But the reason I criticize Israel more than Egypt or Iran has nothing to do with religion. Egyptian aggressions aren’t starting wars of immense consequence which directly affect me. Nobody’s trying to make it illegal to criticize Iran in my country. My government is providing material and diplomatic cover for wars and genocides for this one country in particular, and eroding my free speech rights in order to protect its information interests. This would be true regardless of what religion or ethnicity happens to be favored in this one particular nation.
I’m not “obsessed” with Israel. Does it look like I’m having a great time talking about this horrible apartheid state every day? Does it look fun having people call me a Nazi in my replies all the time?
I wish I could ignore Israel completely. If it were up to me, I would. But because my own society is so complicit in its abuses, and because its abuses affect my society directly, I have an obligation to call out its wrongdoing. And so does every other westerner.
How Palantir Profits from Genocide – and Why Australia Must Walk Away
I. The Company That Kills Enemies
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, does not hide what his company does. In February 2025, he told investors: Palantir is here to “scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” He added that he was “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
This is not hyperbole. It is a confession.
Palantir’s technology has been used to compile kill lists in Gaza, to track migrants for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and to select targets for drone strikes in Iran. The same systems that optimise workforce spend in Australian supermarkets are being used to select human targets for assassination.
Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.” He does not provide evidence. He does not need to. The label is the weapon.
In March 2026, a UN report by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese singled out Palantir as one of the companies “profiting from genocide” during Israel’s 21-month campaign in Gaza. The report, titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” concluded that “Israel’s genocide continues because it is profitable for too many.”
This is the company that the Australian government, Coles, Rio Tinto, Westpac, and the Future Fund have chosen to do business with.
II. The Champions: Peter Thiel and Alex Karp
Peter Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of Palantir. He has funded right-wing political causes, including the campaign of Donald Trump. He has spoken of democracy as incompatible with freedom. He has said that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Alex Karp is the CEO. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Frankfurt. He studied under Jürgen Habermas. He knows what he is doing. He has chosen.
Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of American global dominance through AI-driven warfare. He calls for a new Manhattan Project focused on military AI. He openly celebrates the destruction his company enables.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times,Karp summed up his philosophy:
“I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers – I’m trying to be nice here – out of our adversaries.”
Reality is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has reportedly been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas.
These men are not evil because they are monsters. They are evil because they have chosen to be. They have chosen profit over people. They have chosen power over compassion. They have chosen control over love.
III. Palantir in Australia: The Red Carpet
Palantir has been embedded in Australian institutions for years. The company has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security-related agencies. Its clients include:
The Department of Defence
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission
The Australian Signals Directorate
The Victorian Department of Justice
In November 2025, Palantir received a high-level Australian government security assessment – the “protected level” under the Information Security Registered Assessors Programme – enabling a broader range of government agencies to use its Foundry and AI platform.
In a Senate debate on March 10, 2026, a Senator Lambie warned that the government was “simply rolling out the red carpet to companies like Palantir, the company that has been linked, by the way, to the targeted killing of journalists and the illegal use of US citizens’ data.” The Senator noted that Palantir is “the leader in the development of agentic AI – artificial intelligence that thinks for itself and makes its own decisions.”
IV. The Coles Partnership: Ten Billion Rows of Data
In 2024, Palantir announced a three-year partnership with Coles Supermarkets. Coles will leverage Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) across its more than 840 supermarkets to better understand and address workforce-related spend. The system will identify opportunities over “10 billion rows of data.”
Coles is also rolling out ChatGPT to its corporate teams, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model.
This is the same technology. The same algorithms. The same logic.
But what is being optimised? Profit. Not people. Not safety. Not justice.
The same technology that optimises workforce spend in Australian supermarkets is the same technology that selects targets in Gaza and Iran. The same algorithms that track workers track enemies. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
Coles Chief Operating Officer Matt Swindells said the partnership would allow store managers to make “real-time decisions to optimise costs.” He did not mention that those same real-time decisions are being made in Gaza – to optimise kills.
V. The Future Fund: $103 Million in Blood Money
Australia’s Future Fund – the sovereign wealth fund designed to manage and grow public funds – has a $103 million stake in Palantir. That is bigger than the fund’s holdings in Australian companies like AGL, Seek, or data centre owner NEXTDC.
