Armageddon for Beginners — Geopolitics Directed by Trump’s Global and Balkan Marionettes

By Vuk Bačanović

March 6, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

World War 3 - XII | Image credit: Zé Carrión, M. Tayeb48 & Rubicon1 in the "Tabacalera de Lavapiés: World War 3", Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic via r2hox/Flickr

To begin with, let me recount an old Soviet, Cold War–era joke about America.

A Russian and an American are seated side by side on an airplane flying from Moscow to Washington. The American turns to the Russian and says: “I must admit, your state propaganda is truly impressive.” The Soviet smiles, thanks him for the compliment, and replies that it is nothing compared to American propaganda.

“But we don’t have state propaganda,” the American answers, horrified and bewildered.

The Soviet smiles again and says: “Exactly.”

The joke came back to mind while I was looking into Donald Trump’s personnel choices and stumbled upon the books written by two prominent officials of the current administration: Michael T. Flynn, former National Security Advisor to the president and now the self-styled “intellectual” grey eminence of the MAGA movement — Michael T. Flynn and Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How to Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016) — and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense (or, as Trump has rechristened the office, the Secretary of War), Pete Hegseth — Pete Hegseth, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free (New York: Center Street, 2020).

 Without the slightest hesitation, I can place these books among the most foolish and internally contradictory works I have ever read. And I mean that quite literally — including Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short History, written by the British historian and public intellectual Noel Malcolm; Islam Between East and West by Alija Izetbegović, the Bosnian Islamist thinker and first president of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina; the collected writings of Dragoš Kalajić, the Serbian far-right philosopher, painter, and cultural polemicist; or even the memoirs of Nikola Koljević, the Shakespeare scholar who became one of the political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1990s war, in which he gravely assures the reader that Serbs would never be able to survive in a hypothetical postwar Sarajevo district because of the allegedly excessive Muslim birth rate…  

But let us first turn to the newest great friend of Milorad Dodik—Michael Flynn. Dodik, for those unfamiliar with the Balkan theatre, is the informal political leader of the Bosnian Serbs and, in his latest ideological metamorphosis, a freshly minted white nationalist. And one must thank Providence that Flynn is, at least, a military officer rather than a self-proclaimed literary visionary like the family friend of Alija Izetbegović, the Israeli lobbyist Bernard-Henri Lévy. For had Flynn, by some twist of fate, also fancied himself a dramatist, we might soon—after Lévy’s theatrical vision of Alija as the saviour of Europe—be treated to a new stage production: “Dodik, Knight of Judeo-Christian Civilization,” brandishing his sword atop Mount Zion while a choir from an improvised gallery solemnly chants about the clash of civilizations.

In the manner of dusty, second-rate Cold War propaganda (pardon—of course I meant universal cosmic truth, for America, as we all know, has never produced propaganda; that unfortunate habit belongs exclusively to others), the author patiently explains that Islamists, Marxists, and Nazis are essentially the same thing:

“It is an old story. If Marx and Lenin predicted the inevitable defeat of capitalism, then it will surely fall. If the Aryan race is vastly superior to our ‘impure’ population, then we might as well start learning German immediately. Now there is a new certainty that drives the jihadists: if Allah has blessed the jihad against America, then it cannot fail.”

When one reads this gem of geopolitical dialectics, one cannot help but wonder how humanity managed to survive for so many centuries without such a brilliant synthesis. For it now turns out that Marxism, Nazism, and Islamism are essentially one and the same thing—roughly as if someone were to explain that fire, water, and ice are identical simply because they are all elements encountered in nature.
After all, a heterogeneous ideology that speaks of the cyclical crises of the capitalist economy—which, incidentally, do occur in reality and regularly produce social catastrophes and wars—and that identifies control over resources and markets as the driving force behind imperial expansion, however controversial it may appear to some, imperialists in particular, nevertheless proceeds from a socio-economic analysis. By contrast, an ideology that, however radical it may be, rests on the religious premise that all human beings are equal before God belongs to an entirely different moral plane. Neither of these, whatever one’s personal opinion of them, bears any essential resemblance to an ideology that sought to reduce people of “inferior races” to slavery—or, more efficiently still, to exterminate them like insects in gas chambers.

