ARIZONA- The most obvious focus of the current “No Kings” protests lies in US citizens’ immediate “bread and butter issues”: brutal cuts to education, social security, and health care ($1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and Childre’s Health Insurance); massive inflation that makes it hard to feed families, pay outrageous costs for health insurance, and endure the exorbitant price of fuel precipitated by the perfidious war on Iran, launched for a second time since June, 2025, in the midst of negotiations.

Beyond that initial layer is the severe reduction and even obliteration of programs that help the poor, and the savage attacks against immigrants, many of whom are either legal or already citizens; yet all of them—whether Latin American or Middle Eastern—cast as either “criminals, thugs, rapists” or “threats to national security”, and subjected to imprisonment and deportation.

A distinct goal of the current protests, however, as noted by Tehran Times , is the urgent emphasis on voting in the upcoming midterm elections, since the average voter turnout in midterm elections is only 48%, despite a rise to 52% in 2022. Midterm elections occur halfway through a presidential term, and determine the composition of both chambers of Congress, Representatives and Senators. This November’s election is particularly crucial, for if Trump loses his Republican majority in Congress, Democrats plan to launch investigations into his blatantly corrupt family businesses, the Epstein files, immigration enforcement, and corporate profiteering. And if Trump also loses control of the Senate, Democrats can block Trump’s nominees for Cabinet positions, paralyze his appointment of federal judges and nominees to the Supreme Court, give Democrats subpoena power that would enhance their power to investigate the administration, and might possibly lead to impeachment proceedings.

While Trump and his base—both the “uneducated” he claims to love and the oligarchs he pampers—fear such an outcome, the rest of the country dreads that the administration may steal the election, as he attempted to do in 2020, and which Trump continues to hallucinate having won.

For more astute protesters, deeper dimensions lie beyond their immediate private afflictions and political tactics: the current regime is the malignant harvest of a systemic sociopolitical disease, an incremental process that has achieved only its most virulent embodiment in Trump. Decades of lavish tax breaks for the ultra-rich have impoverished and depleted life for the ordinary citizen, accomplished by the long assault on Labor Unions and the obscene rise in Corporate Profits. The struggle is against a system devoted to perpetual war and militarism, the rise of a surveillance state behind a shabby façade of “democracy” whose flimsy mask conceals the true face of a merciless plutocracy.

The entire society has been commodified: humanity, personhood, culture, art, law, and indeed the Earth itself are subordinated to the calculation of profit for the oligarchs. As one corporate executive affirmed, “We have to save capitalism from democracy.” [Quoted in Nancy MacLean’s masterful Democracy in Chains (2017)]. But this catastrophe did not begin with Trump, whose flagrant vulgarity, malice, ignorance and blatant corruption have reduced every ideal to a “deal”, every principle to “profit”, every fact to “fake news.” Nonetheless, Trump has crossed a threshold, representing an apotheosis of the Neoliberal ideology that has reigned since Reagan and Thatcher. Not to be confused with “Liberal” social values, Neoliberalism is not merely an economic theory but a Worldview that envisions the absolute supremacy of the spurious “Free Market”: privatization of all public space, the erasure of any regulations and responsibilities that protect workers, the public and the environment. The social fabric is devastated: citizens are reduced to mere consumers; elections succumb to legal bribery; the indivual will is divinized, while community and compassion are mocked as “Communist.”

At its root, Neoliberalism is an assault on all transcendent values, which are reduced to mere transactions: the evisceration of the Goodness, Truth and Beauty that form the very basis and deep fraternity of authentic principles that might unite the threefold Abrahamic Traditions and bridge the distance between East and West. But for the plutocracy, nothing is sacred: all life is merely “collateral damage” in the cult of money and power. Meanwhile, a perverse, heretical “Christian fascism” mirrors the Zionist desecration of Judaism and mutilates our shared dialectical heritage into a weapon of conquest.

On leaving office in January, 1961 President Eisenhower warned against the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), which over the last six decades has metastasized into the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex (MIMAC), whereby Corporate Media serves as flagrant propaganda, and corporatized University Administrations silence and expel voices dedicated to the practice of critical thinking, professors who bravely stand for global justice, peace and accountability, while war crimes and genocide are upheld with lies, prevarication and impunity.

Trump has waged an assault on the very foundations of American society: the Constitution, a crucial element of which is the “separation of powers” between the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches, designed to avert the rise of tyranny. While Trump has attacked judges appointed by former presidents of both parties, he has fantasized that Article II of the Constitution gives him the right to do “whatever I want.”

The Will to Power and Addiction to Avarice reign supreme. In 2018, Trump unilaterally abrogated Obama’s JCPOA—the accord (in conjunction with China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom) limiting Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for sanctions relief—despite Iran’s compliance, as verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). That fateful decision resulted from pressure exerted by his billionaire donors, amid the long-established aims of the CIA in conjunction with Mossad.