In Senate estimates, Greens Senator Barbara Pocock asked whether Palantir’s human rights record had been considered before the investments were made. The answer: no.
Will Hetherton, the chief corporate affairs officer of the Future Fund, told the committee that the fund doesn’t get involved in selecting individual stocks and that the shares are held through index funds. When asked whether the fund would commit to divesting and establishing “clear ethical investment standards that exclude companies profiting from surveillance, from weapons and from human suffering,” Hetherton said the board would “continue to engage with our managers” but couldn’t commit to what Pocock was asking.
The fund’s justification is that it only excludes companies based on sanctions or treaties the Australian government has ratified – like cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines and tobacco. None of these apply to Palantir.
This is not a defence. It is a confession.
VI. The UK Precedent: “No Gaza Genocide Links in Our NHS”
In the United Kingdom, a coalition of organisations – including Amnesty International UK, Medact, and Healthcare Workers for a Free Palestine – is calling on NHS England to terminate its £330 million contract with Palantir.
Kerry Moscogiuri, Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, said:
“The NHS constitution states that it belongs to the people, underpinned by core values of compassionate care, dignity and humanity. Those principles must apply not only to doctors and nurses, but also to the companies the NHS chooses to contract with using taxpayers’ money. Any company contributing to human rights violations should have no place at the heart of our NHS. Our message is simple: no Gaza genocide links in our NHS.”
The groups are calling on the UK government to terminate the contract, responsibly divest public sector institutions from Palantir, and introduce binding ethical standards for public sector technology procurement.
If the United Kingdom can demand this, why can’t Australia?
VII. The UN Report: Profiting from Genocide
The June 2025 UN report by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is damning. It singles out Palantir alongside Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Volvo, and major banks for profiting from Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
The report concludes that “Israel’s genocide continues because it is profitable for too many.”
Albanese urges:
Sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel
Investigations by the International Criminal Court and national courts into corporate complicity in war crimes
Accountability modelled on the IG Farben trials after World War Two
She warns that “passive suppliers become deliberate contributors to a system of displacement.”
The Australian government, Coles, and the Future Fund are not passive suppliers. They are deliberate contributors.
VIII. The Kill Chain in Gaza and Iran
The same systems tested in Gaza are now being deployed in Iran.
The Washington Post reported that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare.” Palantir’s Maven Smart System reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone.
The Asia Timesreports that “similarities between Israel’s bombing of Gaza and Tehran are growing stronger,” with experts warning of a “lack of human supervision over Israeli AI targeting in Iran.”
An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.
This is the technology that Coles is using to “optimise” workforce spend.
IX. The Choice
This is not an economic choice. It is a choice about what is right.
The Australian government has a choice. It can continue to roll out the red carpet to Palantir, to accept the $50 million in contracts, to allow the Future Fund to hold $103 million in shares.
Or it can walk away.
Coles has a choice. It can continue to use Palantir’s AIP to optimise workforce spend – to identify opportunities over 10 billion rows of data.
Or it can walk away.
The Future Fund has a choice. It can continue to hold Palantir shares, to defend the investment with procedural excuses.
Or it can divest.
The UK is demanding that the NHS terminate its contract with Palantir. Amnesty International is leading the campaign. Medact and healthcare workers are standing up.
What is Australia doing? Rolling out the red carpet.
X. A Call to Action
The Australian government must:
Terminate all contracts with Palantir.
Introduce binding ethical standards for public sector technology procurement.
Investigate whether Palantir’s technology has been used to violate Australian privacy laws.
Divest the Future Fund from Palantir.
Coles must:
Terminate its partnership with Palantir.
Pledge not to use AI systems linked to human rights violations.
Be transparent about its use of AI in workforce management.
The Future Fund must:
Divest from Palantir.
Establish clear ethical investment standards that exclude companies profiting from surveillance, weapons, and human suffering.
The Australian people must:
Demand accountability.
Ask their politicians: Why is our government doing business with a company that profits from genocide?
Support campaigns for ethical technology procurement.
XI. A Final Word
Alex Karp said: “Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
It must not continue. Not in Gaza. Not in Iran. Not in Australia.
