
Trump, Land, Dugin
Trump is not Land’s monarch nor Dugin’s tsar. He is their degraded symptom: the parody of a fascist synthesis of technology and tradition, replayed in the register of meme stock and casino populism.
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Trump is not Land’s monarch nor Dugin’s tsar. He is their degraded symptom: the parody of a fascist synthesis of technology and tradition, replayed in the register of meme stock and casino populism.
From PwC’s colour-coded attendance dashboard to HSBC’s biometric checkpoints and the rise of Algorithmic Affect Management, the new wave of “bossware” represents less an innovation than the latest stage in capital’s long history of making workers legible. What began with the factory bell and the punch clock now extends to our faces, moods, and keystrokes.
Zarah Sultana’s interview in Sidecar captures the anger at Labour’s complicity in genocide and austerity, but it risks becoming another broad reformist project, haunted by the ghosts of Corbynism—vulnerable to sect capture, parliamentary illusions, and the same popular-front logic that has historically disarmed the working class.
Nigel Farage’s TikTok wunderkind wants us to imagine a Britain that never fought Hitler, kept its colonies, and models itself on Bukele’s prison state. This is not contrarianism; it is fascist nostalgia dressed up as common sense.
Alexander Dugin calls the Trump–Putin summit in Anchorage “splendid,” insisting the US and Russia must find an “understanding as superpowers.” The problem is that this fantasy of bipolar order flatters two declining states while obscuring the real forces shaping the 21st century.
With armed red-state troops patrolling a blue city, Trump is not protecting Washington; he is rehearsing the mechanics of civil war.
Every August, the right reheats its old contempt for higher education. Their complaint is not about debt or “Mickey Mouse” degrees, it is about closing the gates of knowledge, keeping universities for the dominant class and consigning everyone else to warehouses and call centres.
Ben Gvir’s prison-cell confrontation with Marwan Barghouti is not security but theatre, a staged humiliation designed to rally the far-right and remind Palestinians that even their most prominent leaders can be silenced. Occupation thrives on such performances; the degradation is the point.
Bezalel Smotrich’s plan to build more than 3,000 homes in the E1 corridor is not a provocation. This is the burial of a Palestinian state. Populated through state-subsidised domestic relocation and diaspora recruitment from Queens to Moscow, E1 will sever the West Bank, cement annexation, and prove once again that without sanctions, arms embargoes, and trade penalties, international recognition of Palestine is an empty gesture.
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
“Palestine is not a digression from the climate movement. It is its centre.” That’s the force of Andreas Malm’s pamphlet, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. It doesn’t ask for reflection. It demands action. This isn’t a balanced account of Gaza or a theory of climate collapse. Instead it’s a weaponised intervention against the politics of impunity. What Malm offers is a raw and necessary link: between the bombs that fall on Jabaliya and the storms that drown Derna, between settler colonialism and fossil capital, between the rubble of Akka in 1840 and the rubble of Gaza in 2024. The pamphlet is furious, and entirely justified. It should be read, and used.
What’s being rolled out at Northwestern and other campuses is not a programme to protect Jewish students from abuse. It’s a mechanism to discipline campus speech, to teach students that anti-Zionism is taboo and that political critique must defer to geopolitical orthodoxy. It doesn’t mention the Nakba. It doesn’t mention the occupation. It doesn’t mention that many Jews oppose Zionism. These trainings don’t fight antisemitism, they flatten it into a tool of state ideology.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Moral capital was never just sympathy, it was a strategy. It allowed Israel to present itself as victim and victor, past sufferer and present enforcer. But capital is not infinite. What was once a shield has become a smokescreen. And in Gaza, that smokescreen has lifted.
The world is watching a nuclear-backed state starve and bomb a captive population, and still we are told this is security. But what happens when the story no longer convinces? What remains when the history runs out? Only the force. Only the ruin. Only the lie that it was ever anything else.
The phrase “rules-based international order” has become a punchline. When Russia bombs a maternity hospital, it’s a war crime. When Israel flattens a refugee camp, it’s self-defence. The ICC pursues African warlords and Balkan generals with zeal—but stalls or retreats when the accused are allies of Washington or clients of London. The problem isn’t that international law exists. It’s that it doesn’t apply to everyone. War crimes are prosecuted not on the basis of what’s done, but who does it, and who they do it for.
They came for Glastonbury, the BBC, and a punk band. Then they came for students, civil servants, and anyone else who dared speak clearly about Palestine. What we’re watching is not a debate—it’s a crackdown. Armed with legal threats, media outrage, and the ever-flexible label of antisemitism, Britain’s pro-Israel lobby doesn’t just influence politics. It polices speech. And when even a chant against a military force under ICC investigation is treated as hate speech, the message is clear: the violence can continue, but naming it is forbidden.
The next state to cross the nuclear threshold won’t be doing anything new. It’ll be following the path Israel already took—building the bomb in secret, shielded by silence and strategic utility. The real precedent was set decades ago in the Negev. That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called international order: one bomb is a threat to civilisation, the other a pillar of it. This isn’t about non-proliferation. It’s about who gets to own the apocalypse.