The qualitative gulf between these positions is so obvious that it requires a rather dense fog of propaganda to blur it into something resembling a coherent argument. And yet precisely such a fog is necessary for another ideological construction of our own time: the ruling neoconservative Protestant–Zionist doctrine, born of the curious and rather unnatural fusion between American millenarianism and the distorted remnants of Trotskyism that conveniently provided it with a veneer of “scientific” respectability. According to this doctrine, God Himself entrusted the United States with a historical mission—to protect Israel and strike at its enemies—thereby allegedly hastening the arrival of Armageddon, that final cosmic reckoning in which all the enemies of the white Protestant Jesus, as promised by the apocalyptic imagination of His modern interpreters, will be mercilessly destroyed.

Compared to such a cosmic scenario, even the fiercest ideological disputes of the twentieth century begin to look like rather modest intellectual disagreements.
For once Marx, Hitler, and the jihadists are casually stuffed into the same sentence, what is being written is no longer history but the script of a propaganda disaster movie—almost, one might say, a Hollywood blockbuster: a little apocalypse, a little civilizational drama, and in the end the obligatory message that against this cosmic pact of evil a new crusading army must be assembled.
Except that this is not a film.

It is American reality.

In the other remarkably foolish book written by the aforementioned Trump cabinet member, Hegseth, we read the following—verbatim:

“Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, it cannot be coexisted with, nor can it be understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and defeated. Just as the Christian Crusaders in the twelfth century pushed back the Muslim hordes, so too must American crusaders today summon the same courage against the Islamists.”

And also this:

“Islam is a religion practiced by billions of people. Islamism is defined as the belief in imposing Islam on others, through both violent and nonviolent means, and it is practiced by hundreds of millions of people. Even if we take the lower estimate of the percentage of Muslims in the world who can properly be described as Islamists (approximately 25 percent), we are still speaking about a population larger than that of the entire United States.”

And this as well:

“I fully understand the difference between ‘peaceful’ Muslims and Islamist Muslims. I have many dear friends who are Muslims—including Omar from Texas, his family, and colleagues from FOX News. They are wonderful people who, in their view, work and struggle to save a religion occupied by radicals. I disagree with that assessment, but they love America, and I respect them greatly for it.”

One might assume that after such a sweeping diagnosis there would at least follow some elementary analysis of the realities of the Islamic world. But that is precisely where the real circus begins. For this supposedly “monolithic Islamism,” which allegedly stands at the gates of McDonald’s civilization, in reality resembles anything but a unified force.

The Islamic world today is fragmented into dozens of mutually antagonistic states, hundreds of movements that display radical intolerance toward one another, and countless rival sects. Shiites against Sunnis, Sunnis against Sunnis, Salafis against one another and against everyone else, national states against transnational movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan’s followers against the Gülenists—and so on, without end.

Islam as a heterogeneous global religious and political phenomenon possesses no central institution of authority today. There is no caliph—and historically there rarely was one—whose word could trigger anything resembling a “general mobilization.” Even ISIS’s blood-soaked and almost caricatural attempt to resurrect the caliphate failed to attract even a fraction of a percent of the world’s Muslims, let alone the alleged “hundreds of millions.”

And here we arrive at the most delightful part of this geopolitical comedy. While the author brandishes his crusader’s sword against “Islamism,” it was precisely the United States that for decades systematically supported the most radical Salafist currents in the Islamic world—most often against those very regimes that were comparatively more secular and politically “moderate.” From the mujahideen in Afghanistan, through a variety of insurgent networks in the Middle East and Libya, all the way to the Syrian war, where in the chaos of arming the so-called “moderate opposition” the greatest advantage was reaped by the best organized Islamist factions. Not to mention the long-standing, solid alliance with states in which radical Salafism functions practically as the official ideology—Saudi Arabia being the most obvious example—in the geopolitical struggle against Shiite Iran, whose regime, however authoritarian and theocratic it may appear from a liberal perspective, can sometimes, by comparison with Riyadh’s puritanism, genuinely resemble an Enlightenment experiment.

And then, as in every cheap Hollywood script, comes the obligatory scene with the “good Muslims.” The minister assures us that he personally knows several wonderful Muslims—even one from Texas—who love America very much, and for that reason he respects them deeply. Which is certainly touching and commendable. Only at the very same time he advocates a new “crusade” against the Islamic world, while in that crusade assembling as his principal allies precisely the most radical Salafist regimes and movements from Riyadh to the Syrian desert—those very actors whom, in his own rather foolish book, he acknowledges as financing… well, yes, radical Islamic movements in America and Europe.