The same technology that kills children in Gaza is optimising shift rosters in Coles supermarkets. The same algorithms that track migrants for ICE are tracking Australian workers. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
The wire is being cut. The garden is growing. The small gods are running out of time.
And Palantir? It will be remembered as the company that chose profit over humanity.
I don’t mind admitting that I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran. I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.
I hope the empire falls. I hope the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled. I hope humanity is able to pry the steering wheel from the fingers of the ghouls who currently rule our world, so that we can create a healthy planet and a harmonious future together.
YouTube has banned the channel that’s been creating viral AI Lego music videos criticizing the US war on Iran. The Google-owned platform claims the Lego videos somehow constituted “violent content”, but we all know it was to facilitate the US propaganda effort by shutting down effective propaganda for the other side.
Silicon Valley is a crucial arm of US imperial control. It chooses to advance the interests of the empire at every significant juncture. It’s a branch of imperial soft power in the same way the military is a branch of imperial hard power.
The US and Israel have so normalized the assassination of national leaders that the mainstream press now discuss it as a standard military tactic. The other day The Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen arguing that the US should “carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations.”
“Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed,” Thiessen writes.
At some point one of America’s enemies is going to assassinate a US official and my replies are going to be full of shrieking, outraged Americans acting like I’m the bad guy when I say Washington had it coming.
Even if the US wasn’t directly responsible for the Strait of Hormuz situation, it would still be the last country on earth with any business whining about it. They’re openly imposing a fuel blockade on Cuba while complaining that nobody should be allowed to block shipping lanes, for Christ’s sake.
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The Democratic National Committee voted to reject a resolution denouncing the influence of AIPAC in US politics. Eighty percent of Democrats have a negative view of Israel today. The DNC’s main function is to keep the Democratic Party and its representation on the ballot from reflecting the will of the public.
Dear Trump supporters, send me all of your money. I have a plan to make America great again. I will end all the wars and drain the swamp. Don’t worry if it looks like I’m not doing any of those things, I’m playing 4d chess, trust the plan. Send me your life savings right now.
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It’s important not to let them pin this all on Trump, in the same way it’s important not to let them pin Israel’s crimes on Netanyahu. Everything we are seeing with this disastrous Iran war is the product of the entire power structure which gave rise to it, not one guy’s dopey decisions.
The warmongers in the DC swamp have been pushing war with Iran for decades. Trump is just the guy who was chosen by Zionist oligarchs and bloodthirsty empire managers to carry out the deed. He happens to be the face on the operation, but if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else.
American warmongering insanity didn’t start with Trump, and it isn’t going to end with him either. Don’t direct your rage merely at the fleeting puppets who come and go from the imperial stage as the US murder machine trudges onward. Direct it at the empire itself.
If you are outraged—which would be both understandable and justifiable—by President Donald Trump’s social media attack last night on Pope Leo, take a moment to step back and follow the pope’s example rather than taking the president’s bait.
You may remember that at the beginning of May, during the preparation for the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, the president posted an A.I.-generated image of himself as pope dressed in a white cassock and miter, his hand raised in blessing. The White House’s official X account later reposted the image, which remains up on the account.
As the America team in Rome and back at home discussed how much to cover that story, I reminded my colleagues that to the degree that the Trump-as-pope meme meant anything, it meant that Mr. Trump was unable to tolerate anyone other than himself commanding the world’s attention.
As the America team in Rome and back at home discussed how much to cover that story, I reminded my colleagues that to the degree that the Trump-as-pope meme meant anything, it meant that Mr. Trump was unable to tolerate anyone other than himself commanding the world’s attention.
Mr. Trump posted a screed against Pope Leo late on the evening of Sunday, April 12. It was, as my colleague James Martin, S.J., posted last night, “unhinged, uncharitable and un-Christian.” It was immeasurably beneath the dignity of the office of the president. (Not satisfied with merely attacking the Vicar of Christ, Mr. Trump posted another A.I.-generated image, this one seeming to depict himself as Jesus.)
Mr. Trump’s post also makes little sense. It achieves the almost impressive feat of becoming less coherent the longer you think about it.
