After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing

 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

– James Baldwin

You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.

– Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell

Every day we scroll past photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly, they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten... This is not merely a political development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age. 

We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. 

When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference.

As the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki return once again, they do so largely eclipsed by the Trump administration’s transformation of the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary into a spectacle of militarized patriotism, historical mythmaking, and American triumphalism. The pageantry celebrates a narrative of national innocence while eclipsing one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities committed in its name. 

The more urgent question, therefore, is not simply what happened in August 1945. It is what has become of a society whose formative institutions increasingly educate people to accommodate violence rather than resist it.

The answer lies in more than what Gore Vidal once described as America’s cultivated historical amnesia. Under gangster capitalism, forgetting has become a governing principle of power. We inhabit a regime of organized forgetting that erases bodies from public consciousness even as it erases historical memory itself. It teaches us to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and to consume the suffering of others as another spectacle in an endless cycle of distraction, entertainment, and forgetting. Such regimes are not abstractions. They become visible whenever policies capable of producing immense human suffering disappear beneath the noise of political spectacle—as in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, a policy that recent analyses estimate has already contributed to “an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.”

How else are we to understand a world in which more than sixty-four thousand Palestinian children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023 while their suffering disappears almost as quickly as the headlines that briefly acknowledge it? How else do we explain the reported deaths of more than one hundred children in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, an event that barely registered before it was displaced by the next manufactured spectacle? These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a broader cultural condition in which atrocity is consumed, circulated, and forgotten with astonishing speed.

This is the deepest wound inflicted by authoritarian culture. It does not merely normalize violence; it reorganizes consciousness. It severs suffering from compassion, history from responsibility, and death from mourning. 

When the victims disappear from memory almost as quickly as they disappear from life, power secures one of its greatest triumphs: it destroys not only bodies but the public capacity to recognize their loss. In that moment, forgetting becomes the final act of violence, completing in consciousness what bombs, prisons, armies, and occupations begin in history. 

This cultural condition has been analyzed most powerfully by Robert Jay Lifton.

Robert Jay Lifton gave this condition a name: psychic numbing. He used the phrase to describe the diminished capacity to feel in the face of overwhelming violence. What begins as a psychological defense against unbearable suffering can become a cultural and political condition. Entire societies learn to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and eventually to forget. 

This condition is not merely an individual affliction, or type of “impaired mourning”; it is a form of public pedagogy. It is cultivated by schools emptied of critical thought, historical consciousness, and civic purpose; it is produced by media cultures organized around spectacle, digital platforms that reward distraction, a culture of immediacy, and political narratives that teach us to accommodate cruelty rather than confront it. Against this pedagogy of forgetting stands the difficult and necessarily troubling work of historical memory.

These questions matter because remembrance is not the same as historical memory. Official rituals of remembrance often console us by confining catastrophe safely to the past. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes in America, U.S.A., historical memory performs a very different task. It returns us to unfinished histories whose consequences continue to inhabit the present. It unsettles rather than reassures. It refuses the comfort of distance and insists that the past is never truly past when the conditions that produced it survive in altered forms. Historical memory does not ask us simply to remember what happened. It demands that we recognize how the logics that made catastrophe possible continue to shape the present.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong to precisely this kind of historical memory because they remind us that atrocities begin long before the first bomb falls. They begin when language is removed from moral responsibility, when history is erased or rewritten through the vocabulary of conquest and colonization, and when entire populations are rendered disposable before they are destroyed. Every genocide is first a crisis of language, memory, and moral imagination. 

By the time the machinery of death is set in motion, the deeper work has already been done; compassion has been weakened, historical consciousness has been dismantled, and violence has been normalized as common sense. 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand not only as symbols of unprecedented destruction but also as warnings about the political culture that makes such destruction imaginable. Few have expressed this truth more forcefully than the late Howard Zinn: What means could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? 

And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high as from Moses on the Mount.

The atomic bombings were not merely military events that concluded the Second World War. They inaugurated a new historical formation in which scientific achievement became inseparable from industrialized killing, technological rationality overwhelmed ethical judgment, and civilian annihilation could be justified through the sanitized language of military necessity, national security, and historical inevitability. Long before the bombs incinerated cities, another devastation had already taken place. Human beings had been transformed into abstractions, dehumanized through racist slurs, strategic calculations, and collateral damage.

The bomb exploded first in consciousness. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”  When language is colonized, memory itself becomes vulnerable to conquest—capturing consciousness long before it captures territory. 

Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to ash, language had already been emptied of moral responsibility, memory had been rewritten in the service of empire, and entire populations had been rendered disposable.