Thus emerges the curious geopolitical formula of our age: a struggle against Islamic extremism in which the principal partners are—Islamic extremists.

None of this, of course, means that radical Islamist movements are not dangerous. On the contrary: given the opportunity, many of these sects—like many others throughout history—would gladly push even their own followers to the margins of society over disagreements as trivial as whether the left or the right sleeve should be put on first, while sending the rest of the population under the sword. But that does not make them a uniquely singular threat, nor does it render any less dangerous the other, no less messianic fraternity—the Washington Zionist sect convinced that it has been personally entrusted by God with arranging the geopolitical stage for the arrival of the white Protestant Jesus. The very same Jesus who, according to their theological imagination, will one day descend to turn all unbelievers into fuel for the eternal fires of hell—especially those who have had the audacity to suggest that the mass killing of children in Gaza or the bombing of Iran might not entirely conform to the ethics of the New Testament.

And the most remarkable part of the entire story is this: for decades now, these two dangers have been living together in a remarkably stable alliance.

In other words, the front ranks of today’s defenders of “civilizational values” against those supposedly diabolical Iranians are indeed an impressive company. There is the American president with a value system reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan; the Saudi grand mufti Ṣāliḥ al-Fawzān, who once thundered curses at those who believed in the heliocentric system and now explains how his country, together with American soldiers, is waging a holy jihad; Ukrainian neo-Nazis rallying behind the “good Jew” Zelensky; Israeli right-wingers who calmly debate the practical aspects of genocide in television studios while schoolchildren are taught that the Messiah—not the white Protestant Jesus, but another one entirely—will soon arrive to make all nations the servants of Israel. And the exhausted windbag Bernard-Henri Lévy helpfully clarifies that there are noble wars, and that Trump’s war—which on its very first day claimed the lives of 180 underage girls—is apparently one of them.

And on the domestic, Bosnian-Herzegovinian civilizational front, the spectacle is no less exalted. There is the former communist Milorad Dodik, now marching arm in arm with Trump’s luminary Flynn, enthusiastically singing “Sprem’te se, sprem’te četnici” while railing against “commies.” There is also the former physical-education teacher turned Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dino Konaković, lamenting the destruction of American military installations in Arab countries—the very same bases from which, incidentally, another sovereign state is being attacked. And behind them, as a worthy background choir, stand the Mostar crypto-Ustaše, waving an Israeli flag in one hand and an LGBT banner in the other, accompanied by a special guest appearance from the tele-hadith Salafi sheikh Elvedin Pezić, who finds the invasion of Iran unworthy of comment but happily instructs respectable householders of all confessions on the finer points of beating one’s wife without leaving visible bruises—or why there is nothing particularly wrong with close relatives marrying each other. All together, of course, ready to explain to us the subtleties of this salvational civilizational synthesis.

So if anyone is still wondering where exactly “Western civilization” is being defended today, they need only take a glance at this remarkable ensemble. Rarely in history has such a harmonious coalition gathered together: apocalyptic theologians, shameless manipulators whose stupidity is rivalled only by their boundless greed, and creatures who appear to have been carefully selected from the registries of the world’s psychiatric institutions. When such an elite assembles to save the world, one almost wishes the world would somehow manage—by moving resolutely in the opposite direction—to save itself.

Exactly so.

Why the Trump Administration Doesn’t Just Break the Law

But Uses Legality (in a Distinctly Lawless Fashion)

By Maha Hilal

March 6, 2026

Source: Tom Dispatch

Lady Justice / Public Domain Photo

In response to his sentencing following his conviction on 34 felonies in May 2024, President Trump stated that he had “won the election in a massive landslide, and the people of this country understand what’s gone on. This has been a weaponization of government.”

Despite his conviction, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him to an unconditional discharge with no consequences like prison, probation, or even fines. The judge determined that this was the “only lawful sentence” that avoided infringing on the authority of the presidency. Had that been Donald Trump’s first encounter with the law (which, of course, it wasn’t), it would have been a stark lesson in impunity.

It’s no surprise then that, in an interview last year with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, when asked about his obligation to uphold the Constitution, Trump responded, “I don’t know.” In his conversation with Welker, he also defied a Supreme Court decision that ordered the return of immigrant Kilmar Armando Ábrego García from El Salvador, where he had been deported thanks to what the Trump administration termed “an administrative error.” Blaming the deferral of that decision on Attorney General Pam Bondi, the president stated that he was “not involved in the legality or illegality” of the case.