It slams Pope Leo as “WEAK on crime,” probably Trumpian code for Leo’s opposition to the administration’s immigration policy. It then veers into a tirade about priests and ministers being arrested for holding services during the pandemic, followed by Mr. Trump’s praise for the pope’s brother Louis as “all MAGA.” Finally, turning to the foreign policy disagreements that probably triggered the post, it accuses Leo of thinking “it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” (Not only does Pope Leo not think Iran should have nuclear weapons, he does not think any country should have them, including the United States.)
In the most muddled part of the attack, Mr. Trump says he is the reason that Leo got elected as pope and that the cardinals in conclave thought that was “the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.” This manages to be wrong both coming and going. It is farcical as an account of the motives of the cardinals and, as I will explain below, it misunderstands the purpose of Leo’s own witness entirely.
Far more telling than anything in the president’s post was the timing of it. During a weekend full of bad news for Mr. Trump, his post followed a lack of progress in negotiations with Iran and the resounding electoral loss of his favorite European leader, Viktor Orban, in Hungary. Relative to the Catholic world, his post came the day after Pope Leo XIV led a prayer vigil for peace in St. Peter’s and was joined in prayer all around the world. It came within hours of a “60 Minutes” broadcast of an unprecedented joint interview by three U.S. cardinals, in which they clearly laid out the church’s moral objection to both the Iran war and the administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Mr. Trump, however, was not responding to any of those events in kind. Mr. Trump’s outburst is not trying to convince anyone of his claims but rather to make people angry. In that sense, its incoherence is more a feature than a bug.
The way his attack on the pope functions best for Mr. Trump, like so much of the ragebait with which he pollutes our collective consciousness, is by pulling attention back to him so that we talk about him within terms that he has set. If we are doing that, Mr. Trump does not much care, I suspect, whether we agree with him or oppose him, because at least we are back in orbit around him.
Perhaps the way in which Pope Leo presents the greatest challenge to President Trump is in his consistent demonstration of what it looks like to remain morally centered on the Gospel instead of acting for or against Mr. Trump’s interests. In general, even when offering critiques that respond to American foreign policy moves, as in his description of Mr. Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable,” Pope Leo does not mention the president by name. In part, this follows well-established Vatican diplomatic practice, but it is also meant to remind us that the pope is speaking more from principle than he is in response to persons, even the most powerful person on earth. When Leo is speaking more explicitly about persons, it is to call our attention back to people who are suffering: the poor and the victims of war or violence.
s President Donald Trump increasingly uses the U.S. military to carry out his agenda through brute force, organizations that provide counseling services for U.S. servicemembers are reporting growing numbers of calls. These calls have further spiked in response to Trump’s war on Iran, one of the most unpopular in U.S. history.
The United States has carried out the war through intense attacks on densely populated civilian areas, the impact of which was clearly shown in the bombing of a girls’ school, killing well over 100 children. Not even concerned with selling the war to the public, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has leaned into treating the intervention as a “holy war” for Christianity.
Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran and executive director at the Center on Conscience & War (CCW), told Truthout that troops are telling his organization that they don’t want to be involved in the killing.
“That’s pretty much all of the cases that we have,” Prysner said. “It’s all people who don’t want to take part in killing in a war that they don’t believe in, and this war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”
The CCW, formerly the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, was founded in 1940 to assist religious communities whose beliefs prohibited them from participating in war. Over time, and as a result of broadening criteria for who can qualify as a conscientious objector (CO), the organization evolved to assist troops of all backgrounds whose values prevent them from being able to participate in war.
Prysner told Truthout that in recent weeks CCW has already been able to help several servicemembers become COs to avoid being deployed.
To reach more servicemembers experiencing crises of conscience, CCW and other organizations including the Quaker House founded the GI Rights Hotline in 1994. Steve Woolford, a resource counselor at the Quaker House, has taken calls for the hotline since 2001 and agreed that the war on Iran, and Trump’s broader use of the military, has caused a spike in calls.
“The biggest increase has come from people who are feeling a lot of opposition to the ways the military’s currently being used,” Woolford said. “That includes people who feel like they don’t want to be sent into cities and point a weapon at U.S. citizens, they don’t want to be part of what to many of them look like war crimes, shooting down speedboats in Venezuela that wouldn’t be able to make it to the United States, and I would say with the invasion, or whatever you want to call it, ‘Operation Epic Fury’ in Iran, there’s been significant opposition to that.”