That moral rupture did not disappear with the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became embedded in institutions, policies, cultural narratives, and educational practices that normalized militarism while celebrating technological mastery divorced from ethical restraint. The bomb was transformed into a symbol of national virtue rather than a warning about the abyss into which modern civilization had descended. 

As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell observed, American political culture constructed an official narrative that sought not to confront the moral catastrophe of Hiroshima but to redeem it, converting an act of unprecedented destruction into a story of national innocence and salvation. That narrative did more than justify the bomb. It reorganized moral consciousness.

Lifton argued that Hiroshima did not wound only its victims; it also left a profound mark on the American imagination, fostering a culture of denial, moral justification, and emotional numbing. Yet he never regarded Hiroshima solely as a source of despair. He insisted that confronting its moral legacy honestly could foster resilience, renewal, and what he called “survivor wisdom,” restoring the historical memory and moral imagination necessary to resist future catastrophes. That insight is even more urgent today because the habits of denial and indifference he identified have escaped the nuclear age and become defining features of contemporary political culture.

Among survivors of Hiroshima, this diminished capacity to feel initially functioned as a tragic form of psychological survival. Faced with scenes too horrific to absorb, many found themselves emotionally paralyzed, temporarily incapable of responding to the landscape of death surrounding them. But Lifton extended the concept much further. He argued that the same condition also characterized those who designed the bomb, authorized its use, justified its necessity, and later defended its moral legitimacy. What began as an emergency psychological defense gradually became a cultural condition. This insight reaches far beyond Hiroshima. What begins as a defense against unbearable suffering can evolve into a political culture organized around indifference. 

A society that learns not to feel one atrocity gradually acquires the capacity to ignore others. Lifton warned that once Americans constructed what he called a “cordon sanitaire” around Hiroshima—a barrier protecting them from confronting its moral implications—that habit of avoidance spread to other forms of collective suffering. The numbing did not stop with Hiroshima. It became a way of inhabiting the world.

Nothing could better describe our present historical moment. We inhabit societies saturated with images of catastrophe. Yet rather than enlarging our ethical imagination, this relentless exposure often produces exhaustion, indifference, and resignation.

Even more troubling, it feeds a resurgent war culture that glorifies domination, celebrates militarized masculinity, and equates physical strength with moral worth. As Susan Sontag argued in her classic essay on fascist aesthetics, authoritarian culture does more than justify violence; it aestheticizes it. Domination becomes seductive, hierarchy beautiful, submission desirable, and the spectacle of power detached from the suffering it produces. 

Violence no longer appears as a moral catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of strength, discipline, virility, and national renewal. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of militarized masculinity is not simply a political posture; it is the contemporary expression of this fascist aesthetic. 

It transforms domination into virtue, physical force into moral authority, misogyny into masculine authenticity, and violence into the highest expression of citizenship. In doing so, it redefines citizenship itself, replacing democratic responsibility with militarized obedience, civic courage with warrior masculinity, and public life with a theater of force.

In such a culture, violence becomes another genre of entertainment, another spectacle in the economy of distraction. The constant circulation of suffering no longer enlarges compassion; it erodes it, teaching people not simply to witness violence but increasingly to admire, consume, and normalize it.

Lifton anticipated this transformation with extraordinary clarity. As this moral desensitization spreads, he argued, people require ever greater spectacles of violence simply to feel anything at all. Disaster becomes normalized, and ordinary suffering loses its capacity to disturb us.

Here the legacy of Hiroshima converges with the digital culture of the twenty-first century.

Algorithms reward outrage while discouraging reflection. Social media platforms monetize fear, resentment, and humiliation. Corporate news reduces war to spectacle, compressing unbearable histories into disposable images. Artificial intelligence accelerates the circulation of propaganda, conspiracy, and racial mythology while diminishing the time necessary for thoughtful judgment. We increasingly encounter suffering not as fellow human beings but as data, content, or scrolling images. Distance becomes permanent. Responsibility evaporates.

This is not simply a technological crisis. It is a pedagogical one.

Every culture teaches people how to see, what to value, whose lives matter, and whose deaths may be ignored. The most powerful educational institutions today are no longer schools alone. They are digital platforms, corporate media, entertainment industries, and algorithmic systems that organize attention itself. These institutions do more than distribute information. They shape consciousness, organize attention, and cultivate habits of feeling. They manufacture forms of identification while teaching indifference toward others.

Under such conditions, fascism no longer requires spectacular rallies or uniforms to reproduce itself. It works more quietly and, for that reason, often more effectively. It reshapes perception, colonizes language, erodes historical memory, and teaches people to regard entire populations as invaders, parasites, criminals, terrorists, or demographic threats rather than as fellow human beings. By the time the machinery of violence is set in motion, its deepest victory has already been won: the democratic imagination has been hollowed out, compassion has yielded to fear, and disposability has become common sense.