Despite his seemingly ambivalent feelings in that interview, he has emphatically asserted his position with respect to the law elsewhere, especially when it came to him.  For example, on February 16, 2025, he wrote on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Nonetheless, outright violations of the law have been a signature characteristic of his administration writ large.  For example, last March, when Judge James Boasberg ordered the return of planes carrying migrants being deported from the United States to El Salvador’s CECOT prison (known for its brutality), Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instructed the two flights to continue in clear violation of the court order. The Justice Department would subsequently argue in a court filing that the administration hadn’t violated the judge’s order because the flights carrying the migrants were no longer over U.S. territory when the ruling was issued.  

In short, although the attitudes of President Trump and his administration toward legality have been guided by the belief that their power is in no way meaningfully constrained by the law, it would be a mistake to assume that they’ve governed through lawlessness alone. To focus solely on lawlessness would be to minimize the way the president and his administration have simultaneously relied on and weaponized the law itself to legitimize their violence and their violations. They have pursued an America First strategy that has centered on the expansion of executive power and the protection of narrowly defined national interests, while tossing aside both human rights and international legal norms. To fully grasp the depths of the Trump administration’s violence, lawlessness must be examined alongside the strategic use of the law to manufacture a sense of legality and a facade of legal legitimation.

Legalizing Boat Strikes to “Save Americans”

On Tuesday, September 2, 2025, on President Trump’s order, U.S. military forces conducted an airstrike against a boat that the administration claimed belonged to the Latin American gang Tren de Aragua, which he had previously designated a terrorist organization and described as “narcoterrorists.” Since that first strike conducted in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, there have been 46 subsequent boat strikes in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed 147 people to date. Despite the view of legal experts that such strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings, the Trump administration has insisted on their legality. In late November, for example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated on X that “our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict — and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”

The approval Hegseth referred to came in the form of a memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Although that memo has not been made public, sources familiar with its contents report that it frames the strikes as acts of collective self-defense undertaken in the interests of the United States and several Latin American countries. The memo also argues that, because the U.S. is in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, the strikes don’t require Congressional approval, being both in the national interest and sufficiently limited in scope, nature, and duration not to qualify as war-making. That memo has been criticized in numerous ways, with some experts insisting that the legal arguments are not only flawed, but were put together to legitimize a political decision already made by the White House.  

In the last quarter-century of the War on Terror, weaponizing the label of terrorism has been repeatedly invoked to justify repressive interventions. As law professor Sirine Sinnar notes, “Through invoking terrorism, the Trump administration targets its political enemies, pushes an openly racist and xenophobic agenda, and flouts international law more brazenly than its predecessors. But it can do all this so easily because the concept of terrorism has long been selective, political, and racialized, and because Congress and the Supreme Court have largely shielded counterterrorism from accountability.” The designation of individuals as “narcoterrorists” reflects the enduring currency of this post-9/11 framework, demonstrating how the language of terrorism can be redeployed in new contexts through strategically constructed threat narratives.

The Spectacle of “American [In]Justice”

In a speech on January 3rd, President Trump announced the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores de Maduro, accusing them of conducting a “campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens,” and insisting that “hundreds of thousands — over the years — of Americans died because of him.” Further justifying his capture, Trump also claimed that the Venezuelan leader had been sending members of the Tren de Aragua gang to the United States to spread drugs and terror. As it happens, though, not only was there a lack of evidence of that, but the claim wasn’t even mentioned in the Justice Department’s indictment of the Venezuelan president. The Maduros, Trump asserted, would “soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil.” Despite such a projection of power and the assumed superiority of “American justice,” the Trump administration’s entire governing strategy has proven that just as legality is malleable, so, too, is justice.

Many have described the Trump administration’s capture of the Maduros as simply lawless, but the administration’s officials didn’t act without considering the law (in their own lawless fashion). They even requested that the Office of Legal Counsel produce an opinion on whether the president could legally direct U.S. military forces to support law enforcement in seizing Maduro and bringing him to the United States for prosecution (without, of course, any congressional action).

A heavily redacted version of the memo responding to that, dated December 23, 2025, was released on January 13th, 2026. It frames the sending of U.S. special forces and air power into Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, to capture the Maduros as a law-enforcement action to arrest a fugitive, not a military invasion (despite all the Venezuelans who died). It argues that, because of the limited duration and narrow scope of the operation, the action falls under the president’s constitutional authority and isn’t an act of war that would require congressional authorization. Although the memo did avoid making a definitive argument that the operation didn’t violate international law, it essentially tried to make that determination inconsequential by deeming the actions legal under domestic law.

