Rituals around death and dying are among the hallmarks of our species. Other animals express grief and loss in ways that suggest forms of sentience of death that are not exclusive to humans. But humans have produced cultural practices around grief and mourning that are integral to our long-term survival. Such practices involve symbolic systems for placing individual life within larger cycles of death and renewal.

After the Second World War, psychologist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl published Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that describes life in concentration camps and how people survived amidst such horrific death and suffering. Most of his family died in the camps and Frankl himself spent three years in four concentration camps. He observed that caring for other people and for the small tasks of daily life–for finding ways of holding onto one’s humanity amidst such inhumaity–were vital to survival. The Palestinians in Gaza, through their capacity to hold onto their humanity amidst a genocide, have inspired a global justice for Palestine movement.

Many Indigenous traditions are based on similar existential principles. Cultural practices center on developing forms of selfhood grounded in care for the natural world and in an identification with future generations. The existential principle of seeing oneself as part of a larger cycle of life, or part of a historical struggle for justice, invokes notions of the transcendent, of something larger in which one finds comfort and a sense of connection..

Is the Mad King Dying?

There are many signs that Trump knows he is dying. There is his increasing detachment from worldly affairs. There is the monument building but also the way he openly talks about his death (“when I’m gone…when I leave here.”)

In many ways, Trump is more grounded in reality than his tech billionaire allies. In the feverish world of AI, death can be avoided (along with taxes). A February 2026 Forbes article describes this philosophy: “The Death Of Death: How Immortality Became A Technical Problem For Founders.” While warning that their technology could wipe out most of our jobs as well as all of humanity AI promoters wax rhapsodic on how their labs are unlocking the secrets to eternal life. Musk the techno-philosopher explained this to Fortune magazine earlier this year: “You’re pre-programmed to die. And so if you change the program, you will live longer.”

Commentators note that Trump, famous for declaring worries about AI being a “hoax,” is not onboard with this techno-futurism. He is a real estate guy who surveys the lands within his reach to make deals. Yet many of those deals seem to be of fading interest as Trump retreats into his gilded castle.

In a May issue of The New Republic, Greg Sargent reports that “He’s not talking about building a wall. He’s not talking about the war in Iran, trans figures and athletes in sports. He’s so far beyond that. The ship has sailed—even whatever he ran on last time. He’s talking about himself and his own majesty.”

He goes on to observe that “The cult-like defenses of Donald Trump have taken a truly creepy turn of late…when you watch all this madness, you can sense something dark underneath it. All these sycophants are plainly aware that Trump is going to be passing from the scene very soon. And it’s very hard to see what’s going to fill the vacuum within the GOP and the right wing that this will leave behind.”

Trump is not leaving it to the MAGA faithful to fill the vacuum. He is probably the least religious president in US history. His AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ was a testament to his true faith.

Although he mused some months back about whether he would get into Heaven, Trump muses all the time about things he probably doesn’t really believe. Like that he won the 2020 election. Or that his inauguration crowds were bigger than Obama’s. He knows that his destiny lies with his imperial claims on the Nation’s real estate.

Many MAGA evangelicals who support Trump imagine a heaven with streets of gold, turning to their favorite book of the Bible, the Book of Revelations. It describes the great street of the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, as being made of “pure gold, like transparent glass.”

One would expect that his Christian supporters would see the blasphemy in Trump’s god complex and self-idolatry. (First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”.) The only limit on his power, Trump told the New York Times earlier this year, was “my own morality, my own mind — it’s the only thing that can stop me.” A recent Truth Social post boasts that “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that Al needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

The pundits incessantly reporting on Trump’s maniacal behavior seem to have missed the signs with this monumentalizing. One symptom worth taking seriously is Trump’s mad dash to build the 250 foot Trump Triumphal Arch in DC. “It’s for me,” he says. But a few days later, a military and security rationale was rolled out much like the rationale for the ballroom.

Trump explains that the Arch will “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.” Military commentators list many reasons for why this is a crazy idea. This garish structure would obstruct the visual path between the Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. This aspect of the project is most concerning to veterans who are filing lawsuits to stop construction.

Much like tearing down the East Wing to build his ballroom, Trump uses the military and security apparatus to justify these projects. But there is a psychologically primitive aspect to this fortification of real and imagined monuments. It is an externalized projection of his own empty psyche.

Napeloenic Fantasies

Many leaders throughout history have built monuments to their power, many erected to overshadow their predecessors — a practice known as damnatio memoriae, or condemnation to oblivion. Trump the builder specializes in such practices, driven by a deep and devouring psychic state of envy. His fixation on plastering his name on the Kennedy Center in Washington DC is a case in point. Like many leaders stricken down in their youth, JFK was enshrined in American political memory. Most baby boomers and their parents remember where they were on the day that Kennedy was shot. No such memories will be imprinted on the day that Trump gives up the ghost.

An even more telling manifestation of Trump’s megalomania was early in his second term. Trump posted one of those Truth Social decrees that soon became his signature mode of governing. With an AI generated image of himself as Napoleon Bonaparte, Trump added a quote from the French emperor: “he who saves his country does not violate any laws.”

Napoleon died in exile on the island of St Helena in 1821 and was buried there. In 1840 the French brought his body back to Paris to be buried at Les Invalides, the palace built by Louis XIV to house military veterans and to honour France’s military heroes. Trump prefers the story of the early 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte who built monuments in Paris— the Arc de Triomphe and the Vendôme Column, both modeled on Roman architecture. The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 to celebrate the French victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. Completed in 1836, the Arc houses the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which honors soldiers who died without proper burials. Even with his purported little-man complex, Napoleon honored fallen soldiers. For Trump, dying in battle is for losers.

Revolution in the Air

In an 1818 poem titled Ozymandias, British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the ultimate obituary for monument-making tyrants. It describes a statue, erected by an ancient powerful and totally forgotten ruler, that is now crumbled on the sands of a desert. It bears the inscription “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

When Trump dies, politically or physically or both, there will be jubilations in the streets and hammers and wrecking balls to take down many of these obscene monuments. The current crises of this country under the Trump regime are symptomatic of deeper dynamics of American capitalism and concentration of corporate power, however. Building a better world involves organizing around a vision of our shared humanity and interdependence. Our survival depends on our ability to repair the destruction inflicted on our ailing planet–destruction that will be, in no small part, Trump’s true legacy.

The November elections hold promise for bringing the regime to its knees. But Democrats capturing the House and the Senate will certainly not be enough. Many of these politicians are quite comfortable with the system. Young people particularly are looking for radical change, for another way of storming the Capital.

💬 Share Your Thoughts

Why do powerful leaders seem so drawn to monuments and symbols of their own legacy? Is it about history, power, or something more personal? Can a society really build a better future without confronting the ways power and wealth shape whose stories—and whose monuments—survive?

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Dr. Hochman is a licensed clinical psychologist whose research, teaching, and advocacy center on racial justice, allyship, and equity. She is a core organizer for Psychologists for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Psychologists for Justice, and has presented nationally on solidarity and conversations across race and identity lines.

Jan:

Welcome to KBOO and the Old Mole Variety Hour, Alissa Hochman.

Well, I hope to have that very kind of conversation that’s part of what you do as a collective today and to specifically talk about how some of this work involves the struggle within the American Psychological Association. So before we take up that struggle and some of the dynamics of a campaign and proposals within the organization this year, can you talk about the importance of APA to the mental health field and perhaps to other areas of politics and culture?

Alissa:

Sure, absolutely. I should start by saying, too, that even though I am an organizing member of JPJ, I’m also a member of Psychologists for Justice in Palestine. I’m speaking as myself and sharing my observations and opinions, so not speaking on behalf of the organizations.

But yeah, it’s a fantastic question about the importance of the American Psychological Association. So there’s almost 200,000 members of it. It’s massive.

The Struggle Within the APA

Jan:

So then in setting the stage for this current struggle within APA, you talk about both the Ethnic Minority Association of APA, which has been the site of this conflict where Association of Jewish Psychologists has been claiming a place within the Ethnic Minority Association. Talk a little bit about both of those protagonists on the stage.

Alissa:

Sure. So historically, the Ethnic Psychological Associations or the Ethnic Minority Psychological Associations have been a collection of racialized groups represented within psychology. These include the Association of Black Psychologists, Asian American Psychological Association, the National Latinx Psychological Association, the Society for Indian Psychologists, and most recently, American Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African Society.

They exist as divisions themselves or sometimes even outside of APA, depending on where they kind of situate themselves. But simultaneously, they also have a seat on council, which is essentially our governing body. And so they have a voting right that has grown out of history of marginalization and oppression and discrimination and underrepresentation in the field of psychology.

And so that’s really the purpose of it. Now, the second protagonist you mentioned is the American or the Association of Jewish Psychologists. And essentially, ever since 2023, they have been pushing to have a seat among the EPAs or the Ethnic Minority Association.

Jan:

Have they been around for a while? On the face of it, it seems strange. Jews developed much of the whole field of psychology, certainly psychoanalysis, and have been such important contributors and creators of many of the tools, the theoretical frameworks, the treatment approaches. So yeah, on the face of it, it seemed strange to me to have this organization distinct from all of the ways that Jewish psychologists participate at, including at the senior levels of the APA.

Alissa:

I would totally agree with that. And it’s unfortunate. They are very recent in their formation.

I think they formed in response to 2023. And also, in response to backlash towards Israel, one of the several critiques of them is that they don’t really represent Jewish psychologists and Jewish people writ large. They really represent Jewish people who are also Zionist, who support Israel, and who see that as intrinsically tied to being Jewish, and therefore, really center support of Israel.

And so that’s part where that timing comes from.

Jan:

So tell us what happened. In August, there’s an annual convention of APA. They’re very, very big events.

And then there are various proposals to be voted on by divisions, but also by the overall association. Tell us about this proposal to include the Association of Jewish Psychologists as a member of the Ethnic Minority Association. How did that go forward?

And how did you respond to that, you and other colleagues with Jewish Psychologists for Justice?

Alissa:

They did submit legislation to become part of the EPAs. Simultaneously, though, an important piece of context is that now the US House is investigating APA for antisemitism. These things are intrinsically related. Just having myself seen internal issues showing up in places like the New York Post or the Brandeis Center writing about them, it’s hard to imagine that this investigation wasn’t brought on by people who are very unsatisfied with APA not doing more to censor people speaking up about Israel and Palestine.

Those people are pretty bold about it. They write about it explicitly online. It can be found.

They’ll name people explicitly who they have issues with. And so it puts APA in this really precarious position where they’re being accused of antisemitism. The call from the House requested all emails that include the terms antisemitism, Israel, and Palestine.

So again, not necessarily focusing on antisemitism as Jews being discriminated against as Jews, but really that conflation, that speaking against Israel, saying that Palestinians are experiencing a genocide and trying to stop that genocide is somehow antisemitic. And so the first vote actually came up in February, and it was pushed because how can you vote on this issue while you’re under investigation in good faith? And then it was pushed again.

And then it came up in August again. And my understanding is that essentially there’s going to be a working group to understand how best to represent Jewish psychologists.

Jan:

The Jewish Psychologist for Justice argues, as I think Jewish Voice for Peace and many other groups do, that the very conflation of Jewish identity and support for Zionism or Israel is itself antisemitic. Can you say a little about that?

Alissa:

Absolutely. And it’s interesting because those of us who are speaking up against that conflation are being accused of self-hating Jews with an internalized antisemitism being called slurs that call us traitors. And in reality, Zionism itself at its foundation was seen as antisemitic by some Jewish organizations, the idea that all Jewish people should go claim land and move somewhere else.

So this isn’t new. There have always been Jewish people in strong opposition to the Zionist movement. And when it landed on claiming Palestine as its location soon after its beginning, a lot of predicting and naming the harm that that would bring both to the Palestinian people and to Jews at large for the conflict that that would create and the harm it would do.

Jan:

There’s often a kind of equivalency established that I think is very problematic between instances of antisemitism in the Justice for Palestine movement or more broadly in the left, versus antisemitism as a more organized ideology on the right. How do you understand the different expressions of contemporary antisemitism?

Alissa:

What’s interesting for me is like, I have not personally experienced any antisemitism coming from the left. I’m sure it happens. And I know that there are going to be people who make these glossing overreaches, holding all Jewish people responsible for Israel, or some of the stereotypes or tropes, exactly.

And that’s complicated by the fact that there are Jewish people and Israel itself saying that this is for all Jewish people. So I don’t know how to reconcile that. I find that very different than the more classic antisemitism that is absolutely on the rise, but all these things are interrelated like these narratives of a genocide being committed so that Jewish people can be safe.

That doesn’t actually make us safer.

The Shattering of Ideals

Jan:

Okay, so what about your own process? Part of the contribution of psychoanalysis is in taking up the complexity and the ambivalences in human attachments, we become attached to people, but objects, places, and Israel’s kind of a super symbolic object. And in broader global awareness, Palestine and certainly Gaza.

What has been your experience growing up in under Zionism and your own attachment to Israel and how you’ve kind of worked through that and understand that in these conversations we talked about at the beginning? How do you have conversations with people who are struggling with their attachments to Israel as both a place and a kind of a fantasy object, an idealized object?

Alissa:

Absolutely. I’ve done a lot of reflecting on this, especially my own journey to sort of unlearn Zionism really began more in 2014, 2015. I feel like 2023 was a huge turning point for a lot of people.

And it certainly shifted more things for me and helped more unlearning. But, I grew up in a reform synagogue, I was taught how important social justice is, it’s how I’ve generally attributed like the values that I have that have led me to the career I have, but simultaneously was taught to love Israel in just a very kind of passive, subverted way, right? Like we were learning the national anthem and just hearing about people going on trips to Israel.

And it was just in the air that that is a part of being Jewish. It's a complicated story but there was some conflict in my family about how I, whether I’d be raised Jewish or not. And I think that played a role in me choosing to go to Brandeis as my undergrad, also because it purports to be a social justice university.

And when I was there, I went on birthright and I absolutely fell in love with Israel.

Jan:

Can you just say a bit for people who aren’t familiar with the birthright programs, explain that a bit.

Alissa:

I mean, wow, it’s a free 10-day trip to Israel and you party and learn all about the amazing history of it. You meet people your age who are in the military in Israel, but you’re eating the food, drinking, dancing, and simultaneously, I wish I was more of a critical thinker and more emboldened to challenge authority, but there were very strange moments, right? One example is if you meet your significant other on the trip, you get a honeymoon to Israel.

But also sitting us down in a room and explaining that the UN is antisemitic because they spent 50 pages on Israeli human rights violations and only four or five on Darfur at the time. And I remember thinking, how are there 50 pages to write about? But I didn’t really push it farther than that.

The other piece that I think they did that was really powerful, two pieces. One is saying that this is your home and because you’re Jewish, no matter what is happening, if you’re ever in trouble, if you ever need something, you can always come here. And that, for me in particular, was huge at that time.

I didn’t really have a home to go back to, so I felt cared for. And I think the other piece that’s really important, I think that was my own stuff that got played on, but they also do such a powerful playing on intergenerational trauma of Jewish people. I’ve been to Holocaust museums and I had been to them throughout my life growing up.

None of them were like the Holocaust Museum in Israel. Of course, they’re always devastating to go to and eye-opening and painful, but this was on another level. People were hysterically crying.

A few people in my birthright group vomited while they were there because it was so graphic and so upsetting.

Jan:

You mean graphic in terms of what happened during the Holocaust of people being exterminated?

Alissa:

Yeah. They had a pile of shoes of people who had been, I think, killed in the gas chamber or something. Just so intense.

And you walk through that museum and when you get to the very end of it, it’s this massive open air window with an arch that is just looking out over Israel. It’s like you walked this path of hell and trauma and look what we got in the end and look at our freedom and our safety now. I don’t think that can be discounted either, just how that hits you.

Jan:

How do you try to have those conversations with people who are struggling with an attachment to Israel? And how do you draw on your own experience, perhaps, to try to come to terms with that and I guess the feelings of loss and grief? We can be attached to fantasy objects as much as things in the world that have some material basis to them.

Alissa:

Yeah. I just try to hold empathy and understanding and as frustrating and concerning and disappointing it is to see people dug into Zionism and unwilling to see the reality of what’s happening. I understand it in some ways or at least the way I understand it helps me tolerate it because I can’t believe that if you really accepted the reality of what’s happening that you would keep that stance, especially as someone in the field that’s supposed to care about the well-being of other people.

But this is a shattering of a reality that you hold that is so painful. I’ve been through a lot of different things in my life. Nothing has felt as much of a betrayal as when I realized what Israel was doing to Palestinians in 2014, 2015 and the ways that it reminded me of the Holocaust.

You could have just swapped out Palestinian for Jew and it would have been the same story. And the realization that I was simultaneously taught to value social justice and I was taught to value this country that is actually doing the exact things we were taught to stand up against and stop and make sure never happen again. It’s a disillusionment and a betrayal and a rage that I really can’t put words to appropriately.

So I understand in some ways the struggle with that. You have to reconcile. One of the most horrific things you could reconcile.

I try to make space for it. I try to make space for the pain of it. But I think even more so there’s a lot of people who aren’t Jewish who are very confused by the infighting.

And so trying to clarify that as well. It does seem like a lot of people have made decisions about where they land. We’re in a very polarized time.

So I don’t get as much conversations with people who are maybe questioning. But when I am in those spaces, I did have an opportunity to speak with some psychologists and it did seem like some were questioning. And so again, just being my authentic raw self about how painful this is and even how painful it is that it’s risky and controversial to be talking right now, even just on this radio show or to that group of psychologists that have people who are Zionist who have attacked other psychologists and other graduate students for speaking out about Palestine.