Today this pedagogy of dehumanization is once again becoming normalized. Calls for mass deportation, fantasies of ethnic purification disguised as “remigration,” attacks on immigrants, racial conspiracy theories, and genocidal rhetoric directed at Palestinians all depend upon a prior educational achievement: teaching people to regard certain lives as disposable.

That is why figures such as Elon Musk matter. They matter not because they are uniquely evil but because they occupy commanding positions within the cultural apparatuses that now educate hundreds of millions of people. When racist conspiracies, demographic panic, and authoritarian fantasies are amplified through platforms reaching much of the globe, white supremacist propaganda is transformed into common sense. Hatred becomes normalized precisely because it is repeated, circulated, rewarded, and stripped of its historical genealogy.

As Jamelle Bouie has argued, Musk’s rhetoric is no longer confined to coded insinuations or internet provocation. It increasingly echoes themes drawn from the contemporary white nationalist imagination: affirming slogans such as “First the traitors, then the invaders”; declaring that “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor”; amplifying demographic panic over declining white birthrates; and normalizing the language of racial replacement and ethnic cleansing. 

Bouie also notes the disturbing resonance between this rhetoric and the political imaginary of The Turner Diaries, where “traitors” who defend a multiracial democracy are marked for elimination before the campaign against supposed “invaders” begins. This should not be dismissed merely as inflammatory rhetoric.  Language of this kind does not simply describe the world; it prepares people to inhabit one in which exclusion, racial purification, and political violence appear not only legitimate but necessary.

Yet we should resist the temptation to describe figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Stephen Miller simply as monsters. 

As Jorge Gonzalez Arocha observes, the language of monstrosity may satisfy our moral outrage, but it ultimately obscures the deeper workings of power. Monsters exist outside history. They are imagined as aberrations, exceptions to ordinary life. Fascism is neither. It is produced within history, cultivated through institutions, sustained by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, amplified by media, and normalized through the everyday pedagogies of schools, digital platforms, entertainment industries, and political culture. When we imagine authoritarianism as the work of monsters, we mistake symptoms for causes, overlooking the social relations, institutional arrangements, and cultural forces that make such politics possible.

The enduring lesson of Hiroshima is not that monsters occasionally seize power. It is that educated people, respected institutions, celebrated scientists, compliant journalists, and ordinary citizens can become participants in systems that separate technical intelligence from moral responsibility. The bureaucrats who planned Hiroshima were not monsters. The scientists who perfected the bomb were not monsters. The journalists who celebrated it were not monsters. They were products of institutions that transformed mass death into administrative necessity and moral obligation. The greatest crimes of modernity are rarely committed outside civilization; they are committed in its name.

The political danger of the language of monstrosity is that it individualizes what is fundamentally systemic. It encourages us to search for evil personalities rather than authoritarian cultures, for pathological leaders rather than the pedagogical apparatuses that educate people into accepting cruelty, disposability, and organized forgetting. Remove one authoritarian leader and another will take his place so long as the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, and educational forces that manufacture authoritarian consciousness remain intact. That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it remains the central political lesson of our own time.

History never repeats itself mechanically. Gaza is not Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not Gaza. Their histories are different, their contexts distinct.  But they reveal a recurring political logic: civilian populations rendered disposable, overwhelming violence justified as necessity, bureaucratic language replacing ethical judgment, and technological superiority mistaken for moral legitimacy. Whenever human beings become abstractions rather than persons, the conditions for atrocity are already present.

This is why remembering Nagasaki matters. Historical comparison is valuable not because it erases difference but because it reveals recurring political logics.

Historical memory breaks the spell of moral indifference. It restores the connection between feeling and judgment, conscience and politics. It reminds us that every genocide begins not with the machinery of death but with the pedagogy of dehumanization. Long before bodies are destroyed, language is corrupted, history is erased, compassion is ridiculed, and entire populations are taught to disappear morally before they disappear physically.

Lifton believed that confronting Hiroshima could become a source of renewal because it enabled us to recover our moral imagination, relearn how to feel, and reconnect ourselves to the broader human project. That may be the most important lesson Nagasaki offers today.

The struggle against fascism begins not only by resisting authoritarian institutions but by refusing the moral indifference upon which they depend. Against organized forgetting and manufacture illiteracy and amnesia, we must recover historical memory. Against the politics of disposability, we must insist upon the irreducible dignity of every human life. Against the seductive myths of technological omnipotence and permanent war, we must reclaim a language capable of naming both truth and justice.

The authoritarian abyss is no longer a distant possibility. It has entered the present. It appears wherever democracy yields to militarism, wherever cruelty is celebrated as strength, wherever historical memory is erased, and wherever entire peoples are stripped of their humanity in the name of security, racial purity, or national destiny. The forces that produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not disappeared; they have assumed new languages, new technologies, and new justifications.