Performing Legality, Producing Impunity

While the contents of the memo are certainly important, it’s no less critical to understand the purpose and function of such memos to begin with. Like other such “legal” documents, memos from the Office of Legal Counsel are designed to offer a version of “legality” that minimizes scrutiny, enables repetition, and contributes to normalizing state violence in its many forms.

Some have compared the boat-strike memos to the torture memos drafted under the Bush administration. John Yoo, one of the infamous authors of those memos, argued that, for abuse to rise to the level of torture, the result had to be nothing less than organ failure or death. So, consider it ironic that he actually criticized those boat-strike memos, despite their similarity to the torture memos’ form of impunity. In fact, when asked if he regretted the decisions he had made, Yoo said, “The only thing I regret was just the pressure of time that we had to act under.” But he also added that he “would probably do the same things again.”

Yoo nevertheless expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s rationale for the boat strikes, saying about those supposed drug boats, “They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system…They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.” 

Yoo, of course, neglected to mention that, while justifying the most brutal forms of torture at the Bush administration’s prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in CIA “black sites” globally, the torture memos provided impunity for anyone involved in creating that torture regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001.  And no court ever formally ruled those memos illegal, while Yoo, like all the other Bush administration officials involved in sanctioning the torture apparatus, never faced the slightest accountability.  Even when a report on those memos was released by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility in 2009, recommending that Yoo and an associate of his be disciplined, it was vetoed by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, who viewed the memos as resulting from poor decision-making rather than unethical behavior. Like the torture memos, then, the boat-strike memos are meant to offer a facade of legality, while ensuring impunity.

What Yoo’s critique also conveniently overlooks is that legal memoranda like the torture memos don’t just interpret the law. Instead, they offer a threatening “legal” reality to justify certain all-too-grim interventions. Under the Bush administration, this included the denial of Geneva Convention protections based on the argument that the United States was fighting a new kind of war with non-state actors who don’t abide by the laws of war. According to their logic, if the enemy does not follow the laws of war, the United States is not required to extend full protection. This discursive rationale was used to disregard the fact that adherence to Geneva protections is non-reciprocal.

Those memos also exploit perceived gaps in existing legal frameworks to manufacture ambiguity, while, above all, staging a performance of legality. Like the torture memos, the memo authorizing the capture of President Maduro was designed to be a buffer against legal, political, or diplomatic challenges, minimizing the vulnerability of the Trump administration to judicial scrutiny and congressional action.

In his article “Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law,” Matt Jones has written about the consequences of such performances of legality. He argues that “the law’s reliance on continual performance interventions means that gaps in the law may in fact become enshrined in law if a given authority, such as a judge, recognizes them as legitimate within the jurisprudential history of past performances.” In other words, challenging state actions as illegal, whether the conduct occurred as a result of sheer lawlessness or unsound legal rationales, can actually end up rendering the behavior legal.

Legal rationales like those provided in the torture memos also offer an administration the opportunity to act as if its behavior were legal. As Jones points out, when it came to Guantanamo, for example, “the Bush administration’s creative interpretation of the law allowed them to operate ‘as if’ their behavior were legal, knowing that, by the time the law’s reality caught up, the strategic tasks they wanted accomplished in Guantanamo would have long been completed.”

To this day, Guantanamo remains open and there has never been the slightest accountability for anyone involved in past crimes there or the indefinite institutionalization of that infrastructure of state violence.

The Architecture of Hyper-Legality and the Law’s Double-Edged Sword

To understand why the Trump administration has not always chosen to completely violate or disregard the law, it’s useful to consider the concept of hyper-legalism. In “International Refugee Law, ‘Hyper-Legalism’ and Migration Management: The Pacific Solution,” author Claire Inder, special assistant to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, suggests that hyper-legalism “implies a commitment to lawfulness and rule-following, with an underlying disingenuousness in the understanding of ‘legality.’ It suggests that the applicability of the rules themselves is infinitely malleable by the actor purporting to comply.”