It shouldn’t be controversial to talk about trying to stop genocide.

Holding Space for Discomfort

Jan:

And I think just continuing with that thought in closing, I think both as psychologists and teachers, we base much of our work on helping people hold and be able to understand conflict and discomfort.

Alissa:

I will say I feel very protective, though, of my colleagues who are impacted, who are Palestinian or SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) or people of color that are watching this play out. There’s a level of protectiveness and frustration that we’re having this debate when people are being murdered and starved. And that is a privilege that we have to be able to kind of have this back and forth around this comfort.

Yes, around discomfort, around what all of this means, around trying to disentangle the conflation and helping people see that discomfort and fear are not the same thing as actually being unsafe. And so I think that is really the challenge, right?

We have been taught to—we meaning Jews and especially the majority of Jews who grew up exposed to Zionism—were taught to dehumanize Palestinians. And we need to rectify that and recognize that their safety is part of our safety and our discomfort or our fear around what that will look like doesn’t make it real and doesn’t give us a blank slate to do whatever we want with however we feel in any space. Like I do think we should be having these conversations among ourselves and not out in the open with people who are harmed by it.

Jan:

I hope to continue conversations with you and that you’ll join us again on the Old Mole Variety Hour. So much appreciate your work through the Jewish Psychologist for Justice and for sharing your own personal experience.

Thank you. This is Jan Haaken talking today with Dr. Alissa Hochman on the Old Mole Variety Hour.

Alissa:

Thanks so much for having me.

🎞️ Watch the Film

The Palestine Exception explores the largest anti-war movement since the 1970s as students, faculty, and staff demand divestment from companies doing business with Israel. The documentary features diverse academics confronting the historical censorship of criticisms of Israel and Zionism.

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What role should psychologists play in addressing political conflict, human rights, and the experiences of people who are being harmed? How do we reconcile deeply held beliefs about identity, history, and justice when confronted with painful new realities?

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Why are they sucking up vast amounts of water and electricity? Why are they producing that eerie hum day and night? Why are there no people in them? Experts tell the public that these super-structures are necessary to power the AI revolution. If we don’t do this, they say, we will get left behind. We need it to power the world we all depend on.

Some experts debate whether or not this advanced form of computer learning-–hyperscalers, agentic AI, autonomous AI, superhuman AI–is a normal technology. The tech mega-billionaires and their marketing people can’t seem to decide. One story leans into the abnormal: this technology is more powerful than anything in human history–or maybe since the atomic bomb–and it could destroy all of humanity. More likely, others argue, it will just take away your jobs. But they breathlessly add that US tech companies are best positioned to control these bad outcomes. That’s why they have to keep their technology so secret. The other story leans into the idea of normalcy: people always get scared by something new that they don’t understand but they then adjust and find that it’s not so scary after all. It’s normal and you are normal for being afraid of something you don’t understand. People will find new jobs or enjoy their leisure time.

Normal vs. Abnormal

As an academic who taught Abnormal Psychology for decades, I have engaged my students in analyses of how boundaries between normal and abnormal get drawn. In psychiatry and psychology, there are experts whose job it is to establish such boundaries and for establishing scientific criteria for inclusion and exclusion. For those of us who draw on critical traditions in psychology, these boundaries have long been suspect. Social movements, including feminism, cultural studies, queer theory, disability advocacy, the anti-psychiatry movement, have for decades unsettled experts’ claims on the inclusivity or exclusivity of their categories.

In returning to whether or not AI is a normal technology, there are many ways of thinking about this question. Discourse on AI normalcy tends to center on how this technology will be gradually accepted by the public through a process termed diffusion. In coming years, AI will be integrated into our work processes, our mental states, and our economy. This also draws on a continuum model where things familiar that we already accept–automated transcription services, google search functions and automated call centers–will extend into new areas as AI technology automates routine work and provides better computational tools for science and medicine. There is certainly something to this story. It’s compelling if we push out of mind the parts of the AI story which the material horrors of data centers so palpably remind us of.

Alongside this continuum model of normalcy is the major disruption model (also normal). The most common historical examples are the steam engine and railroads in the mid 19th century, the light bulb and electrification in the late 19th century, and the world wide web and the internet at the end of the 20th century. These were transformative technologies that produced public anxieties and economic crises. But many promoting the normalizing discourse point out that such disruptions were merely phases in a general pattern of historical progress. The public finally matures and adapts to the technology, relinquishing out-moded ways of thinking and making things.

It’s a disturbing phase but one that will pass with appropriate parental guidance. In a recent LinkedIn post, for example, Subhas Shetty offers: “Why AI Feels Like a Gifted Teenager (And Why That’s Exciting)” Unlike the computer revolution that always felt under adult control, Shetty suggests, “Current AI models are more like a prodigious teenager: Capable of astonishing creativity (generating code, designs, ideas in seconds); Full of energy and surprising us with brilliance; But also prone to mistakes, overconfidence, biases, and even real damage if not carefully guided.”

This Gifted Teenager metaphor offers a friendly story that most of us can relate to, setting it apart from the spooky Chat GPT “companions,” the autonomous Claude agents, and the frightful AGI, the superintelligent destroyers of humanity. And AI as a gifted teenager is clearly in the line of normalizing metaphors and storytelling.

Scary Things and the Psychology of Containment

Inside a G20 technology summit held in Chapel Hill NC on September 1st and 2nd, 2026, hundreds of protestors gathered outside to express their outrage over the aggressive expansion of AI-fueled data centers across the country. Inside the conference hall, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Open AI’s Sam Altman held what they called a fireside chat.

Altman waxed rhapsodic in his address, referring to AI as an “incredible magic of intelligence in a bottle.”

Altman’s metaphor reminded me of a scene from the 1957 Disneyland TV series that I included in my film Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. In the 1950s, the US government enlisted Walt Disney and his company’s enchanting imagery to assist in separating in the public’s mind the fear of the atomic bomb from what Eisenhower termed “Atoms for Peace.” The first nuclear reactors were created to produce atomic bombs and the aim of building a thousand reactors by the end of the century required a public relations campaign centered on managing public fears.

In Disney’s TV episode, titled “My Friend the Atom,” Dr Heinz Hopper tells a story of how science transformed the frightening atomic bomb into something friendly in the form of nuclear power. “We had a science story (he shows a photo of an atomic blast mushroom cloud to illustrate) but it was almost like a fairytale… like the old fable from the Arabian Nights, the fisherman and the genie.”

In explanation, Dr. Hopper shares a Disney animation of an old fisherman living in poverty, casting his net despondently and only retrieving a bottle from the sea. He opens the bottle and is overtaken by an enormous genie, portrayed in the animation as a muscular and menacing black cloud. Tricking the genie, the fisherman gets the genie back in the bottle and begins to throw the bottle into the sea. But he stops, realizing that he can make use of the powerful genie by making it his friend.

The release of energy in the atomic bomb is similar to that genie in the bottle, Dr. Hopper explains. And scientists like the fisherman have found a way to control that genie in the bottle in the form of nuclear power.

In an August 31, 2026 New York Times Opinion piece, David Wallace-Wells looks for historical antecedents to explain the intensity of public opposition to data centers and finds historical parallels in public anxiety over nuclear power:

Returning to Altman’s magic in a bottle, the metaphor illustrates how much AI mania driving the stock market relies on magical thinking–a belief that wishing something strongly will make it happen. The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and the Business Insider report daily on AI mania and speculate on when the AI bubble will burst. Warning signs blare but the investments keep rolling in. Investors are drunk on that magic substance in the bottle.

With all of the advanced tools available to them– machines that devour the history of human knowledge and our vast wealth in cultural imagery and storytelling–you would think these people could produce better stories to seduce the public. They seem to have overworked the magic of Disney to make us believe.

Alien Invasions and the People

Many tech experts and investors express alarm over the intensity of public opposition to data centers. Politicians who previously signed deals and leased vast tracts of land to tech companies now go into abrupt reverse on the issue. They are reading the room at town halls. Nearly 80 percent of independents oppose local data center projects, along with 83 percent of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans. Around $130 billion in projects were delayed or canceled just in the first quarter of this year and 500 jurisdictions have passed bans or moratoriums. Yet the data center build-out continues. More than 1,500 projects are currently underway and thousands more are in the planning stage.

In trying to tell the Big Story of data center resistance, commentators struggle to find the plot. The Trump Regime and their right-wing allies have fed the public many dark tales of alien invasions: Haitian immigrants eating peoples’ pets, foreigners sneaking into the country to rape and pillage, brown people secretly plotting to take over the country. As white people see their neighbors snatched by ICE agents from their homes and workplaces and taken to concentration camps, these dark tales are losing traction. The regime is losing control of its alien invasion stories.

Like a good sci-fi movie where the town people come together to understand the spaceships that have landed and figure out how to fight them, aliens often symbolize public anxieties over a world they inhabit but over which they struggle to have some control. Data centers are symbols of the billionaire class, the big capitalists and the big investors bulldozing and building their own vision of the future. Much like Trump’s gold appliquéd White House and monuments to himself signify an old empire in decline, monstrous windowless boxes that hold towers of interconnected computers symbolize something dead at the core of advanced capitalism.

And the story of the people versus the alien invaders is still being written.

Watch Full Film for Free

Atomic Bamboozle is documentary that follows anti-nuclear activists, tribal leaders, scientists and attorneys as they draw lessons from the decades-long campaign to shut down the Trojan Nuclear Power plant in Oregon and extend those lessons into a new struggle to stop small modular reactors (SMRs) from being built in the Pacific Northwest.

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💬 Share Your Thoughts

What are the best tactics for opposing data centers? Are local moratoriums enough? What are the most effective storytelling strategies?

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Jan:

I’m talking today with Michael Fabricant, Professor of Policy and Community Organizing at the Silberman School of Social Work, a part of Hunter College. He’s written 10 books and numerous articles on the impact of disassembling and privatizing welfare state programs during the past 50 years. His work extends beyond the academy.

Over the past 40 years, he has helped lead campaigns that expand housing and development programs and homelessness services in New Jersey. Mike also served as a principal officer for 13 years of the Faculty and Staff Union of CUNY, the PSC. Welcome to KBOO and the Old Mole Variety Hour, Mike Fabricant.

Michael:

Thank you, Jan. Terrific to be here.

Jan:

And congratulations on your fabulous and timely new book, The Struggle for Public Goods in the Shadow of Fascism, Hope at Dusk. Let’s start by bringing in your own background in social work as well as activism into this project. There are now more books than we could count on fascism.

It’s become a very big topic during the Trump era. There are debates about whether the Trump regime is fascist, neo-fascist. Even Robert Paxton, the historian you draw on in your book, seems to have shifted in how he would describe the Trump regime in terms of whether it’s useful to think of it as fascist.

So let’s start with what you bring to this topic from your own field of social work.

From Neoliberalism to Evisceration

Michael:

Sure. Thank you. I want to back up just a little bit.

What I bring to it also is having grown up working class. I grew up on the edge of poverty, and the consequence of that is that I was familiar with the differences, modest and substantial, that the welfare state in that period made for my family. And then watching over the last 40, 50 years, the ways in which it’s been so eroded that those kinds of differences are less and less available to others, especially now to people of color and also to people who are migrating to America.

So having said that, I’ve spent most of my life, my work life, writing about different parts of the welfare state, from the practice in nonprofit agencies, to public education, to higher education, and so on. And there are some through lines associated with those studies. And one is the privatization, the disinvestment, and austerity, none of which is new, all of which has been traced.

So what brings me to this work is this kind of threshold moment of personally, politically, based on the work that I do in communities, and through my writing, that the very existence of a welfare state as we’ve understood it, is now being we’ve moved from neoliberalism to a stage of evisceration, there was a gradual undermining of it and diminishment of the welfare state. But now we’re looking at an evisceration of it.

And that then has to have a name. And I think we can no longer talk about this moment as neoliberalism, whatever we may want to call it, neofascism, fascism, fascism is a very slippery political language. But I think it has many of the qualities of the movement toward a fascist state, what’s missing is the takeover of the state by a fascist party.

Social Work Between Care and Control

Jan:

But I’d like to return to that moment, but stay with the particular experience that you bring through your own life experience, but also your field of social work. And I was struck by that, you know, the attentiveness to the idea of social welfare, as public goods, a kind of vision of social welfare that challenges the dominant conservative politics, and even the Democratic Party that has been hostile over the last 50 years, 40 years to the welfare state. But, you know, many people associate social workers with people who deal with the practical problems of poor people.

You know, if you’re in the hospital or a nursing home, or call child welfare services, there’ll be a social worker there to help you. And yet, there’s a left literature, an extensive left literature, on the role of social workers in managing the poor, and regulating the state, not only through the criteria for eligibility to services but often in the monitoring of poor families. So there’s both the kind of progressive story of social workers, dealing with the problems of people who are marginalized, who bear the heaviest weight of stress and insecurity that capitalism produces in this country. On the other hand, there’s a left literature on social workers as in this position of managing the poor.

How do you think about those traditions of your own field and what they bring to your book project?

Michael:

Well, I do think that both strains, there are two strains that exist, which is the institutional and even the professional surveillance and, and the kinds of policing, if you will, and controlling of poor people. But I think there is this other tradition, beginning with the settlement houses and continuing to this day, of really trying to work within communities to create a kind of power in order to change the conditions, a power that would change the conditions that exist in the most oppressed communities. Often, it was quite patriarchal, or it had a quality to it that was sort of from the top benefiting the bottom.

And it wasn’t a shared struggle. But nonetheless, it was a struggle to improve conditions. And it did.

A lot of what happened during the New Deal was a consequence of the social workers who came out of that settlement house movement and what they’ve learned. So it’s a dialectic, you know, between the institution, there’s an institutional drive over time, and then there’s a struggle outside and social workers leading for a period of time that struggle for something far more than the institution would provide. And it’s ultimately a back and forth between one set of political forces or power and another set of forces.

And the question then becomes one of where does the social work profession align itself? And I think historically, it has struggled to align itself with the greater investment in communities. I also think it’s been less and less effective doing it.

But then again, across the board, there’s been less and less effectiveness in promoting that investment. So in the end, this is about a choice and trade off. You know, yes, of course, the state has its flaws and the welfare state particularly.

It’s ways to improve the conditions of citizens across the country. And frankly, non-citizens, you know, folks who are struggling to achieve citizenship. And that’s the welfare state.

There is not and never has been an assurance that that’s going to happen in a maximal or even substantial way. It occurs and often it’s symbolic and or less than. To extend that, to make it far more effective, that requires vigilance, that requires struggle.

Folks not only have to achieve a victory, for example, of Medicare or Medicaid, or health programs or housing, they have to be vigilant in continuing to work to expand it and to protect what’s been won.

Welfare as a Public Good

Jan:

And that’s where you come in on the hope side. But staying with these different visions of the welfare state, you know, of social welfare. The term welfare has such a strong history of being stigmatized in this country through at least 50 years, even farther back than that.

I mean, you weigh into that in a way that resonates with a lot of how democratic socialists are now organizing around, like here in Portland, in Multnomah County, we have a preschool for all campaign that won an election. We’re still fighting to get those funds available that are not merit based access to child care service in the same way that the Mamdani administration in New York argued for preschool for all, as something even high income people should be able to access– kind of like public schools. How do you understand that vision of social welfare as a public good versus a merit based system?

Michael:

Well, let me begin by saying the promise of a democracy was some matter of equality. And if one is going to try to fulfill and struggle toward that promise, then it has to be a redistributive state that moves toward equality in relation to a democracy. Now we’re not naive enough to believe it’s going to be full equality, but, you know, greater equality, a substantial equality, especially on the economic side.

What we’ve seen is the opposite, as evidenced by all kinds of data on inequality. So having said that, in order to achieve it, one has to socialize profit, right? There’s a socialization of profit.

Jan:

So food safety would be part of that. And we’re seeing a lot of the attacks on many areas that you would include in this broader scope of health care. Yeah.

Michael:

Health care, housing, the question of affordability around food, public transportation, these are the kinds of things that Mayor Mamdani has talked about as affordability. I would talk about some of this as universal rights. These are rights that every human being should have access to transportation, public transportation, housing that meets certain standards, and so on.

That requires investment, a public investment. And in this country, presently, any kind of massive redistribution is a third rail, right?

And power politics has no interest in that kind of investment, public investment. And so when you talk about public investment or goods and services, the welfare state, which is not earned, but has been, in many instances, just scapegoated for any one of a number of reasons. That’s not to say it does not have flaws.

It has many. But again, that’s about the vigilance of those who are served by it and others to make certain it does what it is expected to do. We’re left in a circumstance where this is about power.

Debates on Fascism

Jan:

And so where we are is this ongoing debate in the left and also elsewhere, from different political perspectives on whether to have this continuity framework for thinking about the problems with the slashing of social welfare services, this kind of fixation on small government, government’s bad, and all of this gets bundled together, including regulatory apparatus of the state. Whether Trump is on a part of a continuity model and perhaps the most pathological manifestation of a project that’s in its decline, some would say, its empire in its decline, or whether there is something anomalous and a shift in the way that Robert Paxton would describe it that we are now from neoliberalism into fascism.

You endorse that framework. It’s not like an either or proposition, but that you seem to take that point of view that there is a shift with the Trump regime that requires us to think about strategies of resisting fascism. You’ve drawn Toni Morrison’s famous speech in 1995 at Howard University.