The question is no longer whether we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is whether we can recover the moral urgency necessary to prevent their logic from becoming the defining political grammar of the twenty-first century. 

Historical memory is no longer simply an act of remembrance; it has become a condition of survival. To remember is to resist. But memory cannot remain a sanctuary for conscience; it must become a catalyst for collective struggle. Its highest purpose is not simply to preserve the past but to interrupt/rupture/transform the present. Only when remembrance gives rise to solidarity, organized resistance, and the struggle to create a more just world does it honor those whose lives history has tried to erase.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

 

The Plot to Ruin America

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So, who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land.

But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism. Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota.

That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold.

But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.”

Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas. Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025.

The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative.

That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

CounterPunch, this piece first appeared on Red Scare. Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

 

Birthright Citizenship

 

When the Supreme Court issues its decision in the birthright citizenship case, likely this week, the odds are that it will be a loss for the Trump administration. The Court heard argument in U.S. v. Barbara on April 1, 2026. The issue is whether Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” can end birthright citizenship.

Trump’s effort to rewrite the Constitution is blatantly illegal. Doing that takes a constitutional amendment, not a presidential whim. 

And while there may be a vote or two for the administration’s theory that the birthright citizenship provision and accompanying laws don’t mean what they plainly say, it seems more likely, following oral argument, that there are at least six votes for the noncontroversial legal view that the 14th Amendment means what it has been understood to say for over one hundred years—people born in the United States are entitled to U.S. citizenship, with rare exceptions for situations like the children of diplomats.

If you want a refresher on the issues in this case, find it here.

So don’t be surprised and pleased when the Court rules against Trump on this one. It won’t be remarkable. It won’t be a signal that the Court is finally getting tough with the executive branch. This is, put simply, a case that would not have happened in any other administration, because no other president would have attempted such a boldly illegal approach to changing the Constitution. Rejecting Trump’s effort to circumvent the law is a low bar for the Supreme Court to clear.

We saw a better example of this Court’s view of executive branch power last week when it agreed to let the administration end temporary protected status (TPS) for approximately 336,000 people who are legally present in this country because of natural disasters in their home countries—Haitians who came here following earthquakes and hurricanes, or Syrians who came due to armed conflict in their country. The Trump administration suddenly terminated their permission to remain in the country in mid-2025.

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Alito, with a majority that included Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has two adopted children from Haiti, the Court held that the courts can’t review a president’s decisions about TPS. In other words, Trump can do whatever he wants to these people, and the courts can’t stay his hand.

Creator: Lynne Sladky | Credit: AP

The only exception, according to the Court, is for constitutional claims. There was a claim here that the decisions were impermissibly race-based: TPS was terminated for Haitians, Syrians, Venezuelans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans. The majority’s willingness to ignore evidence that the administration’s decision was based on race was so transparently in contravention of the facts that it suggests the exception for constitutional claims exists on paper, but this Supreme Court will never give it any weight. Justice Alito held that so long as a race-neutral explanation for the government’s action exists, no matter how much evidence of racial animus is otherwise involved, a plaintiff is unlikely to succeed on constitutional claims.

The part of the TPS case that’s most worth reading is Justice Kagan’s dissent. She started out by noting that the countries the administration says it’s safe for people to be forced to return to “continue to be unsafe.” Justice Kagan wrote, “Secretaries [of State] have repeatedly examined the conditions in the two countries and have repeatedly determined that they remain too dangerous to permit safe return.” 

But Kristi Noem suddenly decided they were safe. When the case was brought, lower courts ruled in favor of the TPS holders, finding that Noem likely violated the law when she made her decision “without first consulting with other agencies about current country conditions.” Kagan writes, later in her dissent, that “Haiti and Syria are countries that the State Department continues to list as too dangerous for travel; they may be yet more perilous for a former inhabitant.”

But it was the argument about race and the Haitian plaintiffs that revealed the conservative majority’s willingness to tolerate the unacceptable. Justice Kagan was joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson in calling it “plain to see” that race was involved in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. Kagan wrote that “the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.” Ouch.

The legal standard for what the plaintiffs have to prove is taken from a 1977 case, Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. They must show that “a racially ‘discriminatory purpose’ was ‘a motivating factor’ in the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation.” That means “One factor among many is enough when the factor is racial to presumptively establish an equal protection violation.” That means the administration’s decision to terminate TPS should be evaluated in light of “‘circumstantial and direct evidence of intent’ that is available,” as well as “‘[t]he historical background of the decision’; the ‘sequence of events leading up’ to it; and, most relevant here, ‘contemporary statements’ by decisionmakers.” That is the well-established legal standard that the majority purported to apply.