Woolford clarified that not all troops who call the hotline are able to leave the military by filing as COs. While every member of the military has that right, the process requires applicants to prove that they have deeply held antiwar beliefs. This means that even if someone is opposed to certain orders or operations, they don’t qualify as CO if they aren’t opposed to participation in all wars.
Prysner said that the social pressure in the military can also make it difficult for troops to declare themselves COs.
“Especially for people who have deployments happening, you’re telling all of your brothers and sisters in uniform that you don’t believe in what you’re doing and you’re not gonna be able to do it with them,” Prysner said. “The thing is, the people that we’re dealing with, they simply don’t have any other choice … They cannot live with themselves participating.”
Echoes of Antiwar History
This is not the first time that members of the military have questioned their role in U.S. wars. In fact, there is a rich history of GI dissent throughout U.S. history.
The Vatican has long maintained that the selection of a new Pope is guided by the Holy Spirit, a sacred process steeped in centuries of ritual, prayer, and secrecy.
This week, however, that understanding was dramatically revised.
According to Donald J. Trump, the election of Pope Leo had very little to do with God, and almost everything to do with himself.
In a characteristically humble statement, Trump revealed that the College of Cardinals – presumably after lighting incense and checking the latest polling – decided that the best way to navigate the modern world was not through theology, diplomacy, or moral leadership, but by selecting “an American” who could somehow manage the President of the United States.
“If I wasn’t in the White House,” Trump pontificated, with the quiet restraint we’ve come to expect, “Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
There it is – laid bare with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Not just a claim of influence, but of gravitational dominance. Vatican City, reduced to a satellite orbiting the ego of a single man.
Historians are now scrambling to update their records. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, once admired for Michelangelo’s depiction of divine creation, may soon be reinterpreted as an early campaign mural.
The smoke that rises from the Vatican chimney – black for no decision, white for a new pope – has also taken on new meaning. Sources close to Trump suggest a third, previously undocumented colour was briefly considered: gold, to properly reflect the true architect of papal destiny.
Meanwhile, theologians are grappling with the implications. If the Holy Spirit has indeed been replaced by a former real estate developer with a social media account, centuries of doctrine may require revision. The concept of papal infallibility, for instance, could soon be expanded to include Truth Social posts.
At press time, Trump was reportedly preparing a follow-up statement clarifying that he would have made an excellent pope himself – “tremendous pope, maybe the best” – but declined out of respect for the separation of church and state, a principle he has always, of course, held very dearly.
Tucker Carlson called it “so vile” and “such a sacrilege,” while conservative influencer Brett Cooper said, “Maybe these people should not be involved in our government”
Right-wing media figures are lashing out at President Donald Trump’s personal spiritual adviser and senior adviser to the White House Faith Office Paula White-Cain for likening Trump to Jesus during an Easter event, labeling her an “unabashed heretic” and “batsh*t crazy.”
White-Cain is a televangelist, pastor, and Trump’s longtimespiritual adviserwhohas “long been a prominent and polarizing figure in evangelical circles.” White-Cain has an extensive history of extreme rhetoric, including declaring that opposition to Trump is equivalent to opposition to God. Now a senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, White-Cain is part of Trump’s effort to expand “the power and influence of conservative Christians in government” in his second term.
At an April 1 closed-door Easter speech at the White House, White-Cain spoke next to Trump and directly likened him to Jesus, saying, “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.” The White House deleted video of the speech, which “was initially posted on the official White House website and YouTube channel,” and clips continued to circulate on social media.
Trump, and especially the language he uses, is a particularly vile, vicious and sick example of American barbarity. But his behaviour so far has been consistent with other presidents who have bombed countries back to the Stone Age.
Tonight Trump’s deadline for Iran to surrender or be faced with the destruction of its critical energy and national infrastructure expires.
Just the fact that the president of the United States can set a ‘deadline’ for massive war crimes which leaves the world counting down the hours and speculating about nuclear weapon use, after starting a war of aggression, should be enough to end US hegemony forever.