Of course, then people were talking about fascism. The left has been talking about fascism for a long time. But Robert Paxton cautions against just hurling the fascist term at people. We need to think more clearly in the sense that there may be different strategies or diagnoses of the problem that shape our strategies for intervention.

So how did you weigh the different debates on fascism in taking up your own line of analysis?

Michael:

I think the lines of debate matter, but I was most impressed with Paxton’s line of debate. And his line, he has basically five factors, and I’m not going to run through them, but five factors that are characteristic of fascism.

And they overlap really with some large part of what Toni Morrison laid out, and not surprisingly. The bottom line on this is you reach a fascism as a contrast to a fascist politics or fascist tactics, or fascist tactics, when the state becomes, as I said earlier, owned by a fascist party. That has not happened.

And we see even in the rise of socialist Democrats or Democrat socialists, that it hasn’t happened. We’re still sort of struggling around who controls the state, what controls the state. But we’re awfully close.

And this is no accident. We’ve seen 50 years of this progression. And that was no accident, because there were investments in building infrastructure.

And the Koch brothers were at the center, to some extent, of the building. And Nancy MacLean, in her analysis, does an extraordinary job of documenting it, step by step by step by step, moving toward not a neoliberal state, but understanding you’d have to move through these stages to get to what I would characterize as a fascist state.

Are We on the Long March Toward Fascism?

Jan:

Is part of how you characterize a fascist state, draw on a long-standing Marxist or left analysis that argues that under fascism, industry is more subjected to the control of the state? And often out of a period of crisis and countering the rise of the left, the key industries become junior partners in a fascist or authoritarian project? Is that part of how you see what’s happening now?

Michael:

That’s certainly part of what I think has happened at this point. But I’m, you know, the difference is, again, Paxton and others point out, between an autocracy and a fascist state is the othering. In fact, autocracy is interested in the power and the question of single, you know, single leadership, dictatorship.

Fascism adds to that the demonization of other and othering. There’s not necessarily a necessity under autocracy for that to happen. There has been that historically under fascism.

We’ve seen that here. It’s happening and it’s intensifying the othering and the demonization. Now we’ve seen it going back decades in the South, you know, Ku Klux Klan was a fascist construction, but we’re in a different moment where it’s a national, it’s a national project.

We’re not there yet. The struggle continues. And that’s why I’ve written, in part, this book and I do the work I do.

There’s still enormous hope. And the fact is, at the center of it is the continuing tension between a democracy, if you will, whatever that form has been in the United States at different points in time, and a market, market freedom, as contrasted to democracy’s promise of equality, and the intolerance for this democracy and equality in relationship to market freedom.

And where that leaves us is the attack on the welfare state, because in great part the welfare state is the promise, or the embodied promise of democracy and equality.

Fascism and the Anxiety of Decline

Jan:

And that’s part of what people embrace with the New Deal as a larger project. Well, there’s another, there’s another aspect to the fascism as an ideology, a project of politics that Paxton emphasizes that I wanted you to comment on, because I think it’s for many, it’s both the horror and the hope of where we’re at, that he talks about it as an ideology of decline, and anxiety around decline and a kind of restoration of purity. So you get all of this, you know, Trump talks about genetics and his fixation on his aesthetics on purity and in a kind of hollow ways, like Versailles, Palace of Versailles aesthetics.

He’s not only looking back to the 50s, but to an earlier era of palatial grandeur, in response to what he’s always been obsessed with as American decline, that’s the Make America Great Again. And I think people are seeing this now in full display. There’s social media, there’s alternative media, there are movements and organizing projects around the country exposing the level of corruption and obsession with decline, and we have this decadent and demented, declining leader. How much of all of this on display gives some cause for hope that this is the kind of fascism that that spells the end of an empire too?

Michael:

Without a doubt, we know that Trump was able to penetrate the anxiety of white-collar workers who were anxious about their jobs, before AI rolled in. Working class, white working class and other workers of color, who were a small number at that time, but have grown displacement from manufacturing jobs. We also know there’s a sense of displacement on the basis of race and gender, a sense among Christian nationalists, displacement in terms of the sense of a secular culture, as contrasted in their being marginalized. So, there’s a lot, there’s many different expressions of the sense of displacement and decline.

And there is no doubt that when you look at the question of fascism, and the history of fascism, that it has been associated with empire decline of one sort or another. And I think that’s no different today. I mean, this is about a period of American empire decline.

And it was forecasted many decades ago, given the way in which the US was organized. But it’s accelerated under this leadership, dare I call it leadership, misleadership. And so, we’re in a moment where you have an “other” in order to explain it.

So why are we declining? Why are we displaced? Migration. Why?

Well, the race is less and less pure. I mean, all of this is resonant with what occurred in Europe in the 30s.

Jan:

And it’s also the paranoia about the enemy within. It’s not only the hordes at the borders. But now, I think that also signals a kind of paranoid period of ruthlessness, you know, people snatched up off the streets, and people seeing this, and seeing their neighbors being othered, people they depend on to care for their grandparents or parents in nursing homes, people who clean the halls in our hospitals.

So, I think so much of the cruelty of the othering, it shifts when that other is my neighbor, my caregiver. For some, I don’t want to overstate it. I think the majority of Americans now oppose what this regime is doing under their fascist brown shirts of ICE agents.

Knowing Isn’t Enough. We Have to Act.

Michael:

Agreed. But there’s a huge difference between knowing and acting. I want to, I just want to say that.

That’s why certain election results have occurred. But in the building of a social movement to press the far right outside of the legislative halls, that is still in a kind of incipient stage of unity nationally. And that’s really what we have to look toward in building out.

And there are some very healthy signs at the moment. But at the same time, we can’t overlook the fact that we need a social movement that’s a countervailing force. Otherwise, we find ourselves with elected social Democrats, potentially, many across the country.

We find ourselves with a president who may be more progressive. But four years later, without a movement, we may well find ourselves back where we were. And it’s the movement that keeps pressing, helping to press things forward and drawing more people into not only a resistance, but an offensive.

There Is Still Enormous Hope

Jan:

Yes. And I think that is a point that you find a great deal of agreement on the left in terms of your vision of that hope at dusk where you end. And I want to just congratulate you again for this wonderful book.

And it’s timely, of course, but also very instructive in how we talk about the state, the social welfare state, how we frame these issues, as well as how we organize and fight back. And in closing, Mike Fabrikamp, where can people buy the book?

Michael:

Well, you can buy it Rutledge online. I think I sent a flyer which will be posted and easily ordered through Rutledge. There’s I believe, a 15-20% discount on the book for the rest of this year.

So I would recommend ordering it there. And, you know, I know bookstores that are carrying it, but I don’t know if you have Powell out there, right? Yes.

Jan:

Better to try to push our local bookstores rather than ordering it through Amazon. So agreed.

Well, thank you so much, Mike Fabrikamp for being with us today on the Old Mole Variety Hour and sharing your further thoughts about your wonderful new book.

Michael:

Well, thank you, Jan. I much appreciate it. And thank you for the opportunity to be able to be in a conversation with you.

Jan:

Take care and keep up the good work. Bye bye.

💬 Share Your Thoughts

Do you see the current political moment as a continuation of decades of attacks on the welfare state - or as something fundamentally different? Is electoral politics enough to protect and expand public goods, or does lasting change require a sustained social movement?

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Through a mother’s account of her son’s death during a protest in the Occupied West Bank, the film explores family, generational trauma, grief, and the painful limits of parental protection. We also debate whether its appeal to shared humanity risks conceding too much common ground to the oppressor.

Joe:

All That’s Left of You is a 2025 film directed by and co-starring Cherien Dabis. The film follows one Palestinian family across four periods spanning virtually the whole seven decades long history of the Nakba, what Palestinians call the catastrophe of displacement, dispossession, and oppression by the Israeli state and Zionist movement. Starting in the 1980s, we encounter some teenage boys living in the West Bank who get swept up in protests that are part of the first intifada against the Israeli occupation.

When IDF forces start firing on the crowd, one of the teenagers, Nour, dies for cover in a car that is shot at. The film then cuts to Cherien Dabis’ character, Nour’s mother Hanan, addressing the Kama directly, saying, I know you are wondering why we are here. You do not know very much about us.

It’s okay. I’m not here to blame you. I’m here to tell you who is my son.

But for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather. The story then cuts to events in 1948, and then 1978, 1988, and then 2023. In the first period, we meet Nour’s grandfather, an orange farmer, Sharif, in Jaffa, and a very young Salim, Nour’s father.

Their family is displaced by Zionist forces conquering Palestine. In the 1970s, Salim has grown with children of his own and works as a teacher. Nour is still very young, and one day when getting heart medicine for Sharif with Salim, they are caught out past curfew and terrorized by IDF soldiers who force Salim to say shameful things at gunpoint.

Nour resents his father for what he perceives as his cowardice, while also deepening his connection with Sharif, who still believes in fighting for Palestine. When we get to the 1980s, Sharif is dead, and Nour is a teenager. The first Intifada is around the corner, if not happening.

School has been closed because of the conflict, and Nour and some of his friends go to a protest. When Nour dives into a car to avoid gunfire, he’s hit in the head, but not killed. His parents then enter a truly Kafkaesque maze of bureaucracy and structural violence of medical care under apartheid.

They struggle to meet the requirements to travel to an Israeli hospital that can treat his injuries. But because it took so long, his condition worsens to the point that he cannot be saved. Salim and Nour wrestle with the morality of organ donation when the recipients are likely to be part of the population that seek to dominate Palestinians.

The imam they seek counsel with invokes the film’s title, All That’s Left of You, when appealing to the humanity that the oppressor cannot take away from us after they’ve taken everything else. One of the organ recipients is an Israeli boy, who we learn later when he grows up is the addressee of Hanan’s opening plea for an audience. This brings us to the final act, back in Jaffa, but in 2023.

Hanan reunites with Ari, who receives Nour’s heart, and discovers that he did not, could not participate in military service precisely because his heart transplant. Salim wanders his childhood neighborhood and tests the bona fides of the now locals they encounter. They end gazing at the sea together.

Now Jan, this was a really beautiful film, and one thing that is obvious from this summary, and then from many reviews, is that this film is all about the generational component, the relationship between generations, and just what happens in each generation. What was your take on this?

The Wounds We Inherit: Family, Trauma, and the Nakba

Jan:

Well, there’s an enormous literature, some of it taken up in films such as this, centered on intergenerational transmission of stories of suffering and trauma. And this was very much a patrilineal story. So it brings to mind psychoanalytic analysis of father-son relationships, where here the mother is an important kind of mediating presence. But it really is about fathers, whether they can be fighters and whether their sons can be fighters, or whether the fight is futile.

Part of what was important about this film, and how it departs from many of these stories of intergenerational transmission of trauma, is that trauma implies the transmission of impairment. Here we see a more complicated picture, where the grandfather’s losses are felt severely by his son, who is reduced in social class but a highly effective teacher. He’s learning to creatively live under occupation. He is clearly a gifted teacher, playful, and creatively engaging his son and other students on how to live under these terrible conditions.

Freud famously tells the story of his childhood, a formative, disturbing memory, where his father, Jacob, tells him about what a good life they have. They’re much better than they were under the shtetl. But then, as he’s telling this story, a man comes along and says, “Jew, get off the street’ and knocks off his hat.

Sigmund Freud remembers asking his father, well, what did you do? And he said, I got in the gutter, and I picked up my hat. And he remembered looking very differently at his father.

This is so much part of patrilineal stories–of ambivalence, identification with the power of the father, and then finding that the father’s power is crushed by a superior power. And there are many of these stories under patriarchy. But this one, you see most poignantly and tragically under the Israeli occupation and domination.

When a Father Can No Longer Protect His Son

Joe:

There’s a scene in the center of the film where Salim is going to the pharmacy, thinking that curfew has been lifted and it apparently has not. And he has Noor with him. And Noor is his son.

He is the youngest of this generational chain of Sharif, the grandfather. The father in the first generation, Salim, is the father in the second generation and Sharif’s son. Noor is Salim’s son. And they’re coming back, and they’re caught by some IDF soldiers who are saying, “what are you doing out past curfew?”

And Salim tries to negotiate with them. He’s like, hey, I didn’t know. And we’re just like a house away.

“Can you just let us go?” And the soldiers just decide to completely terrorize the both of them, telling Salim to go paint over this graffiti. And then Salim says, “okay, do you have paint? Are you really serious about this?”

They get angrier at him and decide that they’re going to find a way to really humiliate him in front of his son, which is to force him to say these horrible things about himself, but then about his wife.

Jan:

And part of that was threatening to kill him.

Joe:

Oh yeah, at gunpoint. At gunpoint. And it’s not just implicit.

They were holding a gun to his head and saying, do this or die. And he did what I would do as a parent in that situation, and I would comply. But Noor is watching this happen, and Noor is angry.

Noor is so angry that he defies the gun-toting soldiers in front of his father, who is now even more worried that it’s going to get him killed. But ultimately they survive, and that is because he follows their commands, which is to humiliate himself in front of his son and himself.

Jan:

And violating a very, very big taboo in many, if not most cultures, to call your mother a whore. And he had to say that himself. My wife is a whore.

And so it was a terrible violation of a taboo of protecting women and the mother of his son. And so in his own mind, he had, even under the conditions of the threat of his own life and his son’s, he had violated his own conscience and suffered enormous depression and guilt over this, as well as the humiliation of his son seeing him reduced in this way.

Joe:

His son also has a visceral response to this, not just on the level of what he thought his father should do, but he acts out in school, he’s depressed, everyone notices this.

Jan:

And he’s angry.

Joe:

He’s angry.

Jan:

He’s picking fights. And part of his reaction, the father has been so able to create this world through his education, through what he inherited of the Palestinian culture and love of education. He’s a well-read person and has been able to create this kind of sanctuary for these kids under this horrific occupation but yet can’t do it anymore.

And the son discovers the limits of his father’s protective arms. And I think that’s part of the universal appeal of this film, is that all parents, even in relatively privileged conditions, realize that your children are entering a world where you can no longer protect them. And they’re facing forces beyond our reach.

And so Palestinian parents feel this just so profoundly and brutally that it’s agonizing to watch it.

Joe:

And yet, it also reminds all of us, I think, of what we face in our own lives, if we’re parents, or if we’re the children of parents, which is actually all of us, that we look up to these caregivers as creating absolute safety for us. And then eventually, we realize that that is not what’s really going on, and that life is much more fragile. And our parents’ ability to protect us is a lot more limited than we ever thought.

Jan:

Yeah, and you say parents, but I think that, you know, this is a Palestinian woman director. She opens with a woman, the mother speaking to the audience, and then the mother’s voice comes in at the end. The mothers are not the primary protagonists in this struggle against the occupation. And in a way, as Saleem suffered this terrible humiliation in front of his son, he’s kind of the victim of his own patriarchal honor, because he cannot speak of it to his wife.

He can’t enlist her. The boy turns to her for comfort, but he doesn’t explain to her what happened. He’s like, you shall not speak about it.

You shall not ask about it. He’s just so disappointed in his own eyes that he’s kind of internalized something of an identification with the oppressor in the sense of what it means to be a man, and being able to fight as a man. And if he had been able to talk with his wife, because she clearly played this important mediating role, you can imagine that she would have been able to explain something to the son that would have been helpful, although it’s hard to imagine anything at that point that could have reduced the destructiveness of what was happening.

Joe:

Yeah, it might not have taken it all away, but I think that it would have definitely taken the edge off, and it would have maybe allowed Noor to integrate some of that experience without then having this long-standing resentment for his father.

Beyond Trauma: What Survives the Violence

Jan:

There’s also the interesting relationships between grandfathers and grandsons. I mean, the daughters were not so much part of this patrilineal transmission of storytelling and ways of understanding the world, but the grandfather had dementia. The doctor said, “well, maybe that’s God’s way of extending grace to old people.”

He doesn’t have to remember how horrible things are right now, but he did remember what had happened when he lost that orange orchard, and when his family was dispersed, and he was himself defeated by the Zionists. But he had kept some of that struggle that he transmitted to his grandson. So the old couple at the end say, “you know, we can’t control how Noor thinks or what he’s going to do. He’s going to find his own way.”

And, of course, we all are shaped not only by our parents and familial influences, but by the historical forces, captured by history, too. And he was very much, you know, shaped by that first intifada.

Joe:

Yeah, I think that part of what allows Sharif to hold on to some of that spirit and impart it to Noor is the fact that his humiliation and defeat happens off of the scene of the family viewing. Early in the film, after bombardment leads the mother to want to take the kids to live somewhere else, Sharif stays behind, insisting on defending the farm and otherwise working with the town locals to negotiate what comes next. And obviously, that doesn’t work.

You can’t negotiate with conquerors. He’s humiliated and sent to a prison camp, and no one knows where he is until he shows up months later where his wife had taken their kids. And while there was defeat and while there was displacement and trauma from that, that specific encounter between the conqueror, the oppressor, and the oppressed was not on full view for Salim and his brothers and sisters.

And so, in a way, Sharif was saved the shame of them really knowing what it was like and what he lost in the face of what he thought he could actually do for them. And then he connects with Noor and basically imparts this nationalistic spirit of we can’t give up the dream of we were free before and we can be free again. And Noor, experiencing the reality of oppression firsthand, is far less able to turn to his father for any sense of authority and agency in the world that he saw his father completely robbed of.

Making Space for Grief in Palestinian Cinema

Jan:

Yeah. This is Jan Haaken and Joe Clement talking today about the Palestinian film, All That’s Left of You. Wonderful film.