Although Inder focuses on refugee law, hyper-legalism’s relevance to a broader spectrum of governing policies is clear when it comes to Donald Trump and his administration, where a performance of legality has all too often been considered sufficient to allow them to pursue their ultimate objective of justifying whatever intervention they may deem necessary. However, that doesn’t mean that Trump and members of his administration don’t understand the limits of hyper-legalism. As Daniel Ghezelbash, director of the Kaldor Center for International Refugee Law, has argued, some actions are so egregious under international law that no amount of formalistic sophistry can legitimize them. And when that’s the case, states can resort to obfuscation as a tactic. “Obfuscation,” as he puts it, “is achieved through secrecy about what actions the government is taking and deliberate silence as to the purported legal justifications.”

The Trump administration’s refusal to release the Office of Legal Counsel memo that has provided it with supposed legal cover for those boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific is emblematic of hyper-legalism and its limits. More broadly, the fact that its officials are using the law to justify egregious conduct while rejecting any semblance of transparency makes such legal arguments difficult, if not impossible, to challenge in the immediate moment. That, in turn, risks the further institutionalization of sanctioned violence, while, of course, providing legal rationales for future acts of state violence.

In his article “Hyperlegality,” legal scholar Nasser Hussain questions common assumptions about the operation of emergency laws and the idea that the measures implemented are just temporary deviations from the norm. Although he focuses on the United Kingdom, his analysis is distinctly relevant to Donald Trump’s America. He argues that antiterrorism legislation in Great Britain hasn’t just functioned as a short-term, reactive response to crisis, but has produced structural and enduring transformations in the legal order. And that’s just what’s now happening in the United States, where the latest “emergency laws” and defenses of exceptional interventions are helping to create legal frameworks and blueprints that will, in the future, only strengthen and entrench the ability of the state to enact egregious violence. In short, while the violence of the Trump administration may seem exceptional, the historical trajectory of the War on Terror should be a reminder that what we are witnessing isn’t new and isn’t likely to disappear in the future.

In analyzing the Trump administration’s governing strategy, it’s important to remember that, as Hussain argues, “the rule of law is and has always been capable of accommodating a range of repressive but legal measures.”  In other words, even as the Trump administration’s remarkable disregard for the law in so many cases poses urgent challenges, the malleability of the law, as demonstrated throughout the history of the United States, should offer a warning against the seemingly commonsensical response of simply instituting more rules, regulations, conventions, and laws.  After all, the law’s primary function is to preserve the state, not to deliver justice.

All too often, the law operates as a double-edged sword: it can secure rights and constrain power, but it can also legitimize repression, exclusion, and harm. Our task, then, is to understand how to wield the law strategically to challenge the violence and power of the state and to demand justice and accountability.

Whether the Trump administration cloaks its actions in legal rationales or disregards legality altogether, communities at home and abroad continue to resist. Recognizing that the law alone will not save us is not a call to despair but a call to organize and build our power. Because nothing has ever altered the course of injustice except the organized power of the people — and nothing else ever will.

America 250: Toxic Nationalism 

By Tish O'Dell

March 5, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Looking back at what I was taught in my 6 decades on this Earth as an American and what I have had to “unlearn” thanks to my colleagues at CELDF, community members I have fought alongside and even the lawyers, judges, electeds and media who have exposed reality to me, my perspective of the Declaration of Independence (DOI) is far different today than what I learned in school.

As a young girl in school, I believed what I was taught hook line and sinker — the DOI was an amazing document recognizing that we were all free and equal in this country no matter where we were born, our socioeconomic status or who our parents were. Although an obvious red flag clue should have been the first line “all men are created equal”! When I questioned that, the reply was always the same, “women fought for the 19th amendment (over 100 years after the DOI) and won”, as if voting somehow guaranteed we were equal under the law.

I also came of age during the era of “women’s liberation” which included the fights for equal pay and equal rights. I remember seeing Gloria Steinem speak at Kent State University which I was attending in the mid-1980’s and she inspired me to look closer at what I had been taught and what reality was when it came to women’s rights. She gave statistics on the pay discrepancy between men and women doing the same job. The fact that a woman couldn’t get a credit card without her husband’s signature and that in many states marital rape was legal (many states still treat marital rape differently under the law). And of course, the big issue about whether a woman has the right to decide whether to go through with an unwanted pregnancy is still being debated in 2026. 

Over the years I did what so many of us have been taught to do… I marched in my community; I traveled to Washington D.C. to march for the Equal Rights Amendment for women; and I wrote letters to electeds and anywhere else that would print them. These experiences made me realize that the freedom I had been taught that the DOI and constitutional amendments promised, were more illusion than reality.  