Justice Kagan takes the majority to task, writing that: “The evidence they [the Haitian TPS holders] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print. (Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.)” She then recites the comments the majority declined to include:

“Haitians are ‘eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].’”

“Haitians in the United States ‘probably have AIDS.’”

“Haiti is a ‘shithole country,’ which is ‘filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.’”

“Haitian immigration is ‘like a death wish for our country.’”

“Haitians, along with some others, are ‘poisoning the blood’ of our country.”

She concludes with an example of Trump saying, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”

Kagan assesses the majority’s view of Trump’s comments like this: “The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not ‘overtly racial,’ … but it is hard to know what that means.” Then, she reaches the only conclusion possible on these facts: “Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.” It’s not a pretty bottom line, but it’s honest.

It’s hard to refute Kagan’s challenge to the majority: “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” But six conservative Justices chose to ignore them in order to give still more power to a president who has shown a willingness to abuse it and a carelessness about how his decisions affect not only immigrants, but American citizens.

This isn’t just a case about laws and legal standards. It’s a case about people, about individuals and their futures. Kagan makes this clear as well, writing about one of the plaintiffs that “Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot is a Haitian national who has held TPS for fifteen years. He lives in California where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer’s, a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization. Miot suffers from Type 1 diabetes, which is easily treated in the United States. But in Haiti, the same disease can be a death sentence, given that country’s collapsed health-care infrastructure.”

Kagan concludes that the plaintiffs “deserve better than today’s decision.” When the Court rules that Trump can’t rewrite the rules for birthright citizenship, do not clap. Remember Mr. Miot, and what he will face. Remember others with TPS, who are all here legally, with permission, performing important work in our economy. 

Shortly after the administration ended TPS, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote that “This mass de-legalization has left various segments of the American workforce, from health care to construction to hospitality, without the workers they depend on. Notably, the termination of TPS for Haiti — scheduled for February 3, 2026 — threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care, and disability care workforce.”

Who wins here? Perhaps it’s Stephen Miller, who will gain an estimated 1.3 million people he can tack on as statistics to support the success of his mass deportation master plan. It’s hard to see who else these benefits. These people are not violent criminals, who the administration promised us it would deport. These are hardworking people who are making important contributions that benefit Americans, people who have broken no laws, who only ask to be permitted to remain in this country so they can raise their claims in court and have them heard.

Some decisions are wrong from the start. Like Dred Scott, which denied former slaves' citizenship, or Korematsu, which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. This case will join them in a Supreme Court walk of shame.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse. Your support makes it possible for me to do deep dives into cases like this, so we understand what’s really happening at the Supreme Court, not just how the headlines read. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, click on the subscribe button below and join our community.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

"The worst is watching the children"

NEWARK, N.J. — The worst is not the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and private contractors, wielding baseball bats and batons, who flood the parking lot at the end of their shifts and unleash on protesters outside the gates the sadism practiced on those incarcerated inside Delaney Hall.

The worst is not the tear gas, the tasers, the pepper spray or the dozens of arrests.

The worst is not the beatings and the riot shields, raised above the heads of New Jersey State Police and Newark police and brought down swiftly on bodies, leaving severe lacerations.

The worst is watching the children.

The ones heaving and sobbing as they leave Delaney Hall, saying goodbye to their mothers, fathers, sisters or brothers who took them to school, who cheered them on at their soccer games, who told them they are beautiful and talented, who woke up before dawn to work menial jobs so they could have a future, who love them in a world where love is a diminishing commodity.

I am seated against a cyclone fence a block from Delaney Hall, New Jersey’s largest ICE jail, with a protester who goes by the name of Basher. He is 41. He has a thick black beard. His nails are dirty. His hands are scarred from clashing with police. His head is wrapped in a green keffiyeh. The stench of the sprawling Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission treatment plant across the street saturates the air. When it comes to the children, the ones ripped from their parents by a nation that is institutionalizing cruelty, even Basher must catch his breath and stop. The scenes are too much to bear.

The savagery at Delaney Hall is the warm-up act. The goons, the ones who attack those demonized on the inside of the ICE jail and those demonized on the streets outside of it, are in training for the rest of us. Delaney Hall, run by a private prison company — The GEO Group — is the template for a world where we will be stripped of our rights; routinely jailed and tortured; denied adequate medical care; fed rancid, expired and moldy food infested with worms and maggots; forced to drink contaminated water and breathe polluted air; and work for poverty wages — in the case of those inside Delaney Hall, a dollar a day.

Some 300 of the roughly 600 people detained at Delaney Hall — which includes teenagers, the elderly and pregnant women — began a hunger and labor strike on May 22.

