CAPTAIN AMERICA
It is indeed a relief to see most of the country turn against genocide. It was all well and good for Biden to crack some heads on college campuses, but how can Trump and Schumer possibly arrest 3/4 of the country? Most Americans have had enough of this capitalist gaslighting that expects us to believe that they are doing it all for the love of democracy or of Judaism. At the same time, the killing hasn’t slowed down, and you and I are still the ones buying Israel the weapons to do it.
An obvious strategic flaw is how much anti-genocide criticism is focused on Netanyahu. That man signed up to be the scapegoat. If you don’t hate him, he isn’t doing his job. He’s the cartoon villain that self-appointed cartoon heroes are scripted to vanquish. The goal was always to replace him with someone who will commit the same genocide, steal the same land, enforce the same apartheid, but be less obnoxious. War crimes will return once again to their rightful place as boring, everyday background noise.
A deeper problem is America’s unwillingness to reckon with its own past. It’s a bit rich for white liberals who have benefitted for generations from global capitalism, racism and colonialism to now stand in judgement of such practices when Israelis do it. And as long as defeatist Americans keep throwing up their hands and voting for politicians who give weapons to Israel, Israel will keep asking where those voters get off telling them which ethnicities they can or can’t wipe off the face of the earth.
Likewise, until the entire Western world does some repair work for its own land theft, apartheid and genocides, Zionists will be correct to call its critics hypocrites. Remember that the Nazis looked to American genocide, American slavery, and Jim Crow as their model, inspiration, and justification. Until the Western world rediscovers its many centuries of calculated anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, and all of the trauma thus inflicted on European Jews, it’s unprocessed guilt will continue to be weaponized against majority-Muslim countries that had nothing to do with it.
Likewise, until we design a new type of American economy that does not prop itself up on investments in weapons, foreign wars, AI-enhanced killer computers, oil, slave labor, and usury, we can expect our leaders to keep this madness up. After all they are simply fulfilling their contractual obligations to an economic system which granted them their power and wealth. Once we start investing our economy in things that liberate and nourish and educate and sustain us, there will be no more pressure to mass murder non-white people for profit.
Likewise, Americans have a hard time facing the reality that the past three years in Israel are hardly an aberration. The U.S. ruling class, and the media that parrots its talking points, has a long history of selling mass murder as some kind of rescue of democracy or human rights. They’ve been doing it since the Korean War, and it really goes back to the country’s founding. But once whatever scare headlines du jour die down, history is consistent and clear: The U.S. does not care about democracy or human rights. Decade after decade, it’s been perfectly happy to depose or assassinate democratically elected leaders around the world, and install brutal dictators more friendly to American capitalism.
Likewise, the U.S. never actually abolished the slavery that made this country such a capitalist success story. We still practice it in our prisons. And conveniently for capitalists, who are contractually obligated to minimize costs and maximize profits, we imprison more human beings than any country ever, total and per capita. This colossal population is made up largely of poor Black men. At the same time we still allow our most successful companies to practice literal slavery or near-slavery abroad. Until we change this, liberal claims of “this is not who we are” will continue to ring false.
Likewise, people who say “our immigration system is broken” need to clarify what’s actually broken about it. Let’s do that right now: We criminalize human migration. We violently prevent people from escaping global existential crises that we create. The U.S. is systematically making the world uninhabitable. We impoverish countries to maximize profit. Destroy climate to maximize profit. Start or prolong wars and genocides to maximize profit. Make growing food impossible to maximize profit. Install ruthless dictators to maximize profit. We are responsible for the refugees we create.
And at the same moment that we shirk these basic responsibilities to Earth's humans, animals, and their future generations, many of us seem to want to go out of our way to take on the bonus responsibility of centering the feelings of white supremacists and mass murderers. We pressure our friends and neighbors to support them. We stress the need to be cordial to them. We praise them when they die and sympathize with them when they get publicly humiliated. We pointlessly struggle to meet them halfway. We platform them and their racist, murderous beliefs, in an effort to generate clicks and ratings for ourselves, and they are only too happy to oblige.