In 2011 I began organizing and working with CELDF. I took Democracy School and learned the real history behind the DOI and this sparked my interest in learning even more about the movement for women’s rights. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in 1776 as the idea of what we know as the United States was being formed, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”  

Over the next two centuries women fought and fought hard to become recognized rights holders. Some engaged in direct action and were arrested, like Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul.  When they appeared before the court, the judge ruled against them. What many today would call a “loss” and yet, I am so grateful that they didn’t give up. I learned that in many local communities and later territories in the US, women had the right to vote and when the territories became states, the legislatures actually took away women’s right to vote. I learned that the struggle wasn’t just some women in white dresses with sashes parading down the streets and that these protests were somehow responsible for the 19th amendment. It took over 100 years of meetings, organizing, protests, arrests, court cases and acts of extreme courage and sacrifice that resulted in torture and even losing their own children, just to be able to vote, but still not changing that famous line, “all men are created equal”.

I also learned in my work with CELDF and by being directly involved with the court cases filed on behalf of local laws protecting nature and the rights of community members, that when we attempted to cite the DOI as the basis of our arguments in our briefs regarding those “unalienable rights of the people to protect their lives, liberty and happiness”,  the courts, if they even addressed the argument at all, stated that the DOI is not actually law but just poetic words of aspiration.

So while this country and our government celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let’s see it through the eyes of truth and reality. There may have been good intentions by the people at the time who took all the risks, including the women, but we have never lived up to those intentions of freedom, justice and rights for all persons and the non-humans that we depend on. Isn’t it about time we take the words seriously and breathe life into the righteous word of the Declaration of Independence or perhaps just start over with a new guiding document that actually reflects and codifies the values we were taught were there all along?Email

Tish O'Dell

Tish O’Dell has been involved in community rights and Rights of Nature work since 2012. She started in her own community of Broadview Heights, Ohio, leading to the adoption of Ohio’s first Home Rule charter amendment creating a Community Bill of Rights banning fracking and recognizing Rights of Nature. She then went on to work with dozens of Ohio communities on anti-fracking, anti-pipeline, right to a livable climate, fair and free elections, and water privatization issues. Today, Tish works with communities all over the country and internationally, most recently working with residents and a state legislator in NY to introduce the Great Lakes Bill of Rights. In 2019, she worked with the people of Toledo to pass the historic Lake Erie Bill of Rights. She has taught workshops, CELDF’s Democracy Schools, and is a founding member and current board member of the Ohio Community Rights Network. Tish, along with other CELDF staff and community members, has been featured in the documentaries We the People 2.0, Invisible Hand, What We do to Nature, We do to Ourselves, and edited the book Death by Democracy.

The Cathedral of Plastic: How We Manufactured a Year of Excess

By Saskia Karges

March 3, 2026

Source: Resilience

Image by Kannanshanmugam,shanmugamstudio,Kollam/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 3.0

I found myself in a temple of excess last weekend. It wasn’t a place of worship, but it felt like one: a massive toy store inside a shopping mall. I was there for a mundane reason - a relative’s son was turning six, and a gift was required. But as I stepped through the sliding glass doors, I didn’t feel the joy of celebration. I felt a profound sense of claustrophobia.

The shelves were stacked to the meter-high ceilings. There were puzzles and board games, but they were drowned out by a sea of plastic. The aisles were strictly segregated - shimmering pink and glitter on one side, aggressive reds and deep blues on the other. Everything beeped, flashed, or emitted a synthetic scent. There were cars a child could actually drive, costumes for a Carnival that had long since passed, and “outdoor” gear of such questionable quality it looked ready to break at the first encounter with some actual fresh air.

Standing there, I was struck by a single, haunting question: What do you give a child who already has everything?

The Colonization of the Calendar

The store was a graveyard of recent festivities and a staging ground for the next. In one corner, the bedraggled remains of Valentine’s Day gifts - plush hearts and plastic roses - were being cleared away. In another, Mother’s Day displays were already rising like a strategic invasion.

It made me realize that we have allowed the retail industry to colonize our calendar. When I was a child, there were two “high peaks” of consumption: your birthday and Christmas. Occasionally, a very special occasion might merit a small token. Many of my books and toys were twenty years old when they reached me, handed down from my parents. I still own children’s books from the 1960s; their spines may be worn, but their stories are intact (and guaranteed AI free).

Today, every month requires a gift event. We have moved from a culture of celebration to a culture of the transactional kick.

