The Smirk of American Empire

Derek S. Denman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.

During his questioning in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, newly minted special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, bristled at the mention of his record of lying to Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair and his cover-up of massacres by the Salvadoran military. Abrams’s reaction to his questioning was a familiar one of a powerful man being called to account for his actions: feigned consternation, outrage at a recounting of well-established historical record, and the treatment of substantive critique as personal attack. He first brushed off questions from Rep. Ilhan Omar about repressive policies he might support in Venezuela before settling on vague platitudes about support for democracy. As he cycled through the repertoire of obfuscation, something broke through his wall of misdirection. While a still doesn't fully do it justice, the video is clear as ever: His lips curl up, just barely, at each corner, revealing a smirk, before returning to his earlier scowl. This smirk tells an important story about the politics of empire.

In Aspirational Fascism, William Connolly includes facial expressions alongside gestures, postures, rhythms, and habits as vital elements of affective communication, working beneath the symbolic register of language. Specifically, Connolly draws attention to the affective infusions that subtend Trump’s fascist demagoguery. Trump’s facial expressions—variously smug, mocking, and grimacing—work at a visceral register, in concert with “grandiose bodily gestures … Big Lies, hysterical charges, dramatic repetitions, and totalistic assertions that only he can clean up the ‘mess,’” to activate support for individual and nationalist aggression (11).

Abrams’s smirk differs from Trump’s. Trump’s facial expressions are delivered to activate jeering crowds. He experiments with his face in front of his audience, seeking to amplify their glee for his violent fantasies directed at immigrants and protestors or his mockery of a reporter with a disability. Abrams’s smirk slipped through his rehearsed comportment of self-styled seriousness that allows him to shift between visionary promoter of democracy (when asked of his achievements) and hard-nosed realist (when faced with his crimes). It is the face of the imperial agent rather than the fascist demagogue.

What is behind this smirk? What does it signal to the neocons and Trumpists who witness it? And how do we understand the connection between this facial expression and the violent, repressive politics it embodies? We might begin to unpack the meaning of the smirk by focusing on it in relation to what Jon Schwarz of The Intercept identifies as Abrams’s “core competency,” his ability to combine “brutality and unctuousness.”

The brutality that Abrams facilitated—then later denied and concealed—is nearly unfathomable. He is perhaps best known for his denial of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, suggesting that reports of over 800 people murdered and dismembered by government forces were mere communist propaganda. From the support for the genocidal policies of Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala to the defense of the torture and execution of dissidents in Panama, it seems Abrams never found a right-wing death squad he couldn’t get behind, especially when it involved dissembling in front of Congress and the American public.

Abrams’s return to public life might be interpreted through the lens of the recent obsession with true crime and the particular fascination with serial killers. Will Menaker, a host of the “Dirtbag Left” podcast Chapo Trap House, suggests as much, when, in introducing a discussion of Abrams, he notes, "We have left out some of the more prolific mass murderers who have done all of their work ... from behind a desk." It is only appropriate for the Dirtbag Left to diagnose the political pathology that has led to the resurgence of Abrams. It takes a vocabulary of vulgarity to scratch the surface of the horror inflicted by Abrams’s policies, positions, and lies. Mere mention of the atrocities Abrams supported—the decapitations and corpses posed in dioramas of death—exceeds the language and offends the ears of those who are only able to speak within the confines of “civility.”

At one level, Abrams’s smirk is one of condescension. It suggests his defiant sense that he will never have to make amends for his crimes, the scale of which are so enormous as to be almost absolute, remaking the very fabric of life (and death) across Latin America and beyond. We’ve seen this expression before in his appearance on Charlie Rose in 1995. When the investigative journalist Allan Nairn recounted Abrams’s record of support for Guatemalan military atrocities, Abrams first engaged in his characteristic deflection, then laughed at the accusation, and, finally, as the camera lingered on him, settled into a smirk. Abrams smirks, then and today, knowing that he can hide behind the numerous government titles bestowed upon him by the Reagan, Bush, and now Trump administrations, each naming him a champion of democracy, human rights, humanitarianism, and diplomacy. The smirk tells us that he revels in the subterfuge provided by these accolades of empire.

At a deeper level, I suspect that the smirk is also one of sadistic joy. The smirk suggests that perhaps Abrams holds deep-seated delight in the suffering he has wrought. Today, refugees flee countries where he has propped up autocrats, only to be met by guns, walls, and razor wire at the US border, and still Abrams smirks. Empire takes many affective forms, and one of those is an overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction that wells up in its most ruthless agents.

The little-noted, half concealed smirk of Abrams follows a higher profile instance of a smirk dripping with colonial power relations. That moment came when a Covington Catholic student sporting a MAGA hat and attending an anti-choice rally smirked in the face of a member of the Indigenous Peoples March. Upon seeing video of the incident, many of us were rightly horrified by the students, weaponized for their school’s campaign against abortion rights and donning the marker of Trumpist white nationalism. And everyone’s eyes were drawn to the smirk. The event has oddly been treated as a sort of political Rorschach test, emphasizing the diversionary claims of “contextualizing video” instead of the tomahawk chops of the student’s classmates. However, even the most agnostic interpreters note the young man’s unsettling expression: “it’s true that a smirk is a smirk.”

I wonder if, in the moment of noticing the smirk, those of us who were unequivocally troubled by it saw not only our present—a facial expression of white supremacy—but also a future where that smirk had been hardened to conceal the crimes of imperial brutality. We were witnessing not only the undeniable coloniality of the present, but also catching a glimpse into a possible future where the next Abramses-in-waiting look down in condescension at the public for which they hold only contempt and gaze in self-satisfaction at their victims. It was evident to us that the control of public space through a sense of entitlement authorized by whiteness was on the path to becoming a sense of entitlement to remake global space through the power of para-military murder. We thought maybe, just maybe, if we insisted on an acknowledgement of the power relations embodied in this scene, we might avert the hardening of this expression into the smirk of empire.