Have you noticed how no politician or CEO who has been busy destroying the climate and lying about it, or who has been enabling this disgrace in Palestine, has faced the slightest legal consequence? Meanwhile those who actually do believe in international laws, or human liberation, or survival, get their heads bashed in, or get thrown in prison for terrorism. We vote and spend these mass murderers into power and wealth. We pay them salaries and give them healthcare. We put them on TV and debate whose version of genocide we like more. We’ve been willing participants in the normalization of mass murder for profit.
We’re long past the point of claiming that the deaths at the hands of Amerisrael or fossil fuels companies or ICE are some kind of tragic accident. We’re watching the planned murder of millions, if not billions, of people. The only acceptable political position is rapid demilitarization, decarbonization and degrowth. If you aren’t hearing this explicitly from the mouth of your favorite politician or candidate, then they are an avowed murderer. Every bit as premeditated as any serial killer or Marvel villain.
If Amerisrael is allowed to keep up this pace of destruction, there’s no more Palestine. No more Lebanon. Maybe no more Iran. If fossil fuel companies are allowed to keep up their pace of destruction, there’s no more Caribbean. No more Bangladesh. Where do we think those millions of people are going to go? We just sacrifice them to capitalism? So a handful of oil and weapons moguls can get even richer? It all sounds bonkers, but listen carefully to your leaders and media personalities. This is precisely their view, whether they say it out loud or not.
And Republicans do say it out loud: Black and Brown lives are worthless. Democrats try to spin it. Former Biden officials now attempting a weak apology, now that they can’t do anything about it, is simply disgusting. Nothing against personal forgiveness, but no one trying to launder their image and increase their electoral odds by saying “oopsy” after that much unmitigated savagery should ever be allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Same for enablers of ICE, and of the Big Tech fascists. This madness was obvious from day one.
In fact, you pick the controversy, I’ll show you a Left that has been vindicated by history. Time and again the Left turns out to have been holding the only realistic position. Time and again mainstream public opinion ends up adopting the original Left view. Vietnam. Iraq. Data centers. Abolishing ICE. Taxing billionaires. Opposing AIPAC and getting money out of politics. Guantanamo. Medicare For All. New drilling permits. Student loan debt. Family separations. American concentration camps. LGBTQ erasure. Voting DSA. Warning that Harris will just hand Trump the reins unless she takes a clear stand on genocide.
For all the billions that are poured into the capitalist propaganda machine, and pushed on us 24/7 from the day we are born, it’s really not working anymore. Polls show that we increasingly see American capitalism for what it is. The contradictions between words and actions have just become too glaring. We no longer trust our lawmakers, nor the billionaires who own them and own the major media. Unfortunately none of this makes any difference in policy, as long as we keep submitting to the lie that an actual transition away from capitalism, and its two decrepit political parties, is “going too far.”
We’re told repeatedly that this epic showdown between our two clown-like capitalist parties is world history’s top priority. But do we ever stop to notice how many of the actual billionaires driving the world into the gutter are suddenly Democrats when a Democrat is president, and suddenly Republicans when a Republican is president? For these weapons dealers, oil tycoons, and Big Tech man-children, it doesn’t matter who wins. It matters whom the winner serves.
Being a centrist in 2026 is more meaningless than ever. The 2026 centrist is opposed on principle to standing for something, or risking anything. Their goal is to identify the exact halfway point between whatever left and right boundaries happen to be spoon-fed to them on TV that week. The centrist sees it as their duty to dismiss global liberation struggles as unrealistic, and stifle the momentum of any positive movement that has yet to reach 51% public support in America. In this sense they are really more conservative than the far right, and thus a key reason the far right keeps winning.
So why not save ourselves some trouble and just put more trust in the Left, starting immediately? The Left is not a monolith of course, and any number of differing methods and philosophies are contained within it at any time. But what they all share is a set of basic values that the American capitalist parties work hard every day to dismiss or destroy. The Left is where the energy and fun are, and where the future is being written. Follow its voices and momentum. Engage with its analyses and critiques. Support its movements and organizations and candidates.
Let’s don’t judge politicians anymore on what they say. Let’s don’t judge them on what they think. Or what we think they might think. Let’s judge them on what they do. And if they are planning a mass murder, let’s put an end to their political career.