It begins with Valentine’s Day. Once the domain of florists and jewelers, it has been expanded to include children and friends, fueled by an endless stream of personalized mugs, synthetic “love” trinkets, and pre-ordered affection. Then comes Easter. What was once a hunt for dyed eggs and a bit of chocolate has mutated into “Christmas 2.0,” with LEGO sets and electronics hidden in the nests.

Mother’s Day follows, often serving as a liquidation event for whatever heart-shaped inventory didn’t sell in February. Then Father’s Day, where the alcohol industry joins the fray. We have the “summer slump,” which the industry fills with a relentless tide of wedding gifts, baptisms, communions, and the increasingly elaborate “back-to-school” hampers.

Then we hit the autumn slope: Halloween - once a night for “trick or treating” - is now a multi-billion-dollar industry of disposable polyester costumes and plastic decorations. St. Nicholas Day, once a modest morning of nuts and tangerines, is now a warm-up for the main event: the frantic race of Christmas.

And let’s not forget the new arrivals in the ritual landscape: the “Baby Showers” and the “Gender Reveals.” We are now manufacturing consumption for people who haven’t even been born yet.

Right now we are witnessing the final frontier of retail: the elimination of “empty” time. The industry can no longer afford the traditional gaps between the major peaks of December and April; it is now actively scouting the calendar for any remaining pockets of peace. Whether it’s the artificial elevation of “Midsummer” into a second gift-giving season or the rebranding of “Mental Health Awareness” into a reason to purchase high-end wellness gadgets, the strategy remains the same. By tying every human emotion - from seasonal joy to self-care - to a mandatory transaction, we are losing the ability to experience our lives without a price tag. It is a cultural occupation that trades our authentic time for manufactured “kicks,” leaving both our sanity and the planet’s resources depleted.

The Hedonistic Treadmill of Childhood

From a corporate strategy perspective, this is a masterclass in incentive design. By increasing the frequency of gift-giving, companies create a hedonistic treadmill. When a child receives a mid-tier toy set for Easter, the Christmas gift must be twice as large to elicit the same dopamine response. We are training a generation to equate affection with the acquisition of new stuff.

But what happens to the child whose parents cannot afford this madness? In a world where the playground is a showroom of the latest trends, the absence of “stuff” becomes a social scar. We have turned parenting into a competitive sport measured in plastic volume.

The environmental cost of this “kick” is staggering. Most of what I saw in that store was nothing more than pre-packaged trash. Unlike my books from the 1960s, these sound-effect-heavy, battery-dependent plastic toys are not built to survive a generation. They are built for the bin. The energy required to extract the oil, refine it into plastic, manufacture these items in overseas factories, and ship them across oceans is spent for a few weeks - or even hours - of attention.

When the child outgrows the toy, or when the cheap plastic hinge inevitably snaps, it doesn’t get passed down. It ends up in a landfill, where it will outlive the child, the parent, and perhaps the civilization that manufactured it.

A Solarpunk Alternative: The Return to Autonomy

In my work exploring Solarpunk philosophy and through the lens of my novel Amatea, I’ve tried to imagine a different source code for our society. In Amatea, the citizens rely on a “Library of Things.” They realize that the value of a drill, a vacuum cleaner, or a toy isn’t in the owning, but in the using.

What if we reclaimed our holidays? What if we declared independence from those cathedrals of plastic?

True resilience - the kind that makes us un-blackmailable by global markets and restores our sanity - starts with saying “enough.”

• The Gift of Time: What if the birthday gift was a weekend of camping or a day spent learning to ride or fix a bike?
• The Quality of Hand-Me-Downs: What if we invested in one high-quality, repairable tool or book instead of ten plastic “surprises”?
• Shared Ownership: What if our neighborhoods had toy libraries, reducing the need for every household to store a mountain of outgrown plastic?

We are currently drowning in the things we think we want. We are exhausted by the pressure to provide, and our children are overstimulated and under-satisfied.

The industry is happy. The “next kick” is always just one holiday away. But the planet is exhausted, and our social cohesion is fraying. It is time to stop waiting for the next retail season and start building a culture where a gift is a rare, meaningful connection - not just another entry in a ledger of excess.

We don’t need more “stuff.” We need our autonomy back. And that starts with walking out of the toy store empty-handed and realizing that the most resilient thing we can give the next generation isn’t a piece of plastic - it’s a planet that isn’t a graveyard for their old toys.