ICE and GEO Group guards reacted as you would expect. They beat the strikers. They seal vents and toss tear gas and pepper spray into cells. They place suspected leaders of the strike in handcuffs and force them out of the facility to unknown locations, or isolate them, in “punishment units.” They manipulate the heating and cooling systems so prisoners endure extreme heat or cold. They cut telephone and internet access and suspend visitation rights. They sexually harass women.

On May 31, 56 of those held inside Delaney Hall issued their fourth public letter. It was handwritten in Spanish on ruled paper: “The conditions in this prison are not fit for human beings over such a long period of time: medical neglect, water unfit for consumption, food that is past its expiration date and in poor condition, bathrooms that are unusable, and ventilation systems that have never been maintained and because of this, we are constantly sick,” the latest letter reads. “We demand freedom, a fair trial, and for our rights to be respected. S.O.S.”

On July 24, last year, at around 6:45 a.m., ICE vehicles blocked a van carrying 15 Guatemalan workers, three blocks from my house. I went to see the men at the ICE jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because I speak Spanish and because their families, terrified of being targeted, could not. The men told me they were threatened with lengthy prison sentences, followed by certain deportation, if they did not sign papers agreeing to their immediate deportation. They signed. It was my job to inform their families they would not be coming home.

A Guardian analysis of government records found that during the first seven months of Trump’s second term, the parents of at least 27,000 children — 12,000 of whom had U.S. citizenship — were arrested.

These men were my neighbors. Their children attend high school with my children. The kidnapping of parents — often at work or at immigration hearings and ICE check-in appointments — not only traumatizes the children of these families, but the entire community. Every child in the high school wonders if their parents will also one day be seized and disappear. Every child wonders how this cruelty can be inflicted on their friends. Every child wonders what kind of country we live in.

The state and the media organs that act as its echo chamber are doing their best to convince the public that those locked up in Delaney Hall are “criminals,” “the worst of the worst.”

But a review of ICE data by Austin Kocher — an assistant research professor at Syracuse University and an immigration data and policy expert — exposes the lie. Kocher found that 88 percent of immigrants detained at Delaney Hall have no criminal conviction and more than 70 percent have no criminal history. Those with criminal convictions almost universally committed low-level offenses.

The rogue paramilitary forces that pour daily out of the gates of Delaney Hall are unaccountable. They ignore the law. They are the Satanic foundation of our emergent police state. The terror they inflict on those in this small patch of Newark will soon be inflicted on all of us.

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim — who was pepper-sprayed outside Delaney Hall by ICE agents — and Governor Mikie Sherrill were denied entry into the facility. Kim, after an appeal to the Director of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, was eventually given a lightning tour, but forbidden to speak to any detainees. City and state health inspectors have also been blocked from fully accessing the ICE jail.

The message is clear: We will carry out any abuse with immunity.

On Saturday afternoon, after about a dozen protestors blocked cars from driving out of the facility, ICE agents, wearing combat gear and face coverings, charged the protesters with pepper-ball guns, mace and tasers.

“Move back! Get back!” they shouted as they unleashed clouds of pepper spray. Cars leaving the facility struck at least one protester.

By around 10:00 p.m., some 100 protestors had set up a barricade of barrels filled with sand to block the facility’s exits and entrances. The blockade saw a huge influx of ICE agents, GEO Group guards and Newark police push the protestors several hundred yards down the street.

Police announced a ban on protesters wearing protective gear, including respirators and goggles, although Delaney Hall is located in an industrial area with extensive air and water contamination known as “Chemical Corridor.”

The battle at Delaney Hall is not over. It is a battle not only for justice, for the rights of our neighbors, for a world where all are treated with dignity and respect, for children who should never be separated from their fathers and mothers, but a battle to save our country from galloping fascism. Join it now. Soon it may be too late.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

"Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior military officers"

 

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, stripped nine navy officers including women and Black service members from a promotion list last month, according to a person familiar with the matter, resulting in an all-male, overwhelmingly white slate of 22 advancing as nominees to become one-star admirals.

Hegseth’s unusual intervention violated promotion rules designed to be merit-based and apolitical, the New York Times said on Tuesday, and extended the Trump administration’s push to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the military. The original promotion list included three women and two Black officers in addition to the two who remained, the newspaper said.

A navy source said that officials in the service had been “very confident” with those on the promotion list, including the officers whom Hegseth removed. He said Hegseth did not explain to the navy why he removed the officers from the list.

One government source familiar with matter said Hegseth had “his favorite MOS’s [military occupational specialties] and then gender and race. He went through the list and scrubbed a few names. It was felt loud and clear.”