I’d like to talk too about this film as grief work in the context of what is really a golden era of Palestinian films. I’ve now shown The Palestine Exception, a film I made with Jennifer Ruth at, I think, four Palestine film festivals around the world, including in the U.S., as well as other settings. It’s also part of Watermelon Pictures releases.

And there are a lot of films just about the scale of destructiveness inflicted on the Palestinian people, where there is a palpable anger and outrage that courses through the film and a call for action. But this has a much quieter tone, more of grief and a weary mother at the beginning. And then we return at the end to her weary face appealing to us as an audience.

And we learn at the end that she is appealing to this Jewish-Israeli man who’s received the heart of her son after his death. I think it’s so important to acknowledge how much people who are oppressed often are denied the experience of grief. You know, you saw during the Vietnam War, earlier periods of imperial wars against people, that no empathy for the people who’ve lost their sons and daughters, children lost on the other side.

The son, Noor, just fleetingly enters the scene angry, and then he’s basically killed. But that was part of, I think, the mission and the bargain of the film. It doesn’t take you into anything terrible or uncomfortable as an audience or confrontational. In fact, she says, “I don’t blame you” right away at the beginning.

And it’s only the mother who could say this. The sons and the sons of sons, Palestinians, are less in a position as the mother is to be so comforting. But I wondered, you know, is it a little too consoling of the oppressor in kind of winning people over on the basis of a shared humanity that this Jewish Israeli young man has the heart of his son?

She says to him, “I hope you know you have Palestinian heart.”

Shared Humanity - or Too Much Comfort for the Oppressor?

Joe:

Yeah, I think that it’s wagering that part of the struggle has to be addressing how numb we have become to oppression, to genocide, that so many images and stories about what is happening. They’re overwhelming, they shut us down. And the film is trying to show the depth of some of that tragedy and horror, but in a way that is trying to be mindful of how easy it is to shut down.

And so it is being careful to invite us with an open heart, which means disarming the defensiveness that we have when we think that we are on the other side somehow.

Jan:

Yeah, and does so beautifully. I mean, it just in terms of the quality of the film, the acting, how the filmmakers handled the aging of the actors. I mean, it’s a first rate film just on those terms, but also is very educational for people.

I mean, it is about the history of the Nakba and it makes decisions about touchstone years, telling it through this device of the family story that is part of its universal appeal. I mean, I can’t recommend it enough. I think even watching the second time, you know, I learned more and found it even more gratifying because you know the general storyline.

That’s why I think you’re reading the story at the beginning, the plot was important to orient you. And then as you watch it, the richness of it and the layers of family experience that are passed on how much the world has to learn from the Palestinian people, even at tremendous cost to their own lives.

Joe:

Yeah, as Cherien Dabis opened saying, “you don’t know much about us. And I don’t blame you.”

Jan:

I do. I think we have a lot of blame for not knowing more. And maybe especially now.

But you’re right, it was a way of reducing the defensiveness of the audience. But I would say, j’accuse! We are guilty here. But it is very effective at drawing you in.

And there are a lot of films that hopefully will continue to be made, along with this wonderful film. And it comes out of the Palestinian diaspora too. So watch it on Watermelon Pictures as well as seeing many, many other beautiful films on Watermelon Pictures.

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In Necessity: Climate Resistance and the Thin Green Line, Chief Don Sampson tells a story written by beloved Umatilla storyteller Edith Motanic, “The Monster Who Comes Up the River.” He explains how the monster in this folk tale symbolizes the insatiable appetites of colonial powers that devour Native lands and how the wily coyote, spirit of Indian resistance, tricks the monster and ultimately outwits him. Chief Sampson adds that there is a moral to this contest between the monster and coyote and it concerns competing forces within the human spirit. We all carry the capacity for good and for evil. Indigenous people can become selfish betrayers of their own people.

The Windigo legend circulates similarly among First Nations Peoples. According to Shawn Smallman, author of Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, the image of the windigo beast “was a means of defining moral social behavior, which could serve as a warning against greed and selfishness.” This cannibalistic forest beast takes over the spirits of victims and turns them into other windigos. Driven by insatiable hunger, the beast appears as a towering, emaciated figure emanating the odor of decaying flesh and arousing feelings of intimate horror.

For many Indigenous scholars and cultural critics, the Native cannon of windigo folklore unfolds historically alongside settler colonialism and reflects as much the anxieties of the colonizers as it does the fears of the colonized. From the late 19th through the mid twentieth centuries, Christian missionaries, white trappers, traders and anthropologists reported what came to be termed windigo psychosis, a mental disorder where the sufferer holds the delusional belief that he is possessed with the evil spirit of the windigo monster and is driven to acts of cannibalism. While a few cases of cannibalism have been documented historically, they generally occur in famine or other extreme conditions of scarcity.

Windigoism and the Psychiatric Gaza

Fascination with windigo psychosis among Western psychiatrists and anthropologists led to a hotly debated controversy in the 1980s over the historical validity of the phenomenon. The challenge for these white experts, including American psychiatrists, was to identify and diagnose cases where the person is driven by madness to acts of actual cannibalism. Scholars in the 1960s began to look more carefully at the case material on which this diagnostic picture was formed. In 1981, anthropologist Lou Marano looked back on reports that circulated in psychiatry of psychosis-induced cannibalism among First Nations peoples. “In the vast majority of cases in which the Indians employ the term there is no psychosis by either Algonkian or European criteria, much less a psychosis involving murder and cannibalism,” Marano concludes. “Unfortunately, anthropologists zeroed in on the bizarre, the grotesque, and the macabre in Landes’s reports rather than on their inconsistencies and their second-hand nature.”

The term windigoism is used very broadly among First Nations and Native peoples, Marano points out, for states associated with “going mad.” Among the Ojibwe, “almost driven to windigo” refers to madness that arises from life-threateningly harsh conditions. The term is invoked with considerable sympathy as it expresses despair and distress of people who are separated from the group or lost.

Scholars documenting the phenomenon agree, however, that tales of windigoism circulate among the Cree, one of the largest groups of First Nations and Indigenous peoples in North America, living mostly in Canada from Quebec to Alberta. Missionary settlers among the Cree were a common source of these stories, imposing their own cure of Christian conversion on sufferers.

Decolonizing Family Memory

My mother grew up in Norway Valley, Alberta–an area of Norwegian settlers straddling a Cree Reserve. Working with Tara Houska and other Native activists fighting pipelines transporting oil from the Tar Sands fields in Alberta, led me to revisit my own family history. What do we owe to Indigenous people as descendants of white settlers? In Canada, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), operating from 2008-2015, was one form of recognition and place for reparations. Based on legal settlement between Residential Schools Survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives and the parties responsible for creation and operation of the schools, the federal government and the church bodies, the TRC opened space for uncovering repressed memories of Native suffering–repressed in white colonial narratives but also among Indigenous people themselves.

For those of us who are conscious of the debts we share as descendants of white settlers, disturbing conflicts arise over how we pass on our own family stories of hardship. As a clinical psychologist, I hold a longstanding interest in family stories passed from one generation to the next and in working through family mythologies.

My mother worked as a maid for a wealthy family in Bellingham as a young woman in the 1930s before she married my father. She had many stories about growing up dirt poor in Northern Alberta. Her parents, like many rural poor people, were drawn to Spirit-filled Pentecostalism. Their faith was forged by the hell-fire preachers at revival meetings, those seasonal gatherings of believers and backsliders in tents on the prairies.

One beloved family story passed on from my mother unfolded around her own brave and adventurous mother, Ma, following her older brother Ole who had gone before her, leaving Norway in 1906 to arrive in New York City. She then traveled to northern Minnesota where she secured a job as a cook in a hotel. Eight years after marrying my grandfather, Pa, a Norwegian farmer and carpenter, the couple migrated with their four young children to an area at the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, not far from what are now the tar sands oil fields. My grandpa had seen a post in their town, a railway hub in Minnesota, that announced land grants for white settlers by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. White settlers served as paramilitary sites protecting the rails going through Indian country. My grandparents had seven more children in a cabin that was built by Pa at Frog Lake–an area of Scandinavian settlers that became Norway Valley. The settlement straddled the Reserve of Frog Lake Nation–a band of Cree. My mother liked to tell us stories about her brothers running away from the lashings of Pa and how the brothers found sanctuary from his abuse among the Cree.

Of the many pioneer stories about family hardships that were passed on in my family, the story that put Frog Lake in Canadian history books was not among them. In 1885, twenty-three years before my grandparents arrived at Frog Lake, the largest violent resistance to white settlers in Canadian history took place. The Frog Lake Massacre, or what the Cree call the Frog Lake Rebellion, was organized by a band of Cree that had settled in the area but had not yet accepted the government’s reserve site.

Cree men attacked and killed nine whites in the small settlement of Frog Lake. Eight Natives, including Wandering Spirit, were hanged on Nov. 27, 1885 in the largest mass hanging in Canada’s history.

My mother and her siblings are now dead and I have no way of knowing what they knew of this history, although a commemorative grave in their town honors the white settlers who were killed. Local records from the region suggest that the massacre was a formative cultural memory for whites as well as for Indigenous people: “After the Indian uprising of 1885 twenty-five years passed before the influx of white settlers began to move into the area…Because of the wide-spread publicity that stemmed from the rebellion, Frog Lake was the place to which the pioneers came.” My grandparents were among those pioneers, encouraged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to settle in Frog Lake alongside the Reserve as part of a larger program of Indian pacification.

Solomon (Sa-we-pah-u) Delver, a Cree member whose family story is recorded along with that of my grandparents in Frog Lake, recalls another legacy of the era.

Delver explains how his father sent him to the residential school to learn the language of white people. Yet laws passed in Canada made removal of Native children from their families and severing ties with their cultures mandatory. There were 25 residential schools in the province of Alberta and many were open until the last of the schools closed in the 1990s. The network of boarding schools was established by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs after the Indian Act of 1876 and administered by Christian churches, primarily the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church. Smaller denominations ran Residential Schools as well although their religious oppression may have taken more subtle forms. The Doctrine of Discovery, the papal edict of the late 15th century subsequently incorporated into international law that provided religious authority for European conquest of the continent, was a guiding worldview, supported by a series of Supreme Court decisions in the US and Canada, that justified claims on Native lands.

Solidarity and Survival

In my deeper understanding of my mother’s stories and my own familial work of “decolonizing history,” I still find a place for one of my mother’s favorite memories of the Cree. She liked to tell the story of being sent to fetch fish from an ice trap at the age of 10 and getting lost in thick fog in trying to find her way home. She remembered releasing the reins of her horse, knowing that the animal would know the way. In the fog surrounding her, she realized that she was passing through the Cree Reserve and closer than she had ever been to the Indians. The story ended with Mom’s girlhood astonishment: “After I passed through, I realized that they were not going to hurt me. The Cree Indians were actually good people.”

It is up to us, as descendants of those settlers, to join in the ongoing work of Indigenous resistance. As ravenous industries devour more of life, land and the planet itself, our collective survival lies in that shared struggle.

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This film series unfolds around activists and their use of the necessity defense in jury trials in different regions of the US after being charged with trespassing.

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I take up here the discordant parts of the parallel and the parts often omitted, for example, the role of Democrats and the harms inflicted on thousands of Americans in the Lavender Scare, a companion to the Red Scare. I start with where Trump and McCarthy rhyme.

Dark Nights of the Past

Many scholars and commentators search for those dark times in history that offer insights into the present. Although some focus on European fascist regimes, others land on the post-World War II anti-communism crusade as the more relevant parallel. And there is plenty of evidence to support this thesis. The Trump regime projects their idealized split-screen image of 1950s America: There is the dark anti-communist hearings and the conspiratorial obsessions of Senator Joseph McCarthy on one screen. And there are the cheery, everyone-in-their-place Norman Rockwell scenes and post-war industrial boom on the other.

There are unmistakable similarities in Trump and McCarthy in their showmanship and intuitive understanding of television as a stage for political propaganda as well. Indeed, the McCarthy hearings were different from earlier Red Scares in the US because they were televised. The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast live on national TV over 36 days by major news networks. The hearings, with McCarthy thundering, “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party,” mesmerized and terrorized the nation. The hearings brought politics–and for many, television itself– into the living rooms of countless Americans. Trump’s performances in the Apprentice TV series, where the king-boss humiliates and fires “losers,” were part of his schooling in mass psychology, tutored by McCarthy attorney Roy Cohn.

In lock step with McCarthy, Trump in his second term expanded his obsessive prosecutorial campaigns against Republican and Democratic critics to the socialists, many of whom are winning (!!!) elections around the country. These leftists are not cast through his notoriously limited vocabulary of insults (e.g., cons, scum, crazies, low-IQ individuals.) Much like his strange admiration for Zorhan Mamdani, Trump goes above his lazy comfort-zone of the gutter. Portrayed as the hidden enemy within, part of the “Fifth Column,” socialists, according to Trump, sound good but are actually evil. Repeating rather than rhyming with Senator McCarthy, Trump declares that American socialists are “godless communists.” McCarthy never tired of equating communism with godlessness. (It is pretty funny to see this most godless and gaudy president in US history make such statements, the man who, if he read the Bible, would know that God punishes those who worship the Golden Calf of wealth and power, symbolized by Trump in his terrible interior design choices.)

The Lesser Evils

But before the monstrous Trump, we had the famously lesser evil of Biden. In fighting the bloated predations of Trump 2.0 and its revival of McCarthyism, it is easy to forget that the Biden/Harris administration partnered with Republicans to usher in this recent chapter of McCarthyism. That was just two years ago. While the Democrats did not lead the congressional interrogations of university presidents under the pretense of combatting anti-semitism, the Biden administration did enable the repression and the crackdown on faculty and students on campuses around the country.

The politics of the present rhyme with the past in places often overlooked in tracing historical parallels. Republicans and their right-wing allies have a long history of conjuring a Red Menace to scare the public into supporting their ruthless political agenda. Our Mad King, conjuring the Cold War, seems nostalgic for an old superpower to be cast as a Red Menace. The old Communist regimes have either collapsed or have proven themselves better at capitalism than American hyper-capitalism. For Trump, the sight of left-wing candidates winning races arouses Cold-War flashbacks and Red Hysteria: “Communism is the greatest threat to our country in its history, including even World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, 9/11,” he screeches. In the more sober-seeming tones of so-called Democratic Centrists, taking on the left-wing of the Democratic Party means preparing for “the next war that is coming” against their left flank. Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, has committed $15 million to discrediting democratic socialism in the next election cycle.

Returning to McCarthyism and whether it rhymes with today’s red scare, the roles of Democrats and their liberal allies are often overlooked because they were not center stage. The Crucible, an allegorical play about McCarthyism written by Arthur Miller, is now regarded as a classic. It has for decades been performed or read in high school and college classes across the country. (As far as I know, The Crucible is not yet on the banned book lists, perhaps because allegories are famous for bypassing the censors. Indeed, it was Miller’s use of this allegory that provided some political cover for his play about the Red Scare during its scariest period.)

In 1968 Arthur Miller explains why he wrote the play as a drama about McCarthyism but one set in an early period of American history. The play is set in a Puritan colony of Salem, Massachusetts in the 1660s. A group of girls, caught dancing naked with each other by their Puritan elders, defend themselves by accusing older women of practicing witchcraft on them.

As Miller explains, “By 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.”

Miller continues: “The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on.”

Political Hysteria and Sexual Repression

There is a strong current of sexual repression animating the hysteria and witch hunts that unfold in Miller’s play–a theme often overlooked in analyses of McCarthyism. Like the Puritan girls caught dancing naked in the woods at night, victims of McCarthyism faced accusations of sexual immorality. The Lavender Scare accompanied the Red Scare, leading to more civil servants being investigated and fired or having their careers destroyed after being exposed as homosexuals. President Eisenhower passed Executive Order 10450 in 1952, making it illegal for known homosexuals to work in the government. This Executive Order subjected all federal employees to in-depth investigations where friends, family, and acquaintances were asked to reveal details about the personal lives of the accused. Even having friends who were gay was grounds for the dismissal of government workers. After decades of successful gay rights organizing, Order 10450, much like sodomy laws, receded in enforcement. But the law was not completely repealed until 2017, when President Barack Obama ended the order on his last day in office. By then, Obama and the DNC had been pushed by activists and the Supreme Court decision to accept gay marriage.

Intergenerational Immunities

For young people whose parents or grandparents lived through McCarthyism, there may be a kind of intergenerational transmission of immunity in response to Red Scares. Growing up under the anti-communist epidemic that infected the country from 1946 through much of the 1950s, many older Americans may have passed on their antibodies to this political pathogen. A Fox News poll in March showed that 49% of all registered voters, including 72% of Democrats and 60% of independents, described capitalism as working not very well or not at all.

Many may not be knowledgeable about the different traditions of socialism, but they do understand many of its principles. And they plainly see that a small group of obscenely wealthy people are hijacking their futures and wrecking the planet. Henry Ford, the ardent antisemite and anti-union industrialist, sagely observed, “home ownership gives working class people the belief that they too have a piece of the rock.” Owning a home creates an identification with the owning class. Young people no longer have a piece of that rock.

So the socialist threat now proclaimed with such alarm by corporate Democrats and Republicans alike enters the political stage as a different drama than earlier periods of reaction. In the past, red scares followed actual advances of the Left and Labor in American politics–advances repressed through political paranoia and hysteria. We no longer have the Soviet Union as the competing superpower fueling the anti-communist crusade.

As Aruthur Miller explains in a 1996 New Yorker interview, “McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red—especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing.”