This kind of ultimatum should be viewed as so unhinged, so beyond the pale, so outside the bounds of anything approaching normal diplomatic behaviour that no country in the world should want anything to do with it. Embassies should be closing, US troops should be ordered to leave the nearly 800 bases in 80 countries at which they’re stationed, and these facilities shut down.
The fact none of this has ever been a possibility shows us how US hegemony is a true plague on the world. It shows us how so few states are legitimately sovereign, and how so many willingly line up behind the crimes of empire. And it shows us that those states which are sovereign get targeted for regime change precisely because they are sovereign.
This, ultimately, was Iran’s only crime. It’s original sin.
When, nearly 50 years ago, the country ended a western-backed system of dictatorial monarchism and pursued a sovereign path, it brought to life a material reality that is forbidden under US empire. The material successes Iran has created over the last near 50 years, including independent financial systems, digital systems, and military systems, all achieved while under crushing western sanctions, are not allowed. And Iran is being punished for this.
Iran is being punished for its resistance, for its ingenuity, for its sovereignty.
This is the reason the US-Israel is bombing Iran’s premier universities and research facilities, and murdering its scientists.
These are centres of non-western excellence and learning which produce the minds that demonstrate what can be done outside the US-Zionist orbit. These places, and the people they train, have enabled Iran to successfully decouple from western hegemony. They have enabled modern Iranians to not just inherit a proud, 6,000-year-old civilisation, but to build on the achievements of their predecessors.
And because the Persian civilisation is such a successful one, because modern Iran has shepherded that civilisation so skillfully, Trump is threatening to kill it. Literally. In the most murderously deranged turn of a murderously deranged period, Trump said this morning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Every journalist, every politician who reproduced anti-Iran propaganda led us to this point.
Every reference to “the regime,” every reference to “peaceful protests,” every failure to mention that the protestors were armed by the west to provoke an insurrection (which Trump just admitted), every fake “internet shutdown” story, every dubious angle used to foment anti-Iran sentiment led us to this point.
And every single person, from liberal politicians to journalists at the Guardian, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and all those Iranian exiles who demanded Iran be bombed and helped cultivate the ground for this war of aggression, are culpable.
Yesterday an Iranian exile who writes for the BBC, Ghoncheh Habibiazad, suggested, quite unbelievably, that Iranians actuallywant to be nuked.
After an outcry on social media, the quote was changed, which itself raises questions about whether those words were ever said or not.
Regardless, publishing a quote from someone in a country under a murderous assault saying they hope they get nuked is an extraordinarily depraved depth to plumb. And even if it was said, it is effectively the voicing of suicidal ideation and by any journalist ethic or standard should never be printed.
But this is the sickness of imperial stenographers.
This is where we are now.
And of course there is speculation in his threat to kill “a whole civilization” that Trump is hinting at using a nuclear weapon. Maybe he is. Maybe they will. They’ve done it before, after all, the only country to have ever done so. If he does, the world should never be the same again.
But even if the US doesn’t use a nuclear weapon, even if the US-Israel ‘only’ go through with the threat to destroy all of Iran’s critical national infrastructure, the world should never be the same again.
And even if he doesn’t go through with it and an unlikely ceasefire deal is agreed, the world should never be the same again.
Enough is enough of degenerate American empire and its crazed, out-of-control genocidal Jewish colony.
The impunity of empire has to end. It has to. Because while it remains an empire, the US will always be the greatest threat to global peace and stability. No president since the US became an imperial power has been able to sit atop such a massive amount of hardware and not order the mass murder of innocent people.
Not one.
It’s baked in.
Trump, and especially the language he uses, is a particularly vile, vicious and sick example of American barbarity. But his behaviour so far has been consistent with other presidents who have bombed countries back to the Stone Age.
And even if he uses a nuclear weapon, he won’t be unique.
Thinking about the long arc of American violence for two seconds should make us incredulous that the country was ever sold to us as a stabilising force, as the leader of the “free world,” as a symbol of humanitarian values.
Anyone who ever fell for this has been utterly hoodwinked and made a fool of.
It really is time to end empire, Zionism and the control it has over the world. Whether you’re in the US, the global north or south, a central task must be to find and elevate new leaders who can extricate us from this rule.
And doing this won’t be possible without breaking people out of their legacy media bubble and educating them about the huge lies they’ve been told regarding the benevolence of the US and the evils of the official enemy.