The Pentagon disputed that Hegseth blocked promotions based on race or gender. “As we’ve said before, military promotions are given to those who have earned them. The department will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions,” said Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson. “Under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, meritocracy reigns supreme at the war department.”

The move has direct parallels with Hegseth’s reported interposition in a similar army promotion list in March, in which he is said to have directed the army secretary, Dan Driscoll, to remove two women and two Black officers from a nomination slate to become one-star generals.

Hegseth has previously railed against diversity and so-called “woke” in the armed services. “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts,” he told a keynote meeting of military commanders in Virginia in September. “The sooner we have the right people; the sooner we can advance the right policies.”

Hegseth’s involvement in the promotions list is unusual, according to a former military official. “It’s supposed to be an up-and-down vote from the defense secretary. He continuing to meddle on an individual basis,” he said. “He’s stripping autonomy from the service secretaries.” 

One name still on the latest navy list published on 22 May is Capt. Sean Barbabella, Donald Trump’s White House physician, who last week declared the almost 80-year-old president to be in “excellent health”, despite photographs showing him at times with swollen ankles, bruised hands and a blotchy neck.

Hegseth stepped in to overrule a board of navy admirals that had drawn up the list, the Times said, also removing four white officers. The outlet noted that the list as published, which must be confirmed by the US Senate, bears little relation to the makeup of the force the nominees will lead.

The report cites a 2024 government profile of the navy’s active-service composition, which revealed that more than 21% are women, and that almost 40% identify with racial minority groups. The Guardian reported in March that Hegseth, who styles himself the “secretary of war”, acted soon after his confirmation as defense secretary last year to block promotions or redeploy senior military officers, 60% of them women or Black.

He reassigned V Adm Yvette Davids, the first woman to lead the US naval academy, and dismissed another navy vice-admiral, Shoshana Chatfield, as the US military representative to the Nato military committee. Hegseth also dismissed Adm Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations.

Coast guard commandant Linda Fagan, who served for 37 years and was the longest-serving active duty marine safety officer, was dismissed on 20 January 2025, the first day of Trump’s second term of office, four days before Hegseth’s narrow Senate confirmation.

Overall, the Times said, Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior military officers. The actions extend the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the US military, which have included attempts to ban women from combat roles and blocking transgender troops from serving.

A federal appeals court in Washington DC on Monday delivered a setback to the anti-diversity push by ruling that the government acted illegally by moving to dismiss transgender service members. That case is expected to reach the supreme court.

-by Richard Luscombe, Joseph Gedeon and Aram Roston

Related: Transgender troops can remain in US military, but enlistment can be blocked, court rules

Gutted Voting Rights Act

 

The US supreme court has gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act through a landmark decision on Louisiana’s congressional map, in a major upheaval in US civil rights law that threatens to weaken the voting power of minorities. In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court demolished section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the supreme court found that Louisiana’s congressional maps violated the equal protection clause. Writing for the majority, the supreme court justice Samuel Alito maintained that section 2, which has been used for decades to challenge maps producing racially discriminatory results, does not require states to draw majority-minority districts.

How have lawmakers reacted? Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures, who are now at risk of losing their seats in Alabama’s Black congressional districts, have decried the decision as sending the nation “backwards”. How did the ruling come to pass? It is the culmination of justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito’s joint campaign to roll back civil rights legislation.

Map of seats gained by possible partisan redistricting plans. Illustration: Guardian Design

How could midterm maps be changed by redistricting? While the supreme court decision leaves little time to redraw maps ahead of the midterms, here is what midterm maps could look like if both parties achieve all their current redistricting ambitions. -The Guardian

The Continuing Destruction of America

 

It sure is starting to smell like Vietnam… If you’re not old enough to remember the early days of the Vietnam war, ask somebody who was; the bravado, the bullshit coming from the SecDef, the president who’s afraid of being criticized as “weak” by “conservatives” if he doesn’t “win the war,” and the skepticism of the American people are all echoing so loudly it’s impossible to miss. Whiskey Pete, the wife-abusing alcoholic Fox “News” B-lister Trump put in charge of our military because he “looked strong” is proving to be every bit as incompetent and disastrous as the guy who appointed him. 

The most unqualified and frankly disastrous leader of our military in history — openly bragging about committing war crimes while trash-talking the Geneva Convention with his insane riffs about “no quarter” and “no woke rules of engagement” — just purged the top ranks of our military again. 

He just canned Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, four-star general David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain. Nobody’s sure exactly why (or if the timing of Bondi’s firing was designed to distract us from this) but speculation largely falls to two explanations. 

These are competent professional military men who most likely told Whiskey Pete and Trump the truth about what a disaster attacking Iran would be, and how it would be illegal to do it without congressional authorization, so they had to be removed. 