It is also worth noting that socialists in the US are among the most ardent critics of the Communist Party and Stalinism. Michael Harrington, a founder of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was part of the New Left that fought the Old Left and its ties to the Soviet Union. The centrality of democracy to the DSA vision of socialism grows out of decades of genuine struggle. While the Democratic National Committee finds little room for socialists under its corporate-sponsored Big Tent, progressives aligned with the DSA have found a more hospitable place to put forward programs and a vision of genuine progress. It is not so surprising that many young people have found more heart and soul in socialism than in the soulless world of monopoly capitalism.

A memo prepared for the House Republican Conference by a polling firm advised its members to “do your best” to link socialism and Marxism to communism. “Americans still hold communism as far more dangerous and alarming than socialism and Marxism,” the memo read. “So do not retreat to the softer label just because socialism alarms fewer in the abstract. Connect all three, fruit of the same poisonous tree, and let the family name carry the alarm.”

The political drought in America has produced an array of inspiring grassroots candidates, whether they describe themselves as socialists, social democrats, progressives, left-wing Democrats, left independents, or economic populists. Across their political differences, many of these candidates find unity in bringing power back to the people.

And they are not scared.

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In targeting trans people and those who defend their health care rights, such campaigns are symptomatic of the acute anxieties of the Trump Regime. Their sense of the natural order of things is unraveling. As a psychologist, I can also tell you that the image of the trans person occupies a special place in the disturbed psyches of these people.

War Abroad, Culture War at Home

A case in point: The war on Iran rages on into its fifth month and the US military is strategically adrift. Chaos reigns. Troops in ships and bases throughout the Persian Gulf are under attack, at least 18 US service members have been killed and there is an undisclosed number of casualties. Most of the service members in the Gulf are posted on ships and bases, eating bad food, breathing bad air, waiting and anxiously monitoring their screens. When I was carrying out interviews for Mind Zone, many veterans told me that the garrison position – waiting for the fight – is more stressful than actual combat. Paradoxical as it may sound, these more passive positions in warfare are acutely stressful.

Given the gravitas of the situation, we would expect, of course, a somber statement from the Pentagon, offering some clarity on military objectives and the worrisome situation of our troops. Trump lurches about like Odysseus, unable to defeat Troy/Iran or to find his way home. Deranged, he sloshes about, squeezed between the Scylla of the Iran Revolutionary Guard and the Charybdis of Israel and US Hawks.

Surprisingly (or not), Secretary Pete Hegseth’s mind turns in this period of national crisis to gender affirming care for our troops. In a July 15th X post, Hegseth called for a “High-T (testosterone) Department of War” and said in a video that war fighters age 30 and older would be screened as part of their annual health assessments. Service members under age 30 could voluntarily opt in, he said. If low testosterone treatment is recommended, a patient can choose whether to receive testosterone replacement therapy. The aim, the Secretary insists, is to better prepare service members for a modern battlefield that Mr. Hegseth describes as “brutal and unrelenting.”

The Manosphere's Military Medicine

This new approach to jacking up service members is actually not his own idea. Rather than consulting with Veterans Administration doctors (who explain patiently why this is a bad idea), Hegseth seems to have educated himself from the manosphere where influencers declare that low testosterone levels – or “low T” – is a national health crisis for men. Body dysphoria (in previous eras associated with women) is on full display. Ironically, the testosterone craze seems to have very little to do with actually having sex even though the hormone is promoted as an antidote to erectile dysfunction and low libido. The attraction seems to be achieving bigger, bulkier bodies to be admired by other men in the manosphere–bodies that are vulnerable over time to turning to fat. This body dysphoria is the male counterpart to the female anorexic, a condition characterized by extreme preoccupation with the body and an identification with an extreme gender stereotypical ideal.

It took a woman Air Force veteran, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa) to challenge the prevailing hormonal policy. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, Houlahan points out that “Testosterone is important for both men and women.” She adds that in Hegseth’s claim that testosterone merely builds on the natural biology of service members, he “clearly has only one sex in mind.” The men serving in the military are the most in need of hormonal therapeutic assistance.

Feminists Called to Duty

In working with Hegseth’s new policy, I am pleased to say that feminist scholars have a long history of research on sex hormones and the medical applications and misapplications of hormonal therapies. There is a robust literature on everything from influences of hormones on brain development, pre-menstrual syndromes, the role of hormones (progesterone, estrogen, and oxytocin) in childbirth, and extensive analyses of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) during menopause.

If needed, we could step up pretty quickly to organize seminars on the topic for the Department of Defense. We understand that the Pentagon is a trillion dollars short in keeping up with its wars, given the massive depletion of weapons in this current conflict. So in the spirit of Rosy-the-Riveter, we (or I, only speaking for myself) willingly contribute my expertise pro-bono.

We academics often start by taking up the premises behind the claim in question. Are there problematic or false assumptions that lead to faulty conclusions? One premise: higher testosterone levels produce more effective lethal fighters. A second premise: the current difficulties of service members are the result of low-testosterone levels and thus can be corrected by supplements.

A full essay on these premises exceeds the scope of this Substack. But I raise a few points here.

What Makes an Effective Warrior?

Concerning the first premise, what does it mean to be effective as a fighting force? In filming in Afghanistan for the Mind Zone film, I learned that 90 percent of the forces there were in support roles. They cooked, cleaned, ran IT services, provided mental health, spiritual guidance, physical therapy and other augmenting services. Lethality was counter to most of their MOS roles. For the small number in forward operating bases where the actual fighting took place, too much lethality could get you killed. (Hegseth himself was in a reckless situation in Iraq where lethality became a dominant drive.)

Hormones, Stress, and Military Reality

Concerning the second premise: Hegseth confuses, as many people do, correlation with causation. There are some reports of service members testing with lower levels of testosterone. Medical experts often point out that test results can be affected by a range of factors, however. Testosterone levels, like blood pressure, fluctuate considerably, depending on the time of day of testing and interactions with environmental factors. The range of normal levels is also an area of medical dispute.

Feminists tend to agree with those endocrinologists who approach hormones as intricate and dynamic signals of our health status and our relationship to our environments.

Stress, poor sleep and head injuries, which are part of military life, can cause lower hormone levels. Recent studies have identified a condition called “operator syndrome,” in which troops who have served long stretches in special operations units are more likely to report medical problems including decreased testosterone.

Feminists bring such contextual and long-term factors into the picture. For service members, moving from active duty to the chronic and long-term impacts of war managed by the VA is part of that broader picture. Anyone who has spent time in a VA medical center sees those impacts: veterans in wheelchairs, many with oxygen tanks to assist in breathing, others with bags of meds to manage their various chronic ailments.

VA clinicians, many who themselves served in the Long Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are keenly aware of the absurdity of Hegseth’s prescription for our fighting forces. The Veterans Administration has already documented difficulties in managing hormone therapy for veterans. This is not just a problem of short supply. Testosterone therapy can’t just stop abruptly. Dr. Adrian Dobs, a professor of medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explains how testosterone therapy can suppress the body’s natural production of the hormone and sperm, as well as create medical needs that persist after treatment stops. “We’re sort of creating a dependency on testosterone,” she said.

The Vulnerability Behind the Warrior Ideal

There is a strange irony to this situation, one perhaps symptomatic of the military manliness crisis that Hegseth claims to be addressing. The ideal warrior in all of his lethal manliness ultimately faces the dependency and vulnerability that are part of the human condition. Feminists have a lot to teach about these repressed parts of the human condition that are coded as feminine.

And witnessing the turbulent emotional swings of this Regime, we might also ask who are the true hysterics.

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MIND ZONE follows therapists with the 113th Army Combat Stress Control detachment as they carry out two conflicting missions: protecting soldiers from battle fatigue and keeping these same soldiers in the fight.

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“We live in a time of monsters,” Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was thought to have said in the 1930s. He was describing the rise of fascism in his time. Another quote by Gramsci circulates in the fascism of our time: “The old world is dying and the new struggles to be born.”

Yet everyday people band together to try to stop them. We see this in the revolts against AI companies and their massive data centers. In protests against this corporate devouring of land and resources, we hear the echo of longstanding indigenous resistance to extractive industries: Water is life!

Why Stories Matter in Times of Crisis

As a psychologist and documentary filmmaker, I have for decades followed stories that circulate in social movements. In many Native-led climate actions, fables and legends are enlisted to place the struggles of the moment and the sense of urgency in a wider temporal and existential frame. We understand how important fables are for the moral education of young children. When my son was little, he was particularly fascinated by West Africa fairy tales, many centered on small animals outwitting the bigger ones.

In my two documentaries on climate resistance, the Necessity Series, Native traditions of storytelling are more than just allegorical tales. I came to understand the stories as carrying vital symbolic power in the climate justice movement. Facing off against the pipeline companies and oil trains, imagined as black snakes, circulated as a powerful signifier of the deadly oil pipelines. In countering the climate denial promoted by reactionaries and the individualistic carbon-tracking of liberals (“Don’t fly, don’t drive, don’t eat meat!), Native evoking of the black snake represented an old struggle against ongoing colonial forces. Rooted in the folklore and visions of Lakota People and other Indigenous elders, prophecies warn of a great black snake that will stretch across the land, poison waterways, desecrate sacred sites, and bring sickness and destruction. The image and the prophecy circulated widely during the Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.

The Black Snake and the Return of Prophecy

During that valiant struggle, I was reminded of bible stories in my childhood about cunning snakes that do the devil’s work. The lessons inevitably led to submission before the Almighty. In Genesis Chapter 3, Eve is seduced by a serpent into eating the forbidden fruit. And for acting on that desire, she was condemned by God to everlasting suffering: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This was one of many bible lessons that led me to leave the religious fold of my childhood and to look to feminism for adult wisdom.

The Monster Who Came Up the River

The first Necessity film opens with a more local allegory. “The Monster Who Came Up the River” is a fable passed through oral traditions of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation here in Oregon. One version of the story was told in the 1950s by Esther Motanac, a beloved Umatilla storyteller. Chief Peo-Peo Mox-Mox (aka Don Sampson), a hereditary chief, narrated the story for the Necessity film and talked with me about how the Monster in the fable works as an allegory for settler colonialism in the Columbia Gorge region.

This huge monster came up from the ocean. He would open his huge mouth and inhale anything that was in his path. He soon had all the salmon and other fish like sturgeon and eels, all eaten and because he was so huge he began taking in the deer and all food animals of the forest. Soon there was nothing left for the people and they were getting hungry, and babies and old people began to die. Finally, someone went to Coyote and told him he would have to kill the monster. He got a length of a vine that is called coyote’s rope. He tied one end around his waist and coiled the other around his arm. He got some pitchy kindling and flints for starting a fire. He stood on a far hill and called the monster a shameful name, he teased him until the monster began trying to eat him. Every time the mouth opened, coyote would throw out some useful thing. The monster was near collapsing. The fire got so hot that the monster died and went back into the sea. Some parts of him clung to the sides of the river bank so it was rough like it was before Bonneville Dam was built.

The monster devours salmon, other animals and people and produces starvation among Indian survivors. The powers of Coyote lie in its clever tactics of resistance as well as in the stupidity of the monster.

Jonah and Coyote: Two Moral Universes

While listening to this story, I was struck by parallels between Motanac’s tale and the Judeo-Christian story of Jonah and the Whale (or the Big Fish). The tale of Jonah may have been particularly popular in the fundamentalist Christian church we attended in Ballard, a neighborhood in Seattle settled by Norwegian fisher families. My family, like many others in the congregation, had lost relatives at sea so this allegory held special resonance. In my Sunday School class the lesson of Jonah centered on punishment, submission to authority, and rebirth through suffering. The rebellious Jonah was spit out onto the beach, subdued after three days in the creature’s stomach.

Unlike the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, where the Whale engulfs Jonah under the disciplinary control of the Almighty, Coyote allows himself to be consumed by the Monster as a ploy. Jonah is belched onto the land after being devoured by the creature, transformed from rebel into loyal supplicant. Coyote, in contrast, outmaneuvers the monster and is then able to destroy it and cast it back into the river. In the biblical tale, Jonah is redeemed through engulfment by the great fish and his three days and nights of endurance in its belly. “The Monster Who Came Up the River” unfolds around a more active contest of wills.

While listening to Chief Don Sampson’s interpretation of the Monster story, I was struck by another difference between Jonah and Coyote. Sampson explains how the monster represents the potential for greed and selfishness in all people, and that Coyote in Native stories is both a deliverer and sometimes a betrayer of his people. Coyote enters stories as a morally ambiguous figure. The forced assimilation and the destruction and displacement of Native peoples generated a rich trove of literature where the powerful spirits, both good and bad, are more dispersed across the cosmos than are the spirit forces in the Abrahamic traditions. While respect for elders carries enormous moral weight in tribal cultures, the tribes in the Northwest also stress respect for children and for their independence. Fables with Coyote tricksters abound. There is considerable latitude for children to explore the world around them and to find their own animal spirits or guides.

Data Colonialism and the New Monsters

Colonial powers returned to Indian Country last year with an aggressive push by tech companies to build their monstrous data centers on tribal lands. Honor the Earth’s Stop Data Colonialism Manifesto has gathered support, even in Oklahoma where battles among tribes over Big Oil and now Big Tech are most fierce. After intense opposition, the Muskogee Nation, 40 miles south of Tulsa, rejected a rezoning plan that would have converted 5,570 acres of farmland to a data center “park.” The coyotes may not be clever enough to outsmart these new monsters. But they carry a long history of surviving and subverting their conquerors. And they have many tales to tell.

🎞️ Watch NECESSITY Part II: Climate Justice & The Thin Green Line

This film series unfolds around activists and their use of the necessity defense in jury trials in different regions of the US after being charged with trespassing.

Watch NECESSITY

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What modern “monsters” do you think pose the greatest threat to our communities, and what stories help us resist them? How do myths, fables, or cultural traditions shape the way you understand today’s environmental and political struggles?

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Jacob was part of the protests documented by the Oregonian, the major local paper. In the photo above, Jacob is seen providing first aid to an injured protestor (an image not included in the prosecution’s case). He was then identified by the DHS officer whom he hit. This image was then plugged into facial recognition software. The FBI used this surveillance technology to identify Jacob as a recent Reed College student. Within weeks, the FBI received the personal information they needed from the safety officer at the school to arrest Jacob--an action in violation of college policy and for which he was later fired.

Jacob had thrown a rock inside the ICE building that resulted in a gash above the agent’s eye—an injury requiring medical treatment but resulting in no lasting damage. He pled guilty to aggravated assault on a federal officer—a charge that carries a maximum statutory penalty of up to 20 years in federal prison. The charge is elevated from simple assault if the crime involves a deadly or dangerous weapon or results in bodily injury. The deadly weapon in this case was a rock, and the bodily injury was a gash above the eye. Federal agents have special protections as victims that elevate the sentencing level if the assailant is believed to have known that the victim was a federal officer.

I have known Jacob for over a year, mainly through our work together as grievance officers in a local organization. He has the temperament as well as the principles that make him well suited for the adjudication of grievances. It requires a capacity to listen to emotionally distressed people who hold opposing perspectives on events and to see both sides of a conflict.

In making his plea before the court and before his Quaker conscience, Jacob brought this same capacity to hold conflicting positions in mind. In the courtroom where prosecution and defense made their final arguments before the judge, the prosecutor zoomed in on video of Jacob throwing a rock as well as him joining others in thrusting a stop sign into a gate. The prosecutor painted a picture of a person acting with violent intent, omitting from her prosecutorial picture the larger scene of what ICE agents were doing, omitting as well assaults on protestors that night.

Jacob recognized the skewed and narrow story presented by the prosecutor. At the same time, he felt that he had violated his own conscience. In entering a guilty plea, he took personal responsibility for his action on the night of June 14^th and admitted that throwing rocks at ICE agents was morally wrong.

While genuinely felt, Jacob’s statement of personal responsibility was part of legal rituals around plea bargaining. From the civil rights era through other movements using tactics of civil disobedience, activists often take a guilty plea to pay a fine, accept requirements for probation and to find a way hopefully to get back on the streets. Plea bargaining, however, is a notoriously corrupt and unjust part of the carceral system. Legal counsel includes assessing the risks of going to trial versus pleading guilty to reduced charges. In negotiating a plea in a racist and class-based system of criminal justice, people sometimes plead guilty to crimes they did not commit.

In issuing her sentence, Judge Adrienne Nelson acknowledged that those few minutes on a tense evening of June 14^th had changed his life forever. He would spend a significant part of his young adulthood in prison and carry the consequences of being marked as a felon. In Oregon, voting rights are restored automatically on release from prison. This is not the case in many other states.

The judge offered that version of compassion so often issued by those in positions of power. She spoke of Jacob’s many strengths, how he seemed to genuinely care about social justice, and how he had complied with every requirement of the court. And she spoke to his many strengths and his notable “resilience.” “You will be okay,” she consoled.

She was right, I thought. He is resilient and he will be okay. Yet this faux-parental pat on the back, disgusted me.

In this federal courtroom, facing a packed room of supporters and the defendant, the judge rationalized her very harsh sentence with trite uplifting words. In sharing her further thoughts, she added the empirically false but politically potent rationale of “deterrence.” There were expectations from the public, she claimed, that activists who crossed the line from peaceful protest to violence would face serious consequences in federal court.

Before he left to begin his prison term, I interviewed Jacob for the Old Mole Variety Hour on KBOO Community Radio—an interview that followed a series of off record conversations. In the interview, we talk about what happened during that night of anti-ICE protests, the SWAT team that arrived at his house to violently arrest him, and the criminal investigation that followed. And he reflects on his difficult path from protestor to prisoner. One area of personal struggle centers on reconciling his philosophy as a Quaker, deeply rooted in the Friends’ tradition of non-violence and pacifism, with his violent action on the night that he joined the ICE protests.