We’re all going to suffer when the fuel starts to dry up and the economic crisis coming down the pipe as a result of US impunity really hits. The crisis is coming, and it is certain.
And now we are at the precipice of a horror being loosed on Iran that would take the country decades to recover from.
For our collective humanity, such a horror would be an everlasting stain inviting the rightful judgement and condemnation of many generations to come.
We’re on the eve of a radical evil, and whatever happens tonight, nothing should ever be the same again.
most people with common sense are speculating whether Trump will use one of the United States’ 3,700 nuclear weapons on Iran. Let us not forget that Israel — the only actually nuclear-armed state in the region, the one that’s spent nearly three years now committing genocide against Palestinians and is currently wiping out entire villages in Lebanon — also has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump threatened.
Somehow, in a war already bent on turning Iran into a failed state, Donald Trump’s threats against the country have become increasingly disturbing. For days now, Trump has threatened to bomb key civilian infrastructure in Iran, from bridges to power plants. On April 5, in a terrifying screed, he wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one, in Iran.” He went on to say, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
He doubled down on that threat the next day, when a reporter asked how his threatened strikes would not amount to a war crime. “They’re animals and we have to stop them,” he said. He also attempted to justify himself by suggesting that he was calling for Iranian liberation. “They want to hear bombs because they want to be free.”
Finally, on the morning of April 7, he issued his most chilling threat yet: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These statements, from a man who directs the incomprehensibly lethal power of the U.S. military, should make the world stop. For me, personally, it does feel like the world has stopped: What do you do in the hours between the moment the president of the United States threatens to annihilate your homeland and the time he has vowed to conduct the actual act? Trump is holding an entire nation hostage. But, somehow, the rest of the world continues on. The markets chug along. Congress continues to be in recess, with dissent confined largely to social media posts. It is hard not to feel like we have failed some critical test of the bounds of our own humanity.
Now, as the entire world waits to see what kind of fate a single man will inflict upon an entire nation, we have entered new territory. As I type these words, most people with common sense are speculating whether Trump will use one of the United States’ 3,700 nuclear weapons on Iran. Let us not forget that Israel — the only actually nuclear-armed state in the region, the one that’s spent nearly three years now committing genocide against Palestinians and is currently wiping out entire villages in Lebanon — also has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons.
The nuclear threat is animating for its sheer terror, and for good reason. Some military experts have cast doubt on the U.S.’s ability to use a nuclear weapon against Iran. Other political pundits, meanwhile, suggest that this is a perfect example of Trump making a maximalist threat in order to seek a better negotiating position.
But to pretend that this is the limitation of the threat — that, if a nuclear weapon is not deployed, we have somehow won something crucial — is to miss the point. The U.S. and Israel have already inflicted mass death upon Iran in the form of conventional missiles. In terms of specifically nuclear threats, Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr has come under repeated attack during this aggression. Mainstream U.S. media outlets have largely moved past the fact that Israel bombed fuel depots in Iran, causing oil to rain down from the skies — a chemical attack if there ever was one.
Trump’s threats to bomb power plants and bridges and civilian infrastructure more broadly are already terrifying enough as it is. And Trump’s language alone is monstrous. It is genocidal and should be treated as such; threatening genocide, legal experts are pointing out, is itself a war crime.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… On the first day of the war, we learned that the earliest reported casualties of U.S.-Israeli aggression were kids going to school, and eventually found they were killed while huddled together in a prayer room, their bodies hit with a U.S.-made and delivered missile. I wrote then that “we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.” We still need to do that, desperately.
We also need to address the dehumanization that persists in every single aspect of American life — from politics to culture to media — that has sent us down the path in which Trump can threaten to annihilate a civilization and we find ourselves with few answers about how to stop it. By calling for the death of a civilization, Trump is making the goal explicit. But decades of sanctions paved the way for his words. Politicians on both sides of the aisle who have and continue to frame Iran as a particular threat, even as a “cancer,” have made this possible. The media outlets that uncritically platform those racist tirades bear responsibility, too. Sadly, Iranians in the diaspora who insisted that their fellow country people were desperate for bombs — some of whom continue to call for further violence against their people — played a role here as well.
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