As Senator Chris Murphy noted, “It’s likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly.” Only toadies, lickspittles, and sycophants allowed here. 

The other possibility is that they objected to Petey inserting himself into the promotion process explicitly to stop women and Black men from rising into the most senior ranks. Or both. Whatever it is, following on his gutting the JAG corps (which advises officers about what are and are not war crimes) and his previous attacks on Blacks and women, this is the lowest point for our military in my lifetime, and probably yours, too.

Who was General George, who Whiskey Pete just fired? General Randy A. George enlisted in the Army in 1982, fought his way into West Point, and then spent a career in the active duty infantry from platoon leader in the 101st Airborne in Desert Storm to multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanding battalions, brigades, a division, and I Corps before becoming the 41st Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Along the way he earned a Bronze Star with three oak leaf clusters, a Purple Heart, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Ranger tab, and a senior parachutist badge with a combat jump; the résumé of someone who has led from the front and bled with his soldiers. 

Whiskey Pete, on the other hand, essentially bankrupted two small veterans' charities that he was supposed to be running while he was busy getting drunk and cheating on his wife.

Is the Supreme Court about to become even more bizarre and corrupt than it already is? Speculation is rife in DC that Sam Alito and possibly Clarence Thomas — the two most extreme neo-fascists and on-the-take betrayers of the rule of law — are planning to retire this summer, giving Trump the opportunity to turn the Court into a 5-4 Trump-appointed majority. Alito has apparently penned a book, which some see as a sign he’s paving the way for his departure. 

Since Mango Mussolini is furious right now with his own appointees because they didn’t appear to roll over for his Birthright Citizenship scam attempt, odds are anybody he puts forward will be even more extreme than anybody currently there. Aileen Cannon, anyone? Or Matthew Kacsmaryk? The former helped Trump avoid prosecution in Florida for stealing and disseminating Top Secret documents essential to national security, and the latter tried to outlaw abortion pills nationwide. And there’s always John Eastman, even though he’s already been disbarred; with Trump, anything is possible. Get ready.

Gas prices got you down? A new report by Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee finds that just during the first month of Trump’s criminal war against Iran American drivers paid fully $8.4 billion more at the pump for gas than they would have had the war not driven up the price of oil. 

While he’s borrowed over $7 trillion in our names and given it to his billionaire buddies as tax cuts and run up our national debt higher and faster than any president in American history, Trump appears determined to drain every last cent he and his greedy buddies in the fossil fuel industry can get from average working people. 

He took billions from us in tariffs, and now they’re screwing us on the price of gas and diesel, since their costs haven’t gone up a penny but they’re sure happy to use the war as an excuse to jack up prices. This after killing off the VA program that kept over 10,000 veterans in their homes (with another 90,000 facing foreclosure in the coming month or two), gutting food aid, decimating Medicaid, and telling us all this past week that he really doesn’t have the time and America doesn’t have the budget for Medicare. 

When billionaires first declared war on the American working class with the Reagan Revolution in 1981, most people just thought it was a labor dispute with the air traffic controllers and an “adjustment” to tax rates; now the naked attack the morbidly rich have spearheaded against our middle class is impossible to ignore.

JD Vance (or whatever his name is this week) is now in charge of Project Screw Blue States. Trump named him the “fraud czar” yesterday and told him to go after Democratic-run states, specifically “California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, and New York.” In an announcement unconsciously rich with irony and double entendre, Trump began the announcement on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site with this line for the ages: “Vice President JD Vance is now in charge of ‘FRAUD’ in the United States.” Couldn’t have said it better myself....

-Thom Hartmann

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s

 

Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also — wait for it — a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout.

Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine. Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism.

Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump.

Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from White supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically based intellectual differences between the races.

Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined.

It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, Whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in-between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, D.C., had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the White race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of White Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-White immigrants from the global South. Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.

Epstein on Race

Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences.

Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).

According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.

Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help.

In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”

Epstein also spent time on hardcore White supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright White supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science.

According to the Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.

The “Great Gene” President

Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House. For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:

“Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”

“You have to have the rights — the right genes.”

“Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”

“I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”

And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former  White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.

It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and Congressional Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Jasmine Crockett, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, radio host Charlamagne the God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.

Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling White-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).

His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025, speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for White — and implicitly White only — immigration to this country:

“Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, ‘This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,’ because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people?”

In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.

At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 White South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely, claiming that Whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27th and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS), and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.

Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid 19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology.

It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.

In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft — legal at the time — would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations.

After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.

Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in U.S. history. He will never acknowledge — or even understand — that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.

Clarence Lusane is an author, activist, scholar, and journalist. He is a professor and former Chairman of Howard University’s Department of Political Science. He is author of many books. His latest is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.

 -Clarence Lusane, CounterPunch