In our interview, I pushed back some on Jacob’s pacifist perspectives on non-violence. His arguments were both moral and strategic. Violent actions against other people, even in resisting state violence, can inflict moral damage on both parties to a conflict. However, this moral stance of pacifism in the Quaker tradition includes a moral duty to act in the face of injustice.

Jacob also took the strategic stance that violence is not an effective way of creating radical change. We agreed that the use of violence in resisting State violence is a complex topic with a long history of debates within the Left. The Justice for Palestine movement has revived some of these old debates. “In the First Intifada,” I asked Jacob, “youth in Gaza threw stones at the IDF. Don’t Palestinians have the right of violent forms of self-defense, forms of action that have followed waves of violent suppression of peaceful protest?” His response centered on finding the work that he could best do in the movement. This work would not be on the barricades.

Whatever the rights of oppressed people to take up stones and guns in righteous resistance, we agreed that engaging with the violence of the State requires organized strategy. Jacob had not been part of activists’ discussions on dealing with heated encounters with ICE agents and was ill-prepared for the emotional and physical intensity of what unfolded that night. Even when morally or strategically defensible, the consequences of throwing rocks at the oppressor are far more violent than the act itself.

Jacob will be okay because the movement of which he is a part continues this struggle. For me, he is one of our heroic Davids fighting the Goliaths of our times.

🎙️ Old Mole Variety Hour

Listen to the interview on KBOO Community Radio, Monday July 27th at 9 am PST or later on the Old Mole Variety Hour podcast.

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How should social movements navigate the tension between non-violence, self-defense, and resistance when confronting state power? What lessons can we draw from the ongoing federal crackdowns on ICE protests?

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In this piece, I take up conversations with Jewish students who have stunned their elders by turning against liberal Zionism.

In over a hundred screenings of The Palestine Exception over the past year and a half, I have talked with countless students. A number of these students organized actions and teach-ins during the 2023-24 academic year and faced the crushing responses of their school administrators. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapters were particularly active in organizing screenings of the film across the country and Jewish students played important roles in support of Palestinian-led protests.

Protecting ideals and holding valued images of people are important to character development. In the face of attacks on those ideals, defensive responses are also part of acting on moral conviction. But these situations can be most agonizing when ideals—someone or something dearly loved—comes to be looked at in a new light. (In my own early adulthood, I struggled with a similar conflict with new disturbing understandings of family history. Cherished stories of my godly grandparents leaving Minnesota to homestead in the harsh conditions of Frog Lake, Alberta were difficult to cherish in the same way when I learned how my grandparents got that land and the genocidal starvation of the Frog Lake First Nations people.)

For many Jewish students, many who were never spanked as children, this crackdown on their campuses was an affront to cherished representations of parental figures, including the liberal leaders of their schools. Questioning various Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, was permitted in many of their households and synagogues. But students were violating a taboo when they pointed to the injustices behind the entire Zionist project. They could defend the (perpetually deferred) two-state solution. But they could not question the necessity or morality of Israel as a sanctuary for the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

A good liberal arts education inevitably generates discomfort—and for some, existential crises--as students ask new questions and enlarge their understandings of the world. For the majority of campus protestors, speaking out against the genocide in Gaza meant acting on a key principle of their liberal education.

In the Q and A post-screening discussions, students often asked me to respond as a psychologist to their distress as well as from my perspective as a film director. Palestinian students, as well as many Black and brown students, were less shocked by the brutal responses of their administrators to the protests than were Jewish students. Palestinians tended to view the Hamas October 7^th attack on Israel in the context of decades of apartheid and systematic violence against Palestinians.

This linguistic extension of a moral call struck at the heart of a painful contradiction in liberal Zionist politics. As “Never again for anyone” mobilized protestors, the chant felt to many Jewish students like the breaking of a taboo passed on from their elders. And once broken, the taboo no longer held things in check in quite the same way. The violence of the crackdown registered the very failure of the taboo. Doubling down on the enforcement of a taboo with violence may produce public submission. But it as likely produces private rebellions.

In addition to the meaning of slogans such as “From the river to the Sea, Palestine will be free” and “Globalize the intifada,” the contested meaning of “Never again” emerged as a touchstone topic in The Palestine Exception. In the film, UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler takes up the lessons of the Holocaust and explains that “It’s important to remember that people who have suffered tremendous oppression can also inflict tremendous oppression.” Students witnessed the federal government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which designates criticism of Israel as a form of antisemitism. This definition was legally imposed on universities under the Biden administration under Title VII antidiscrimination laws and became the legal fist accompanying the boots and tear gas. Not lost on Jewish activists was the absurdity of this charge of antisemitism. Under Trump 2.0, the deployment of federal law under the ruse of combatting antisemitism accelerated as universities caved to appease the new regime.

In some of those Q and A discussions, students struggled with conflicts among various campus groups as well. As in all social movements, factions develop with different ideas about strategy and political analysis. On some campuses, establishing encampments with “No Zionists allowed” represented the refusal of the old virtuous shibboleths of liberal Zionism.

Exposing that contradiction in American Judaism and the repressed history of the Nakba sometimes led to erecting rigid boundaries around the encampments. Some Jewish students filed complaints over these restrictive spaces. Movements inevitably include such defensive reactions and sometimes over-reactions.

For directors Jennifer Ruth and me, documenting what was at stake in the campus protests from fall 2023 through fall 2024 was a way of paying tribute to this movement. In the midst of media demonizing of protestors, law enforcement crackdowns and university disciplinary actions, we wanted to show that these students were on the right side of history. When we filmed at Hunter College/CUNY and Barnard/Columbia University in early 2024, pro-Israel demonstrators, flanked with police support, were in full display. Yet echoes of earlier anti-war movements and social justice struggles were palpable. The city carries a rich history of progressive political actions that ignite national movements, from the 1969 Stonewall uprising that launched the gay rights movement, the 1980s student organizing against Apartheid in South Africa, Occupy Wall Street in 2011 that inspired the national Occupy Movement to the first pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia in spring 2024.

Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim American, made justice for Palestine a central plank of his mayoral campaign and won with a wide margin of supports, including among Jewish New Yorkers. Beyond New York, majorities of Americans, and particularly among Democrats, came to the same position as that fought for by these brave students.

🎙️ Left & the Law

In our Left & the Law segment on KBOO Community Radio this month, Mike Snedeker and I look back on the student protest movement in light of dramatic shifts in public opinion.

Join us on the Old Mole Variety Hour on KBOO Community Radio and listen to the full Left & the Law segment!

Listen to the Full Segment

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Fox News: “They hate America.”

Democratic National Committee (DNC) leadership: “They hate the Democratic Party; they hate capitalism.”

The second appraisal is more correct than the first and more aligned with the views of Democratic voters. According to a Gallup 2025 poll, Democrats had a significantly more favorable view of socialism (66%) than capitalism (42%). A Majority of Democrats also express disapproval of the Party leadership.

Memories of Big Tents

The big tents in my family were the places of hot revival meetings. Many of my relatives were saved by grace under some enormous canvas structure erected in summer Bible camp. They were called by the preacher to come forward and invite Jesus into their hearts. Although a true believer as a child, I never responded to these alter calls. Nonetheless, summer Bible camps did reinforce the message that I was among a chosen group of outsiders.

My own tradition of psychanalytic theory approaches in-group and out-group boundaries as a more dynamic process. Psychoanalysts attend to unconscious and often fluid group dynamics. One recurring dynamic involves projection of disturbing internal conflicts onto outsiders. This defensive use of projection, of “we are good/they are bad,” is a normal part of development and political culture. Morality involves making distinctions between the good and the bad. The pathology is in the rigidity and habitual reliance on this defense. Under the reign of Trump, we are living through a case study in how this dynamic works as an extreme pathology, including in what happens when the defense falls apart. The pathology lies in its adaptive failures and the necessity of increasingly psychotic thinking to shore up the defense.

Hysteria and the Democratic Party Establishment

It is well known that hysterics are more fun at parties than are sociopaths. So too, the pathologies of the Democrats are more seductive than those of Trump’s MAGA base. (Free association here: What comes to mind when we hear endless references to Trump’s “base.” Is it because Trump claims to be a successful builder of Big Things with strong foundations? But what happens when the base “cracks”—a source of endless speculation on MS Now and CNN).

Returning to the DNC crisis: Rather than a rigid character disorder (sociopathic or narcissistic), the DNC establishment is more like the neurotic who projects disturbing feelings onto outsiders only in fits of hysteria. Who let them in?, they ask. How did this happen?, they demand. These are the questions of hysterics, based on their tendency to feel periodically flooded with emotions. Hysterics are not as intent on violently policing and punishing outsiders as are sociopaths. The Kamala Harris campaign had the markers of this form of group hysteria in its insistent “joy” and bad-ass girl power, accompanied by passive-aggressive surprise that so many Democrats were outraged over her refusal to speak to Palestinian suffering or the murderous brutality of the Israeli regime.

In the current Red Scare afflicting the Democratic establishment, the fear of young socialists with their “energy” and “passion” signals this stance of la belle indifference. The Democratic Party has depended since the 1930s on socialists to tame the ruthless exploitation and profit motives driving capitalism. But the role of socialists in American history is perpetually forgotten by liberals. What follows is what Freud termed the return of the repressed-a sense of being taken by surprise at a phenomenon that appears both familiar and alien.

Once forced to recognize the popularity of socialists among many Democratic voters, the DNC establishment scans the members for signs of disloyalty. In remodeling the Democratic Party’s famous big tent, they overlook, as overlords generally do, the variegated terrain outside their own tightly controlled borders. Christians generally know about protestant denominations and historical schisms between Catholics and Protestants. And white Christians likely know a little about the history of the Black Church and the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King Day honors this legacy in spite of the Trump regime’s efforts to repress from national consciousness all memory of MLK. School children may still read, however, King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. From an African American Southern clergyman, the letter was an appeal to white Southern clergymen:

“I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of ‘outsiders coming in’… In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership in the community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.”

America as Big Casino

MLK Jr lived through the era of segregationist Southern Democrats and had no illusions about big tents. The true size of the Republican Party’s claims as a big tent, however, has always been subject to wild speculation. They did invite in working class white men and Latinos in the last election cycle but many of those groups have since left. Whatever the dimensions in the past, no one would describe the current Republican Party as a big tent today. Indeed, the metaphor does not work at all in capturing this moment. The giddiness of Trump’s Republican Party lies in his Big Casino vision. The President controls the house and we are all losers in this Las Vegas like world of reckless gamblers.

Perhaps that’s why President Trump did not know how to organize a proper Fair at the Capital to celebrate our country’s 250^th birthday. Every county in America knows how to plan a fair, even in sweltering heat. These are places that bring city and country people together.

“The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.”

The creative and non-violent expressions of discontent that mobilize many voters, young and old alike, through democratic socialist and other left candidates are responses to the severity of the crises we face. While the DNC aims to simply steady the ship, these candidates say that such modest adjustments are not nearly enough. They refuse the seductions of la belle indifference.

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What role should dissent, protest, and democratic socialism play within the future of the Democratic Party: a challenge to the establishment, a necessary corrective, or something else entirely?

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Democratic socialists won big in New York City races in the June primaries. Socialist candidates achieved impressive victories in local elections elsewhere in the country as well, many by enlisting the long legacy of “sewer socialism.” In 2022, union organizer Juan Miguel Martinez and city council member Ryan Clancy both cited the sewer socialists as part of an honorable Wisconsin tradition of good governance. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Milwaukie socialists fought to repair the city’s toxic industrial legacy, cleaning up neighborhoods and factories with new sanitation systems and city-owned water and power systems.

In marking his first 100 days as the newly elected Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani invokes this tradition in his administration’s program to clean up the city. “I know there are many who use ‘socialist’ as a dirty word, something to be ashamed of,” he proclaims. “They can try all they want, but we will not be ashamed of using government to fight for the many, not simply the few.” The mayor spoke about sewer socialism on the campaign trail, promising to build more public restrooms across the city and to improve garbage services across the boroughs.

In primary contests of 2026, we witness one of the many ironies of the Trump era. Here the drama unfolds around his MAGA promise to Drain the swamp! The sewer socialists seem the only politicians intent on taking the slogan seriously.

Dirty and Clean: Symbolic Boundaries in American Politics

The socialists entering Congress have a big job ahead of them, however. Swamp-dwellers proliferate at an alarming rate. The obscenely wealthy, Big Tech, military contractors and mega-donors devour everything within their reach. Corporate Democrats swim in the swamp as well, although they are not the most disgusting of the bottom-feeders.

In my last Substack post, I talk about how systems of power often enlist the categories of dirty and clean to mark social boundaries. Grassroots political campaigns enlist these same categories in subversive ways, however, whether in defending the dignity of “dirty work” to Mamdani’s “pothole politics.”

The DOGE buzz saw attacks on protective services here and abroad was part of this so-called MAGA mandate. In his second term, Trump reflexively projects his swampy psyche onto an external world of “shit-hole countries” and perceived dirty outsiders. Obsessed with germs and cleanliness, Trump, according to authors of Regime Change, paradoxically has quite disgusting bathroom habits. Aides reportedly had to deal with unhygienic conditions, such as soaked carpets left outside his shower that risked mold and his practice of leaving fast-food snack wrappers around his bedroom.

Such reports might seem too petty for serious journalists to chronicle. But with this uniquely petty and emotionally incontinent president, anything goes.

The Reflecting Pool: A Psychoanalytic Picture of Power

One of my favorite Freud quotes: “Dirt is matter in the wrong place,” from his 1908 essay, Character and Anal Erotism.

I start with what the Reflecting Pool represents to this notoriously defiant patient. First, we talk about his relationship with his cold and cruel father and the devouring envy of other men that he has nursed throughout his life. By killing off competitors, my patient imagines that he has finally secured the love of father Fred. The pool is a disturbing reminder of the impossibilities of this task, I gently suggest. There is the naming of honored fathers surrounding the pool itself—the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as well as the Washington Monument at its east. My patient recalls that this was the setting for the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. No matter how many executive orders declaring the Dream dead, the ghost of MLK continues to haunt my patient.

The Return of the Repressed

I also tentatively explore Mr. President’s anxieties around cleanliness. The COVID epidemic seemed to have intensified his anxieties, making them more tied to reality. But the pool problem exposes unconscious currents lurking in this defense. Extracting toxins and filling the pool with “pure, crystal clear water” represented an attempt to expel his own toxic family from his psyche. I gently offer an interpretation: May these anxieties around purity have created blind-spots around his efforts to repair the pool? Was he aware of the shady business profile of his Mar-A-Lago neighbor who he brought in to line the pool in “American flag blue”? Was this an instance where he had to confront, as a man of 80, the illusions behind his belief that he could magically control every situation? Realities in the material world of organisms had intruded. Here the blooming algae and the green swampy reflection pool represent what Freud might term the “return of the repressed.” I suggest to my patient that the disturbing matter surfacing here symbolizes horrifying aspects of his own unconscious—something that cannot be vanquished no matter how many chemicals and edicts are summoned in the effort.

The third session with the President was the most difficult. I commented on his pattern of blaming others for every disappointment or defeat in life. The Reflecting Pool problem had perhaps confronted him with the costs of this defense. Do you really believe that leftists snuck into this guarded area at night, violently attacking the blue liner with knives? Do you really believe that the few observers who touched the water or picked up floating pieces of the blue liner were actually vandals to be prosecuted? Or, perhaps, do you see these visitors as vandals because they represent an attack on defenses that now feel as precarious as that blue lining? (I may have been too aggressive here in anticipating the aggressiveness of his response.)

I found the closest door to exit Walter Reed, heading as fast as I could to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is solace there in spite of the President’s desperate efforts.

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Who is really draining the swamp—and who is merely renaming it? Could the old tradition of sewer socialism offer a model for progressive politics today?

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United by worry over their own futures and the futures of their children, citizens across the country are fighting to shut down data centers. AI companies’ business plans depend on:

1. Massively increasing subscription revenues.

2. Gobbling up as much land, water and electricity as possible. This second part of the plan is where citizens find their own Strait of Hormuz in resistance to the AI empire.

Lessons from Fossil Fuel Propaganda

As a psychologist and documentarian, I have tracked through my film projects the stories that oil, gas, and nuclear industries tell about themselves to win these wagers. Much of Big Oil propaganda plays on public cognitive dissonance: We need the oil but it is killing us! They offer in response a cognitive compromise: Maybe it is not really killing you! In contradiction/cover-up of their own internal research, oil companies produced a blitz of infomercials in the late 20^th century casting doubt on what had emerged as scientific consensus on fossil fuels and global warming. Another strategy of Big Oil has been to displace responsibility for the problem. British Petroleum (BP) was a true pioneer on this front with their “carbon footprint” campaign, encouraging the public to track its carbon use. Journalist Mark Kaufman describes the marketing campaign: “The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, ‘carbon footprint’ is everywhere.” And fossil fuel consumption is also everywhere and climbing at an alarming rate.

In my documentaries on the fights against oil pipelines in North America over the past decade, from the proud Standing Rock Sioux Tribe actions to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline to organized civil disobedience in opposition to Line 3 in Minnesota, even the strong and sustained alliances of these campaigns could not withstand the black boots of federal military force in lockstep with the pipeline companies. The tragic defeats of these campaigns were aided significantly by oil and gas workers, as well as some tribal leaders, who staked their own fortunes on the survival of the oil and pipeline companies. The nuclear power industry, with its endless claims of undergoing a “renaissance,” has some organized labor on its side as well but primarily promotes itself as the work of engineers. The industry also enlists an old boundary between dirty (bad) and clean (good) energy.