What many Iranians as well as Americans grasp is that we are facing an administration of the most deeply cynical character, whose abysmal inhumanity was crystallized in the heartless retort of Matt Schlapp (chairman of the American Conservative Union), on a Piers Morgan broadcast in March: dismissing Peter Beinart’s compassionate lament that if the U.S. and Israel had not attacked Iran on February 28, the schoolgirls killed at the Shajareh Tayyibeh elementary school in Minab “would be alive”, Schlapp quipped: “They’d be alive in a burqa… in a barbaric, unequal society… with no ability to make career choices.” By Schlapp’s cavalier reckoning, the illegal, unprovoked war of aggression launched against Iran was blameless, the humanity of both the dead and living girls, their teachers and parents obliterated, along with the lives of the 73 boys whose massacre was omitted in nearly all US media reports.

Be it noted that Schlapp has faced multiple sexual harassment charges involving other men.

The bombing of Minab was no mere “accident”, given that Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of War (formerly “Defense”) openly implemented a doctrine of “More lethality and less accountability”, publicly spurning what he called “stupid rules of engagement.” Not mere bravado: he dissolved the policy to limit civilian casualties established by the Department of Defense, known as the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR, pronounced “Chimmer”), and fired the senior advisor at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant. “We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”

As the eminent former Ambassador Chas Freeman has declared, “diplomacy… begins with empathy.” The tragic reality of US foreign policy, he laments, is quite the opposite: “We don’t do diplomacy anymore. [In] the ‘rules-based order,’ … we make the rules and decide who they apply to and who is exempt from them.”

Freeman’s grim insights are amply confirmed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s shameless scorn of “so-called International Law”, as the administration engages in attacking and dismantling every mechanism designed to promote and ensure human rights and global accountability, from the UN to the ICC, which Trump himself has called “an evil group of people”. For the US soars above the law, which it makes and breaks, supports or sabotages at will, in accordance with its capricious, often incoherent and myopic “interests” bereft of values, blind to principles, contemptuous of truth.

Like a lobotomized version of Netanyahu, Trump exemplifies what Marc Owen Jones has called alethocide: the killing of truth, in brash defiance of Hannah Arendt’s warning: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” [The Origins of Totalitarianism. Part 3, Ch. 13, §3., p. 474. (1979 ed.)].

Yet lest we be comforted by the hope that a Democratic majority would make the needful turn to empathy and diplomacy, we have only to regard the dismal Biden policy toward Palestine to sober such wishes, from its refusal to condemn the brutal evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem (2021), to its audacious denials of Israeli apartheid—documented and declared from 2020-2022 not only by the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, but by Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Yesh Din—to its brazen lies and duplicity in the face of war crimes and genocide, as Biden’s minions violated US domestic law by providing Israel a flood of weapons, and “willfully enabled atrocities” in Gaza, as meticulously detailed in the recent book Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed.

As demonstrated since the Clinton presidency, the key difference between the two US parties rests in rhetoric and comportment, not in substance: while Trump spews vulgarity, racism, misogyny, megalomania and toxic fables; threatens Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”; declares Climate Change a “hoax” and sneers at the global scientific consensus regarding the ecocide we continue to commit—Democrats deplore his barbarity and ignorance, while urbanely praising human rights but ignoring their implementation, raise insipid procedural objections against the war, and prudently pose and gesture toward crucial shifts to renewable energy—yet only two candidates even mention “climate” on their current campaign websites.

After Gaza, the Democrats’ notoriety as “the lesser of two evils” is more woefully suspect than ever. Both parties serve the corporate and financial elite, even as they seduce and betray their constituents, far too many of whom remain complacent in the face of the fascist tide, distracted by celebrity worship, sports events, casinos, and barbecues, while vainly imagining themselves immune to the lure of “bread and circuses” and the lust for dominion and military might that leads to the suicide of empires. Trump is merely, as Chris Hedges avows, “the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact.”

The thirst for hope must not erase our nation’s long history of depredation, too rarely taught in our schools: throughout the twentieth century US support for Latin American dictators reached its peak during the Reagan administration, but the Empire emerged long before: the Mexican-American War (1846-8) was provoked by the US in order to justify stealing the territories and riches of California and Texas; Hawaii was overthrown in 1893; and the Spanish-American War of 1898—purportedly to “liberate Cuba from the domination of Spain (the erstwhile analogue of our era’s ennemis du jour, whether “Communist” or “Islamist”), but in truth to ensure US domination of the Caribbean sugar market—extended to the Philippine War (1899-1902) to annex and subjugate the archipelago under the guise of independence, freedom, and “Christian” values.

The dynamic satirized in Mark Twain’s scathing essay of 1901, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” exposed the seething Imperialism and avarice beneath the dazzling veil of rhetorical hypocrisy in its lethal quest to “enlighten” the “savage”, “heathen”, “uncivilized” peoples and lands whose sovereignty and dignity were despoiled in our grotesque triumph.

A modicum of change will doubtless come with time, but the imperative transformation of consciousness may well arrive only with the bitter gift of regret: the inevitable collapse of our hegemonic Heart of Darkness.