American Fascism, Expanding Seas, Mass Disability

The US immigration agency ICE has detained two Germans, a Brit and a Canadian tourist in recent weeks as America’s illegals panic ratches up a notch. The weeks-long detentions, which appear to be based on sketchy intel about incomplete/incorrect visas, are being seen by many as a further example of creeping fascism under Trump. ICE have also indefinitely detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University for the crime of organising pro-Palestine rallies. Khalil is a legal US resident on a green card, theoretically protected by the US constitution, yet so far this has offered him no protection. All this has been fairly well covered this week.

What has been less well covered is the fact that America’s sprawling network of ICE detention centres (more than 200 nationwide, all for-profit) and its squadrons of jackbooted enforcers (around 50,000 agents) were very deliberately created and utilised by moderate, liberal presidents. Presidents who, we’re told, unlike Trump ‘respected the constitution’ and ‘believed in democracy.’ ICE is barely twenty years old, established under Bush Jr and fully legitimised under Obama. Obama, who had eight years to dismantle ICE (which at the time was a fledgling agency), but instead demanded more funding for it every year, massively expanding its reach and enthusiastically embracing its powers.

Alongside his embrace of ICE, Obama also ramped-up a little-known homeland security programme, named, with an Orwellian flourish, “Secure Communities.” Explicitly designed to create hostility within communities against undocumented migrants, it gave local police new immigration enforcement powers. This initiative to hunt down people without the correct papers existed in only 14 counties under Bush Jr, but by 2013, it was active in all 3,181 US jurisdictions. As a result, Obama oversaw record deportations, exceeding all the Republican presidents that had come before him, a record not even Trump one could match.

Obama created the deportation machine for Trump’s American fascism.

I don’t think any of us would be surprised to see Trump using ICE and local police forces to detain more dissidents and further advance American fascism in the coming years. When this happens, it will also in no small part be down to Obama, who militarised America’s police departments under the so-called 1033 program. Established by Bill Clinton, the programme allowed the Pentagon to transfer excess military equipment to local police departments. Modest transfers through the late 90s and Bush Jr accelerated massively under Obama, especially after his donors got freaked out by the occupy Wall Street protests and encampments. By 2016, Obama was sending nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of battlefield weapons to local police departments, a massive 2400% increase on Bush Jr’s final year.

American liberals need to start reckoning with the complicity of rainbow flag identity politicians like Obama in laying the groundwork for Trump. If they start to do that, if they work to understand how liberal rule has always created the architecture for fascism and why it must be rejected for any hope of a decent future, we might all get somewhere eventually. But without that understanding, America is doomed to a death spiral that could just take the world down with it.

Fuck AI more

I have already explained how much I hate AI. A few developments this week have ratcheted up my hate to new levels. Firstly Sam Altman, the boss of ChatGPT, announced the company had begun testing a creative writing AI. He gave an example of the output, which he praised. It’s total dogshit, the sort of writing that spills forth from your brain when you’re half cut after a day of lazy drinking and the mysteries of life suddenly reveal themselves to you. That’s not to say it won’t be used (and abused) by capitalists. We’re almost certain to see AI-generated movies, TV show scripts and book series. Cutting creative humans out of the creative process for certain types of content is inevitable. The average Michael Bay or superhero movie may as well be written by AI as it is. So does it matter? I think it does. I think it cuts to the core of what it means to be human. Ever since our long years in the caves we’ve been entertained by the words and images created by fellow humans. There is an inherent soul-nourishing mystery about being entertained by another human doing something you can’t do, using only their brain. And in that process of creation, they do something to you. When this is replaced by machines, what mystery remains? It will further the impoverishment of the human experience on Earth. What will become of our ability to create and how we relate to each other?

On this, AI is already shredding trust and the relationship between teachers and students. This week a computer science professor at Berkeley tweeted that they suspect the large bulk of their students are using Chat GPT to complete assignments.

We’re moving rapidly towards a world where people can’t think for themselves. Where the temptation to plug an inquiry into AI rather than do the thinking and research yourself will soon be overwhelming. What will this do to our cognitive abilities? What will it do to brains congested with plastic when we don’t need to, and don’t want to, think.

Also in AI news this week, Yale University suspended a professor after an AI-generated news site accused her of terrorism. If you read the story, the only accusations are that she participated in pro-Palestine rallies and spoke out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The AI ‘news’ website called Jewish Onliner appears to trawl the internet for pro-Palestine voices and accuse them of terrorism, expressly to harm their lives and careers. Job done, in the case of Dr Helyeh Doutaghi. The Zionist lobby allied with malicious AI as just another tool in the Nazi toolkit, and a reminder of how Palestine is a key fracture line along which everything is breaking.

In the final piece of AI news for the week, British prime minister Keir Starmer said he is going to replace every civil servant with an AI, where feasible. This is the same Keir Starmer who has just declared war on the rising numbers of sick and disabled by announcing plans to slash their benefit payments to try and force them into work. You’d have to be wilfully ignorant not to see where this is going. A refined austerity state powered by punitive AI will, by design, accelerate the immiseration and impoverishment of large parts of the British population. The challenge for Brits is the same as for Americans: to be radicalised against neoliberalism, turn away from neonationalism and embrace a radical politics of justice that can pull us back from the brink.

The Long Covid backlash

The failure of the left on covid has left it unable to connect the attack on disabled people by the neoliberal state with the reality that this is happening in the context of long covid. The most recent NHS survey of long covid rates in the population found nearly 5% of people are suffering with the condition, roughly 3.1 million people. Rates of long covid in British children nearly doubled in a year to March 2024, with more than 110,000 children in England & Scotland now suffering. In the US, somewhere around 7% of the population has long covid, according to the CDC. Rates of disability have skyrocketed since 2020, the covid connection clear and blindingly obvious.

But no one talks about it, especially not politicians. That’s because the neoliberal state is practised in punishment, not care. It demands bodies for capital and for nothing else. This kind of mass disabling event was always going to be treated accordingly, and as we are seeing: nothing other than a threat to capital. Hence Starmer going to war with the disabled and the Republicans pushing massive cuts to welfare.

For neoliberal states looking to hunt down dissidents and the disabled, AI is a godsend. It will enable the middle managers of new fascism to scour every single digital corner for signs of treachery and dissent, for signs of the activity that will prove you aren’t sick or needy. And all the while the massive amounts of energy required for this will ensure it burns up the planet.

Heating up

In planet burning news, sea level rise hit unexpected highs last year according to NASA, at nearly a quarter of an inch. The expected rise was 0.17 inches. This was not because of melting ice but because of thermal expansion - when water heats up it expands. The oceans are absorbing so much heat they are being forced upwards. It’s quite incredible. In response to this dire state of affairs France has just announced it is planning for a temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius within 75 years. So within the lifetime of the average person born today (all being equal), France expects summers will regularly be too hot to spend much time outside without quite literally dying and crop failures will be essentially continuous. News of France anticipating a near-term apocalypse passed by with less than a flicker of interest in the mainstream.

Things are bad, we need to do something, but loads of people don’t know it’s this bad, many don’t care, and the ones that do know don’t know what to do. Something I’ll be writing about soon. In the meantime every little heart I get on my articles is a shot of heat to my soul, reassurance that there remain people with a consistent moral through-line. So thanks for the click.

Have a good weekend all.