Purity, Pollution, and the Politics of Energy

In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that all cultures draw boundaries between pure and impure. In many cultures, menstruating women are viewed as unclean and excluded for periods of time from contact with men. Douglas goes further to explain how groups that perform “dirty work,” from day laborers, coal miners and garbage collectors to many immigrant and marginalized groups, carry this stigma. Since the 1950s, American bourgeois/middle class culture has leaned heavily into this boundary. Advertisers endlessly promote products that psychologically fuse unrelated phenomena: cleanliness, whiteness and moral purity. Gwyneth Paltrow’s products embody this fusion to a level of absurdity that makes her a favorite target for lampooning.

Unlike the oil industry, proponents of “new nuclear” and their proposed fleet of small reactors enlist this bourgeois boundary and its implicit warding off of the dangerously unclean. Proponents make the case for reviving dying nuclear plants and building a seemingly modern fleet of baby reactors by positioning nuclear power as the clean alternative to polluting sources of energy. (It should be noted, FYI, that nuclear power has a heavy carbon footprint, from the long fuel cycles, extraction and processing of uranium, construction costs and over-runs, through the eventual decommissioning of old reactors.)

The Clean Machine Aesthetic

AI companies and their investors work this same boundary with supercomputers humming along and quietly colonizing farmland and extending into the vast tech “Enterprise Zones” that circle urban areas and occupy rural lands around the country. The corporate boxy towers, warehouses and distribution centers that are now a central feature of these zones are visibly clean and neo-brutalist in design.

Last weekend, my photographer friend, Friderike Heuer, and I drove by some of these massive AI data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon, 16 miles from where we live in Portland. A city of around 110,000 people, Hillsboro was regularly on the Portland TV news last fall for student led protests against ICE Raids on the Latino community there. Hillsboro, known as the Silicon Valley of Oregon, is once again on the local news for community led outrage over the expansion of data centers on to tracks of farmland and for sucking up resources in this agricultural region. Packed meetings with city council members in May and June featured locals demanding answers as to why these leaders allowed fast-track permits for eight companies before the June 6^th State moratorium against data center permits went into effect. Hillsboro Herald has been a beacon of independent media in following this unfolding story.

Capitalism and Enshitification

Coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, enshitification describes the lifecycle of platforms as they transition from being genuinely useful to sucking users into degraded, degrading and addictive platforms. The term now circulates widely to describe the AI ecosystem as well with degradation of existing chatbot services and the flooding of the internet with AI slop. As an idiom that works between the registers of academia (something-itifcation) and street talk (shit) enshitification lands most loudly on the dirty side of Mary Douglas’ anthropological divide.

The term may also be apt in describing our current advanced age of capitalism. The transformative technologies that powered industrial revolution from the 19^th century through the late 20^th century had what Karl Marx called “use value.” But from the railroads, radio and telegraph, electric lights, the automobile, airplanes, computer technology and the world wide web, technologies also often brought death, destruction and the displacement of workers.

The railway bubble that led to a major stock market crisis and depression in the US in the 1870s is often cited as historical reference for the current AI bubble. There were deaths associated with rail. The earliest neurotic conditions treated by doctors in the US were for a condition termed “railway spine.” People claimed to suffer debilitating neurological conditions, often after merely witnessing a derailment.

When History Feels Uncanny

But as frightening as rail may have been and as enormous as the costs of the investment mania, the use value of rail was never really in question (aside from their role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples). And unlike the major AI companies today who proclaim helplessly that their products may destroy most jobs and potentially all of humanity, railroad executives would never have said that their trains may blow up your town, but you have to build the stations anyway.

The bizarreness of our current situation is brought into relief by these historical comparisons. Freud’s concept of the uncanny also comes to mind: a response to a current situation that is simultaneously familiar in evoking something from the past and hauntingly strange.

In addition to use value, Marx introduced the concept of exchange value in his theory of the driving forces behind capitalism. Profits accumulate through a system of commodity exchange by extracting as much value as possible from human labor and natural resources while keeping costs of production as low as possible. Labor (and we might add, Nature) pushes back in various ways against this intensive exploitation, for example in the late 19^th century fight of workers for the eight-hour day. Marx predicted an era when periods of crisis—which are structural characteristics of capitalist growth—reach their limits and workers would usher in an era of socialism and liberation from the alienating labor of capitalist production. This era, as most historians agree, has not yet come about. There is a rich history of experiments and social movements to draw on, however, as potential signposts for futures yet to be realized.

In addition to one of the most influential political economists and philosophers of the modern era, Marx continues to be studied because of the eloquence of his writing. Published in 1848 and co-authored by Frederik Engels, The Communist Manifesto remains on many college syllabi because of the lyrical beauty of its prose. A line from the introduction speaks to the capitalism of that era and perhaps to ours: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Certainly, AI has ushered in a world of horrifying commerce where what had seemed solid in the past now melts into air. We are compelled to soberly face our current conditions, to imagine a different future, and to organize in bringing it about.

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Easily overlooked in this drama is how allegations against Platner are understood through the lens of his PTSD story. It’s a new version of an old story. Throughout the history of America’s wars, postwar syndromes include mounting public anxieties over the mental states of returning soldiers. American films reflect these anxieties, from John Huston’s classic documentary Let There Be Light (1946), a sympathetic portrayal of emotional broken, hospitalized WW II veterans, to Taxi Driver (1976) and Deer Hunter (1978) - films that draw out the psychopathic side of Vietnam era veterans.

The Rise of PTSD as a Redemptive Narrative

PTSD emerged in the 1980s as a redemptive diagnosis – a condition tied to the situational madness of war. (As promoters routinely exclaimed, “PTSD is a normal response to an abnormal situation.”) Unlike the psychotic or psychopathic veterans of earlier eras, the veteran with PTSD arouses far less anxiety. At the same time, the diagnosis grew alongside public recognition of how military culture fosters sexism and aggressive acting out. Military discipline and rules of engagement often break down on the battlefront and on the home front. Higher rates of suicide and domestic violence are among the signature problems of returning service members.

Addressing a crowd of cheering supporters at a YMCA gym in Blue Hill Maine, Platner acknowledged voters’ concerns about his past behavior. But he broke from the PTSD clinical frame in positioning himself in the tradition of veterans for peace, fighters whose struggles with personal demons speak to fights on the home front. “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change,” he told supporters.

Two Veterans, Two Visions of Recovery

Pete Hegseth also offers a PTSD story in explaining his history of bad behavior, but he provides a very different denouement. Both joined the military as young men after 9/11 and both served many tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan during the “long wars.” Both acknowledge histories of heavy drinking, sexual misconduct and aggressive behavior related to their extensive combat experience. But their politics are very far apart as are the lessons they drew from those wars.

While enlisting the PTSD script, Hegseth distances himself from the debilitating aspects of this condition. His hyper-masculine persona conforms to the Trump regime’s view that vulnerability and weakness are incompatible with manliness. In a 2020 Fox news interview where he “opens up“ about his emotional problems, he offers that “I’m sure I was a mess... I didn’t talk about things like post-traumatic stress and all that. I definitely had it… I don’t call it PTSD because I don’t think you live with a disorder all the time – not everyone does... I don’t live with the disorder today, but I definitely had it. [I spent] a lot of time drinking and laying on the couch.” When he got off that couch, he vaulted into a Fox News gig and then to the heights of power as Secretary of Defense/War.

Healing, Masculinity, and the Politics of Care

For Platner, recovering from PTSD means overcoming a very debilitating vision of manhood. He talks about learning to listen and caring for others as central to that process. It is noteworthy that he sought treatment through the VA during an era when military planners launched campaigns to overcome stigma around mental health problems. Throughout VA facilities, posters announced that “it takes a strong warrior to get help.” Platner often attributes his process of recovery to reconnecting with nature, as well as to his ongoing therapy. His story of how he became an oyster farmer opens into a wider tale of capitalist exploitation and calls for a different relationship with the natural world. One reporter sums up Platner’s oyster philosophy:

“From Indigenous subsistence to working-class staple, a species decimated by extractive capitalism and the predilections of the elite, [was] brought back to life by a public institution as a sustainable resource [oysters].

The Warrior Ethos and the Rejection of Restraint

The lesson Hegseth draws from his tours of duty point to anxieties around the castrating effects of rules on fighters. This complaint courses through Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors. Military rules around engagement seem to fuse in his mind with a nanny state, that old cudgel of the right against any governmental restrictions on personal behavior. Hegseth’s psyche may have been shaped by his experience during the early years of the US War on Terrorism as well. In the spring of 2004, he deployed to Guantanamo Bay where he guarded detainees for a year. A 2008 UC Berkeley Law article titled Guantánamo and Its Aftermath presents an analysis of the traumatic impact of these black sites on detainees as well as their morally corrosive effects on military personnel.

In his book American Crusade, Hegseth recalls telling his platoon to disregard the rules of engagement that are standard military protocol. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he said. “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.” The enemy for Hegseth began as a holy war against Islam and extended into the wide reach of the fascists currently governing this country. The Crusader tattoos inking Hegseth’s chest and limbs proudly proclaim his far-right political identity, even as questions continue to swirl around Platner’s tattoo from his Marine days and whether it signified hidden Nazi sympathies.

Why Return to a War You Oppose?

I want to return at the end to Graham Platner and the lessons he brings home from his military service. Supporters have a right to answers about allegations of sexual misconduct and other concerns that might affect their support for the candidate. But we might ask why someone who expressed opposition to Bush’s war as a young man ended up spending most of his adult life in the military. Beginning with joining the Marines after high school in 2003 (against the opposition of his parents), he served repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and then returned to Afghanistan as a State Department security contractor in 2018. These repeated deployments may explain why he had so many girlfriends (with no lasting domestic partners until his current partner) and why some of them found his moods and behavior “unsettling.” These are common biographies among professional Soldiers and Marines. But why did he keep returning to fight in wars that he had publicly opposed?

This is not meant to be accusatory in tone. My own psychoanalytic approach to therapy places considerable emphasis on ambivalence and conflict, how people struggle with the interplay of love and hate, and how adult choices are shaped by childhood experiences in complicated ways. In talking with service members in Afghanistan while filming Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines, this theme of ambivalence and conflict over military missions was a recurring one. I came to recognize during this documentary project what many young people found of such value–forms of community and camaraderie that were often missing back home. Yet this camaraderie was in the service of maintaining the lethal American war machine. This may have also been the case for Platner. Those values he does seem to be bringing home in this campaign.

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📖 Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down

Providing a new way of thinking about PTSD and an alternative to both critics and defenders of the diagnosis, this text will be useful for scholars and practitioners in psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, public health policy as well as, sociology, social work, gender studies, and the law.

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🎞️ MIND ZONE

MIND ZONE follows therapists with the 113th Army Combat Stress Control detachment as they carry out two conflicting missions: protecting soldiers from battle fatigue and keeping these same soldiers in the fight.

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State laws proposed or passed in recent years include everything from bathroom bans and restrictions on gender-affirming health care to laws against drag performances and campaigns to overturn gay marriage. These repressive campaigns share a common political agenda. But they each express specific anxieties and defenses animating conservative politics.

Generational Shifts Within LGBTQ+ Identity

There are important generational dynamics in play as well. While many women of my generation fought to come out as lesbians (L), many young women identify as queer (Q) or bi (B). These latter terms reflect the gender fluidity that is central to this generation’s politics. These politics also reflect younger activists’ emphasis on the irreducible remainder of non-conforming categories (+). Gay (G) is still an umbrella term. But the G remains troubling to some straight people in its association with gay men and anal sex. Lesbians in the homophobic imagination can be pictured as cuddling in non-genital ways. Gay men, on the other hand, bring to mind images that disturb more forcefully repressive hetero-sex codes.

Marriage Equality and Civil Rights

The advances in LGBTQ+ rights are important to celebrate even in waves of backlash. Gay marriage gained broad popular support in the 21^st century with most Democrats and around half of Republicans supporting same-sex relationships (with regression in support among Republicans under Trump 2.0). The right to marry in the US across race (interracial marriage was illegal in the US until the Supreme Court 1967 Loving v Virginia ruling of June 12, 1967) and gender lines does represent real progress. It is important to honor and learn from the movements that fought for this basic civil right. At the same time, the right to marry represents the most domesticated and conservative demand of the gay rights movement. Gender fluidity (and the famous Trump ad against Harris, “She is for they/them; He is for you”) mobilizes old fears around a new frontier of perceived threats (+!)

Drag Queens and the Politics of Visibility

Drag performers are the loudest and most visible side of the gay rights movement. These performances have gained public followings over the years, leading Pride marches and other civic events as well as invited performances in liberal parts of the country for school-age children. The Stonewall Uprising in 1969 was led by drag queens who resisted a police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The uprising on June 29^th of that year is a primary reason that June is celebrated as Pride month. Their insistently joyful visibility makes them an ongoing target of hysterical reactions.

Trans People and the Politics of Suspicion

Trans people, on the other hand, are objects of the aggressively paranoid edge of the right. Political paranoia, much like clinical paranoia, fixates on hidden threats. Its concern is with intimate invasions and alarm over outsiders passing as “one of us.” Post-war McCarthyism marshaled anti-communism through this tactic. A communist could be your normal-seeming neighbor. Or it could even be your doctor. The Trump regime’s violent campaign against “aliens within” is awash in the markers of the crazed paranoiac: “They walk among us,” the government website ominously declares in shades of horror comic green.

In an article and prelude to Gender Trouble, published the following year, queer theorist Judith Butler offers an astute observation that touches on this same distinction (even as she conflates transvestism and drag):

“The site of a transvestite on stage can compel pleasure and applause while the site of that same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence.”

Put in contemporary terms, the drag queen on stage can be enjoyed as an act (it’s not real, after all) whereas the trans woman’s claim to a place in everyday life feels dangerously close.

In my earliest documentary feature, Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag, Darcelle XV, the star of the film, takes up different identities and the meanings of those identities in the LGBTQ community. She explains the difference between gay men performing drag and trans women just living their lives and also comments on public conflation of cross-dressing—a private practice primarily of straight men—and drag, a very public performance primarily by gay men. We learn in the film about the history of the club as a lesbian bar in the late 1960s and as a refuge over the decades, including during times of intense persecution. The club has been most famous locally for their raucous “bride’s last night out” parties—a phenomenon that we take up in the film.

Drag, Gender Identity, and Community Tensions

The documentary project began in 2003 with conversations in the LGBTQ community, including currents of ambivalence for some about drag. In a conversation on Reddit in 2023, two decades later, I was reminded of these early conversations, and particularly comments by trans women about drag queens.

“It gives me a huge amount of dysphoria. It is like my worst fear. That I will always look like a guy in a dress.”

“Yep, this is why. Drag is what (almost) every trans girl is afraid of being.”

“I don’t have a problem with drag queens…but I do have a problem being called one….I want to be a girl. I want to feel like a girl and be perceived as a girl….not as a guy playing dress up.”

This Pride Month, it is important to march in solidarity with a movement that carries liberatory potential for all of us. At the same time, it is important to recognize how attacks on people take varying forms. Each identity in the LGBTQ+ Rainbow is its own Rorschach card for bigots, arousing fears, fantasies and persecutory impulses that we must collectively resist.

Remembering Darcelle XV

Portland Oregon is a queer friendly place for the most part. In this city, we honor this month the memory of Darcelle XV, our city’s most famous and beloved drag queen. At 85 years of age, she was proud to receive an entry in the Guinness World of Records as the oldest continually performing drag queen in the world. With support from her rhinestone encrusted walker, she continued to delight audiences with her dazzle, warmth and acerbic wit until shortly before her death at age 92. She was my friend and a friend to so many others.

Goddesses rest her beautiful soul.

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Prosecution and defense arguments in jury trials in California and in New Mexico centered on interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enacted by Congress in 1996.

Often called the law that created the 21^st century internet, Section 230 protects servers and users from liability for objectionable content. The law also provides legal protection for content moderation, including content deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

Until these recent cases, Meta has been able to enlist Section 230 to shield the company from governmental regulation and liability. In our Left & the Law review of these recent lawsuits, we look at some of the measures that critics are calling for in protecting youth from the harmful effects of online apps and how young people themselves are pushing back on corporate control of social media.

As we prepare for our radio segments, Mike and I often take up the personal and professional associations that come to mind with the cases under discussion. On the professional side, we met decades ago through our shared research and writing on child protection agencies and their role in the “Satanic ritual abuse” scare of the 1990s. On the personal side, we both grew up in white middle-class families during the repressive post-war era. This was a time of televised congressional hearings with the mandate of protecting a decisively conservative vision of morality against the rebellious currents of that era.

My Story: When Bambi Was Too Dangerous to Watch

In the fundamentalist Christian home of my youth, movies were strictly forbidden. As a grade schooler, I suffered many humiliations over this policy. When the mom at a friend’s birthday party hauled everyone in her station wagon to a local theater to watch Bambi, I had to go home.

It was the 1950s and the McCarthy hearings were targeting the film industry in Hollywood for communist sympathies and for subversion of public morality. Walt Disney was himself a stalwart supporter of McCarthyism. In 1947 he went before HUAC to name leaders of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, claiming that they were labor agitators and members of or influenced by the Communist Party.

