Re: <nettime> Robert B Shpiner: Three speeches on a single day signaled a dying American democracy (TG)

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

The weird thing about NSPM-7 and the attempt to declare open season on the
left in the USA, is that someone like Hassan Piker, a Communist, is now
listened to by millions and quoted frequently by the New York Times.
Anarcho-communist ideas are everywhere among youth. The Democratic
Socialists of America win election after election (they didn't use to).
Mayor Mamdani calls loudly for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu. As for
Charlie Kirk, whose assassination seems to have sparked al this? The last
thing I read (yesterday) said "cringe" was the new vibe regarding this man
whose reputation was held sacred just months ago.

It may be that the midterm elections are stolen, and in retrospect,
democracy in the USA will have ended on Thursday. If that does happen, it
may also be that we leftists will all soon be arrested and shoved into
giant camps in the desert. There are, in the Americas, very clear examples
of how this sort of thing worked in the past, as in Argentina and Chile,
societies whose political forms and mores are not far from our own. Of
course they cannot arrest everyone who has listened to Hassan Piker or
voted for Zoran Mamdani. But they conceivably could arrest everyone who
goes out into the street to protest anything, or raises their voice against
the Fearless Leader on social media, or anything like that. For many of us,
this is extremely threatening.

Basically we're gonna find out something crucial in the midterms. I reckon
that Trump and co. are going to be squashed in these midterms, because when
people see voter suppression in action, then they make particular efforts
to go out and vote. I also think that when mainstream Republicans see Trump
shattering world peace, sparking inflation, destroying the economy with
tariffs, wrecking scientific research, sending health-care costs through
the roof, brazenly profiting from cryptocurrencies, glitzing DC like a
casino and ordering thugs to shoot people in the street, a number of those
Republicans will do something very simple, namely stay home on election day
out of disgust for the whole thing. But that's just what I reckon, and
history is full of bad surprises.

Anyway, we will know in about three and a half months. I suspect some
people, reading this, will find me naive to think that elections matter.
But these people weren't paying attention as folks all over the country
stood up against ICE and the legitimacy of state violence crumbled. What
matter is not just the vote and the formal powers it supposedly regulates.
What matters is the perception of legitimacy (or maybe better,
tolerability) by the citizens. A yes vote says, sure, I don't like my
neighbors being disappeared but go ahead, do it, we need it. A no vote says
this is insane, stop.

Should we get to that point, the question of how to stop a super-empowered
and visibly crazed US president, with the army at his command, no respect
for law or procedure, and plenty of armed and faithful goons inside and
outside of his administration, will be the next big horrifying question for
the Christmas season.

On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 2:40 AM Patrice Riemens via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> ... And it's not only in the United States, at the moment the most
> demented example, luring other constituencies in a dangerous sense of
> delusion about the state of their own politics ...
>
> Original to:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/22/stephen-miller-marco-rubio-trump-speeches
>
>
> Three speeches on a single day signaled a dying American democracy
> Robert B Shpiner
>
> Stephen Miller warned of a leftwing ‘cancer’ threatening civilization. As
> a critical care doctor, I have a response to his diagnosis
>
> Wed 22 Jul 2026
>
> The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in
> Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of
> three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the
> country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely
> to kill.
>
> In critical care we distinguish the mechanism of death from its cause. The
> mechanism was a Thursday. The cause was chronic, progressive and untreated.
>
> The morning belonged to the secretary of state. Before officials of more
> than 60 countries, he announced that the counterterrorism architecture of
> the free world, built over a generation against jihadist mass murder,
> should be rebuilt and aimed at the domestic left. He named a transnational
> enemy defined by hatred of the west, “a revolt of the worst against the
> best”. He tied it to Iran and to Cuba and offered no evidence for either
> link. He said the journalists and thinktanks who might check the claims
> often agree with the enemy’s goals. The move is old and reliable: discredit
> the second opinion in advance.
>
> Midday belonged to the White House deputy chief of staff. What he said
> deserves to be quoted rather than summarized, because summary is a mercy it
> has not earned. He called “leftwing political terrorism” a “fatal cancer of
> civilization”. He said that its politics, left to run its course, “always
> becomes a gulag”. He said antifa demonstrators are “all deformed in some
> way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”, that “their
> outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred”, and he
> asked why there is “not one normal-looking person among them”. He said that
> when the leftist protests that his rights are being violated, those appeals
> “must fall on deaf ears”. He urged the assembled governments to be
> “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of
> civilization”. And he described the work already under way in six verbs:
> “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute”.
>
> I have been practicing medicine for four decades. Cancer is my vocabulary,
> not his. And I know what happened the last time a government borrowed it.
> The Nazi state’s central perversion was the medicalization of killing: the
> enemy as tumor, as bacillus, the nation as patient, extermination as cure.
> Robert Jay Lifton called it the biomedical vision. It recruited my
> profession first, and my profession answered willingly. When a government
> describes citizens as a cancer, it has written the first line of a
> treatment plan. On Thursday, the plan was read aloud, from a state
> department podium, in six verbs.
>
> One disclosure belongs in the chart. My family left Russia in 1917. My
> relatives left Germany in 1933. In both generations, leaving was called
> excessive; staying was the reasonable position. But an alarm that was right
> both times it sounded is not overcaution. On Thursday, it sounded a third
> time.
>
> The evening belonged to the president. In primetime he called the American
> election system indefensible, claimed a foreign power held 220 million
> voter files, declared mail voting inherently corrupt, accused his own
> intelligence services of concealment, and told Congress that the only
> reason to oppose his bill is the intent to cheat. That framework converts
> every future outcome into evidence. Pass the bill and win: the bill worked.
> Fail and lose: the cheaters blocked it. A presumption of legitimacy cannot
> survive inside a belief system engineered to be unfalsifiable.
>
> It was just a Thursday. Netflix’s forecast disappointed Wall Street. A
> rocket aborted on the pad. No sirens sounded, because this is not how they
> sound. Democracies do not die to soundtracks. They die on ordinary
> weekdays, between the earnings reports, while the country is at work.
>
> Then came the response, and the response was a triage error. Nearly all of
> it ran to the evening. The factcheckers parsed the voter files. The law
> professors graded the bombshells. Real work, spent on the loudest injury.
> The morning’s remarks, the ones that declared a class of Americans a cancer
> and read enmity on their bodies, drew the attention of an ordinary news
> cycle: straight coverage in the mainstream, horror at the margins, and in a
> portion of the press, open applause. I have watched teams run to the
> dramatic patient while the quiet one, the one not crying out, exsanguinates
> behind a curtain. The most dangerous words spoken in Washington on Thursday
> were not spoken in primetime. They were spoken before lunch, to more than
> 60 countries. The official transcript records the applause.
>
> The decedent is survived by the federal courts, still open. By 50
> secretaries of state, still certifying. By a general election, still on the
> calendar, 108 days out. And by an electorate that has not yet been asked
> the only question that matters, which is whether it will accept a count its
> president has pre-declared corrupt, counted among citizens its government
> has pre-declared malignant.
>
> In 40 years of intensive care, I have pronounced death many times. The
> criteria are strict because the declaration is irreversible, and so we are
> taught to be certain before we speak. I have also, more than once, seen a
> rhythm return after the room had gone quiet, when someone refused to stop
> compressions on schedule. This notice is filed in the knowledge that
> pronouncements can be premature. It is filed in the fear that this one is
> not.
>
> Robert B Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine in pulmonary and
> critical care at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
>
>
>
>
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