But my mother was not seduced by Disney’s distancing his studios from the problems of Hollywood. The sanitized (and very white) allure of Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Bambi failed to satisfy the strict scrutiny of my mother’s personal censorship codes. When I appealed for mercy, she would inevitably instruct me in the slippery slope argument: “Today it’s Bambi; tomorrow it’s Lolita” (that was not her exact reference but something to that effect). Her backup argument—one that actually stayed with me in thinking critically about films—was that “these films have a lot of hidden messages. They are not just entertainment.” We never talked about what those messages were.

The Hays Code that governed censorship in the film industry during the post-war era also failed to convince her. Once again, she insisted that there was a lot more going on in films that went under the radar of the Code and its list of prohibited images and words. And decades of psychoanalytic and feminist film analysis would support her in that general critical stance.

Mike’s Story: When Comic Books Became a National Scandal

Mike, on the other hand, had more freedom from watchful parents. He could walk to the local movie house on Saturday to watch a double-feature. The stacks of comic books under his bed did not arouse parental suspicion. Mike was a big fan of the Little Lulu comics which feature a spunky, stubborn girl (Lulu) and her friend Tubby, a boy she spars with, and her best friend Annie. The Lulu series had a distinctively proto-feminist message: girls are as smart and clever as boys and need to band together to fight for their rights. (Lulu and her friends confront the “Clubhouse boys” who try to enforce their “no girls allowed” rules.)

The EC comics seemed to Mike to be part of the landscape but they were the Horror Corner. He was jarred when he saw the comic book part of his life spill over into the daily newspapers that his father religiously read. It took a minute for him to realize that actual grown-ups were saying that reading a comic book would somehow shape your future behavior. That realization was perhaps the first time he felt that grownups, some of them anyway, were caught up in some kind of national hysteria.

The Comics Code Authority, created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, was a response to moral panic over the burgeoning popularity of comics, particularly crime and horror comics, and modeled after the Hays Code in Hollywood. Some of this anxiety was fueled by the bestselling book, Seduction of the Innocent published in the same year. Authored by German American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, the book targets crime comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. The book asserts that “if one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised” than letting them read comic books. As supporting evidence, Wertham argues that 95% of children placed in reform school for delinquent behavior read comics. Based on the popular influence of his book, Wertham was invited to testify in 1954 before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Like other figures in 1950s inquisitions, the psychiatrist’s scrutiny of comics also fixated on anxiety over homosexual seductions of youth. The Batman and Robin comics in particulars, he warned, expressed “a wish-dream of two homosexuals living together.”

The Cases Against Meta: Moral Panic?

Just as there were in Mike and my youth, there are currents of moral panic in contemporary discourse over youth mentally destroyed through their use of social media. The history of campaigns to protect youth from corruptive influences should give us pause. Unlike movies and comic books, however, Meta represents a qualitatively and quantitatively different threat. These platforms intrude on personal life in very intimate ways. At the same time, young people find creative ways of ways using these tools. In our Left & the Law segment on the cases against Meta, we look at forms of resistance among youth to social media in their lives.

Discussion of the monstrous side of Meta often overlooks how these companies are products of capitalism and particularly the lightly regulated reign of industries so central to the dominant American story of progress. Not unlike the film industry and the companies publishing comic books in earlier eras, the profit motive drives this generation’s social media companies as well. As a college drop-out in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his former roommates/co-developers pitched Facebook as a place for “building community and connection.” In 2012, Zuckerberg enlisted mobile phone companies in the global South with the noble aim of bringing internet access to hundreds of millions of underserved people. He is now one of the richest people in the world and, like other capitalists, measures growth in how much value (profit) can be extracted from the human labor behind his products.

In the case of social media platforms, users themselves are the living base of this system of extraction. The longer users stay on a platform, the more revenue in advertising. Indeed, Meta and Google control over half of the world’s digital advertising market and over 40% of the entire global advertising market.

A former liberal supporting LGBT rights, immigrant rights, and the Black Lives Matter Movement, Zuckerberg proclaimed himself in 2025 an avid Trump supporter. In January 2025, he proclaimed (with no apparent shame) that “We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad.” Much like other Silicon Valley tech liberals, Zuckerberg has turned hard right in embracing the Trump regime. He aggressively opposes EU regulations of his social media companies, stating “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies.”

Part of the story of Meta that unfolds in recent lawsuits centers on the federal government’s role in the commercialization of the internet at the turn of the 21^st century. A 2025 Stanford Law article asserts that “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is the most important law in the history of the internet. It is also one of the most flawed.” Representatives Christopher Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the provision in 1995 as the “Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act” which was folded into the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Their goal was to protect nascent internet startups from lawsuits and regulation.

In our Left & the Law segment on June 8th, Mike and I take up the stories and strategies behind the recent jury trials in California and New Mexico. And we look at how lawsuits signify a shift in public views on social media and how they affect regulatory initiatives. We close the segment with some of the initiatives of young people as they struggle with intense ambivalence over the place of social media in their lives.

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Join us on the Old Mole Variety Hour on KBOO Community Radio and listen to the whole 25-minute segment on Monday!

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Left theorists invoke melancholia in describing the pervasive malaise that often characterize left-wing movements during reactionary periods. In History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, political theorist Theodor Adorno addresses the depressive emotional currents of left-wing culture. For Adorno,

“This is a melancholy that has become active, not a melancholy that makes do, that remains stuck in an unhappy consciousness, not at home with itself, but a consciousness that exteriorizes itself as critique of existing phenomena.”

In joining campus screenings of The Palestine Exception, directed by Jennifer Ruth and me, I am often asked to speak as a clinical psychologist to students’ feelings of distress. Student activists describe feeling traumatized and suffering from symptoms of PTSD in the wake of punitive actions on the part of their universities. The sense of joyful community and revolutionary possibilities that accompanied the encampments and occupation of buildings in 2024 have given way to states of depressive defeat. For students from more protected backgrounds, there is often a sense of shock. How could these administrators, positioning themselves in their own PR as in loco parentis, beat up on young people on their campuses?

Taking on the power of pro-Israel board members in their schools and pro-Israel lobbies in liberal politics, including the Democratic Party, exposed these students to the brutality of administrative authority in ways many had never experienced.

Responding to students’ distress, I sometimes suggest that the group mood seems melancholic rather than traumatized or depressed. Trauma and depression are part of a clinical vocabulary of emotional impairments and mental disorder. Melancholia, on the other hand, is a more dynamic state of mind. Assaults on shared moral purpose and political agency do hit hard emotionally. And in realizing the power of oppressive forces to crush resistance, activists must face the necessary process of gathering up and holding the ideals and forms of solidarity that have made Gaza a moral compass for our era. This is a form of melancholic work.

Political theorists such as Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, along with Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin and Adorno of generations prior, have contributed to a rich literature on left melancholia. While most of these theorists depart in critical ways from psychoanalytic readings, they all make use of Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia as a touchtone text. Freud wrote this essay toward the end of the First World War and his clinical thinking carries the emotional weight of the War’s large-scale death and destruction. For Freud, psychoanalysis offers insights on grief as a necessary human capacity as well as on how grief takes regressive or pathological forms.

Freud distinguishes between normal mourning and melancholic depression: the “inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely.” The melancholic (the depressive), unlike the mourner, refuses to accept the reality of the loss. This psychological work that eludes observation—the internal work that “we cannot see”—centers on protecting an internal representation of the beloved lost object (a person, an ideal, a movement) while modifying in some way the relationship of the self (or the group) to that object. The mourner, according to Freud, must eventually accept the loss and reinvest their motional energy in new attachments. The melancholic refuses the finality of the loss and intensifies emotional investment in the lost object. The melancholic remains in a state of unstable revolt against what Freud terms the “reality principle.”

A range of political theorists have drawn on Mourning and Melancholia to frame the disturbing emotional states that follow in the wake of crushing political defeats. Nouri Gana’s recent book, Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World enlists psychoanalysis in arguing for the centrality of melancholic loss to Arab subjectivity and politics. In his analyses of recurring motifs in Arab films, short stories, plays, and poems, Gana defends melancholy as the only ethical and political orientation to the persistence of loss into the present. The ethics of these works center on a refusal to accept the oppressor’s demands for closure, for burying ideas and ideals along with the dead. Unlike post-traumatic stress conditions, there is no “post” for people suffering ongoing violence and displacement. And unlike assertions of postcolonial conditions in the Arab world, there is no postcolonial genuine sovereignty.

The American left has tended toward manic reactions (Fight! Fight! Fight!) in fending off dark moods. In “Resisting Left Melancholia,” a 1999 essay written by political theorist Wendy Brown, melancholia is framed as a pathological political symptom. She diagnoses the problem as centering on leftists’ tendency toward narcissistic identification with past historical possibilities. She draws on the work of critical theorist Walter Benjamin who similarly diagnoses melancholia as a political pathology. “Left-wing melancholy” was the title of an essay written by Benjamin in 1931 for the German newspaper Die Gesellschaft. The left melancholic, from the perspective of Benjamin, retreats into a narcissistic fixation on a dead past. Speaking to different periods of political reaction, Brown and Benjamin frame political melancholia as regressive. It is a conservative backward-looking stance, more attached to cherished ideas than to the world of living struggle.

Peter Gordon takes up the emotional toll of left defeats while offering an analysis more in line with Adorno. In “Why the left needs melancholy,” Gordon begins by noting that melancholia is a mood of defeat.

“In the face of so much suffering and injustice,” he insists, “the melancholic’s refusal to move on with business as usual already bears within itself a kind of resistance, a recognition that all is not right in the world and that something must be done.”

In A Politics of Melancholia, authors George Edmundson and Klaua Mladek suggest that the revolutionary potential of melancholia lies in how we understand the place of loss and grief in movements of resistance. The conservative melancholic refuses to relinquish an idealized representation of the past. It is backward looking. What the authors term the “political melancholic” refuses to give up on a vision of the world that has not yet been realized. It is a world that has been imagined and fought for under conditions that make it seem an impossibility.

There are no immediate antidotes for these melancholic currents in left politics. The challenge for activists is in developing practices that acknowledge and positively value the range of affective currents that accompany long-term struggles. As one of the students offered in our post-screening discussion, “We did not know how hard and long this fight for Palestinian freedoms would be and how much it is part of larger systems of oppression.”

My response, which I often offer to young activists, was to point out that they have rich legacies of struggle to draw on. Oppressed people have found creative ways to resist and to hold onto connections to land and identity, even in the face of genocide. Gaza makes moral claims on all of us to resist. If Palestinians refuse to accept the conditions of their subjugation, then we in solidarity must refuse as well.

I close with a poem written by the late Gazan poet Refaat Alareer shortly before his death. It’s titled “If I Must Die.”

“The Palestine Exception is a searing and unflinchingly honest account of what it means to stand for something, and the immense consequences of speaking up. This is a vital documentary for our present moment, but also a terrifying look at how institutional power has always tried – and will always try – to enforce silence on every last one of its critics.”

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Winner of National Book Award

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This aphorism was not a prohibition against poetry per se nor a taboo against art that represents the Holocaust. Rather, Adorno was condemning cultural practices that provide a comforting distance from the suffering it represents or from the societal dynamics that give rise to industrial scale murder. At the same time, Adorno insisted that it is “in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”

As a director of The Palestine Exception and SUMUD: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza, I was invited along with my team to film the opening of Gaza—No Words—See the Exhibit at the Venice Biennale with the aim of producing a documentary that tells the story behind the exhibit.

In filming the event, I was reminded of Adorno’s warnings on the politically repressive uses of art as well as his hopes for art that is faithful to its subject matter.

This hopeful vision was palpably on display at the opening in the main salon of the Palazzo Mora at the European Centre—one of the spaces for the officially recognized Collateral Exhibits. These independently organized projects undergo a competitive review process to be accepted as part of the Biennale outside of the national pavilions. Much like Palestine itself, these exhibits on the periphery are animated by a spirit of persistence.

If the Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world (as its often described), the collateral exhibits are its long-distance runners. This most decidedly characterizes Gaza—No Words—See the Exhibit. As large protests and boycotts of Israel’s participation shook many of the national exhibit halls, the embroidery exhibit at the Palazzo Mora offers a consoling space to think, to feel and to recognize what is happening in Gaza.

Faisal Saleh explained the meaning of the “No Words” in the exhibit’s title. Saleh is founder and director of the Palestine Museum US and part of the team that produced the exhibit.

“As the title of this exhibit suggests, no speech and most certainly no set of words from this podium can fully capture what hangs on these walls today,” Saleh explains in his opening remarks. He describes the urgency of the project as global protests fail to stop the genocidal destruction of Gaza. “It was a bold proposal and a painstaking undertaking and the result is this exhibit. It is the result of over 60 embroiderers, five field coordinators and a team of four.”

Two of the team members—Jan Chalmers and Ibrahim Muhtadi—were not able to be present for the opening ceremonies. Team members Faisal Saleh and Jehan Alfarra were there to present the project to the attendees gathered.

Along with Saleh, Alfarra spoke to the meaning of “No Words” in the exhibit title.

“We will make no attempt to explain or describe these stories. The panels speak for themselves. These remarks are simply an offering of gratitude and recognition to all those who made this work possible. And they are in honor of all the women who spent months stitching scenes most of the world could barely bear to look at for seconds. And with that said, I would first and foremost, like to begin by expressing my utmost appreciation for Faisal Saleh standing before you today and for the Palestine Museum, U.S., without whom this exhibit would not have been possible.”

The creativity, caring and deep suffering of the Palestinian people are woven into these magnificent panels. And they collectively present an indictment of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign. Each of the 100 panels tells a story of horrific suffering. But they project a feeling of deep intimacy as well. The panels are based on photographs, many taken by photographers who took enormous risks in documenting the destruction in Gaza.

The photos were transformed into patterns that became the basis of this use of the traditional cross-stitch craft of tatreez to tell a collective story. The exhibit honors these heroic journalists who documented the genocide, many of whom died in the course of carrying out this vital work.

The exhibit also includes a video titled Cartography of Genocide produced by Forensic Architecture, based in the UK.

“With genocide, like any other military campaign, there’s an architecture to it,” founder Eyal Weizman explains. Their mapping of the systematic nature of the destruction includes definitions from the UN charter of 1948. “It’s about whether the scale of atrocities, whether the patterns between things that are happening constitute a systemic campaign that is designed to destroy people.”

This visual mapping of the structure of the genocide offers a distinctive counterpoint to the mournful beauty and intimacy of the embroideries.

It is an honor to be working with the Palestine Museum on a documentary that brings the story of these embroidery panels into the medium of a film. There will be words in the form of thoughtful observations and insights.

But as a film production team, we are guided by the quietly disturbing spirit of this project. Art can speak in ways that words fail. Art can provide new ways of seeing in the darkest of times.

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Watch Trailer

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In solidarity,

Jan

It takes close to a day to travel from my home in Portland Oregon to Venice, Italy.

For those transporting the work on display at this exhibit, the journeys take weeks or months. The carriers are part of a global network reaching across the Mediterranean Sea and through various ports, borders, roadblocks and delivery stations to arrive in Venice.

This cargo began in the Palestinian villages and refugee camps where women embroiderers created 100 pieces in a year-long project funded through the Palestine Museum US and their Tapestry History Project. From Ramallah to Lebanon’s refugee camps and as far as New Zealand, Palestinian women have been embroidering panels to create a collective cross-stitched testimonial in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Each piece consists of 55,000 stitches, totaling 5.5 million stitches, and depicts scenes from the genocide in Gaza.

🏛️ The Exhibit

The exhibit is part of the official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and on display from May 9 through 22nd November 2026.

The creators of GAZA–NO WORDS have a vision of this work as an enduring record of the genocide. There is deep heartache, grief and mourning etched into the pieces on display. They also express collective outrage over the scale of the ongoing violence and a call to hold the perpetrators accountable.

GAZA - NO WORDS is visually bold and aesthetically moving as well. The 19 by 31-inch tapestries reflect the intricate beauty of tatreez (embroidery) as well as its history as symbol of Palestinian resistance. A centuries-old Palestinian tradition, tatreez is used to adorn wedding dresses and for other celebratory occasions. But much like the keffiyeh scarves, tatreez designs have been taken up as expressions of Palestinian identity and pride.

🎞️ The Documentary

I am honored to be working with Faisal Saleh and others on his team at the Palestine Museum US on a documentary that we hope to produce over the summer of 2026.

As a first step, editor Jeff Harshman and I worked with Faisal to create a trailer on the exhibit.

Watch Trailer

The film (likely 30-40 minutes in length) will tell the story behind the exhibit. That story includes the daunting journey of the carefully wrapped packages as they are passed person to person, via taxis, boats, cars and planes. It is a network born of creative strategies of resistance and movement across inhospitable borders. In following that journey, the film provides glimpses of the embroiderers as well, many of whom live under conditions of displacement and occupation.

Please follow this project as the production team and I report from the field.

If you haven’t seen the team’s previous films on Gaza, check out these documentaries from 2025: The Palestine Exception and SUMUD: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza.

Watch on Watermelon Pictures

Watch on Amazon Prime Video

Watch SUMUD Trailer

SUMUD is now available for streaming worldwide on Kinema.

The stream also includes the full panel discussion recorded after our premiere. The conversation is candid, searching, and deeply personal. We talk about what it means to document suffering ethically, about the burden carried by medical workers who return home, and about why storytelling still matters.

The stream will be available to watch anywhere in the world - with a suggested rental of $4.99 and a pay-what-you-can option.

Stream SUMUD on Kinema

I hope you’ll watch these films. I hope you’ll share them. And I hope you’ll continue to stand with those whose steadfast perseverance keeps truth alive.

In solidarity,

Jan