- February 2019

Dietetic Capitalism

William E. Connolly

Author of Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism (2017)

On a scintillating panel several years ago, Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig and Melissa Orlie promulgated the health and political virtues of the slow food movement at an American Political Science Convention. One rump group in the room would have none of it. Such a movement, they insisted, is inherently class based. It speaks only to the upper middle class and the rich who can afford such luxuries of time and expense.

The critics were right about a class dimension of this phenomenon, wrong to the extent they thought the situation does not require a radical class response. It is expensive today to enjoy slow, organic foods that enrich the microbial diversity of the gut, encourage brain health, and protect people on several health fronts. But that is because diet exploitation joins other modes of class/race exploitation in several capitalist societies. Dietetic Capitalism joins the stratification of work, consumption practices, retirement opportunities, housing possibilities, pollution, susceptibility to military duty, longevity, and sources of stress. It even helps to solidify them.

I grew up in a Midwest, working class family before fast food became pervasive and two bread winners were so dominant. We did eat too many potato chips and too much ice cream. We also loved hot dogs, but only as special treats. The working class had not yet succumbed to the fast food industry that now afflicts the health of so many in that class and elsewhere.  Additives of sugar and fat were less pervasive; livestock were less subjected to corn feeding and closed feeding pens, antibiotics were thus less needed; obesity was less common; and several other sicknesses were less frequent. It was an unhealthy diet, certainly, but still a step or two above a fast food diet. Whenever as a teen I was invited to my Italian girlfriend’s upscale house for dinner, olive oil, fish, tomato sauces, fresh garlic, red wine and good cuts of meat were on the menu. I spent evenings there often, for several good reasons.

The recent book by Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection (2016) gives the lie to critics of slow, healthy food diets. Mayer is not himself focused on the class composition of Dietetic Capitalism, but his review of recent revolutions in neuroscience do carry implications for that issue on every page.  The older neuroscience of the brain as a self-contained computer is on life support. More recent versions, which concentrate on intersections between multiple body, brain culture processes, are undergoing another revamping too. The new scientists often enough appreciate the reality of creative thinking and judgment.

The more we learn about the role of the dense neuronal system in the gut, its numerous imbrications with the gut microbiome, and the complex communications between both of them and brain regions in the head, the more the subtlety of relations between ingestion, digestion, microbial composition, neuronal systems, moods, thinking, and health come to the fore. One focus in the book is on the two way communications between the neuronal system in the gut, the vagus nerve, and  blood pathways for hormones of numerous sorts from the gut. Gut bacteria and the hormones they produce infiltrate moods, appetites, susceptibility to disease, brain health, and vulnerability to inflammation of the immune system. The food we eat and digest affects the quality of the microbiome; its specific composition then feeds back into the character of the food it seeks. The gut is a complex source of desires, feelings and prejudgments.

 

Here are just a few things Mayer says:

• "in recent years the gut-brain axis has taken center stage. This shift can be largely attributed to the exponential rise in knowledge and data about the bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses that live inside the gut..."(p. 14)
• benefits of microbiota for health: "Some of the best documented benefits include assistance in the digestion of food components our guts cannot handle by themselves, regulation of our bodies’ metabolism, processing and detoxifying dangerous chemicals,..regulation of the immune system, and prevention of invasion by dangerous pathogens." (p. 15)
• immunity and its inflammations. "In addition to the gut-brain communication channel involving the endocrine cells, there is another system involving our gut-based immune cells and the inflammatory molecules these immune cells produce., the so-called cytokines." (p. 62)
• the hidden mood/salience system: "most of the time the salience system operates below the level of conscious awareness. Trillions of sensory signals rise up from your gut every day and are processed in your brain’s salience network. They remain content to..percolate into your subconscious." (p. 173)
• transmission of the effects of bad diet to the next generation: "If the human genome.. is the  book of life, then a brain cell, a liver cell and a heart cell each reads different sections of the book. Epigenetic tags are the bookmarks..that tell a brain cell to read one passage of the book and a liver cell to read  another." (p. 120)
• "Epigenetics violated everything modern biologists had learned about inheritance." (p. 121)

The microbiome begins to establish its specific composition in the mother’s womb, continues to do so dramatically for three years, collects “chemical tags” that propel some of these tendencies to the next generation, and is susceptible to further change by the quality of food ingested and stresses adults face. It can contribute to later bouts of depression, diabetes, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, obesity, Parkinson’s, Dementia, immune disorders, cancer, and probably Alzheimer’s when it is not composed in healthy ways. Our moods and cognitive powers partly flow from interchanges between numerous micro-agents moving back and forth between the brain in the head and the gut system, through both the vagus nerve and the blood system. Olfactory sensors on numerous intercommunicating organs play roles of importance as well. Note, too, how such processes do not have to be construed as blind determinants of thinking and judgment; they can be read as micro-agentic participants in thinking, mood and judgment.  A conversation between Mayer and Alfred North Whitehead could be very illuminating in this respect, since the latter construes such processes to be micro-agents.

Mayer, after probing new research into microbiome, brain and health relations, celebrates a Mediterranean diet high in plant foods, chicken and fish, olive oil, nuts, whole grains, tomatoes, and a daily dose of red wine. This brain and microbiome diet is equipped to help reduce stress and maybe even curtail temptations to listen to manipulative politicians who seek to exacerbate and exploit class and race based stresses. Mayer also emphasizes how several other dietary traditions can contribute to similar effects. It is fast food--highly processed, high salt and sugar content, red meat, soaked with antibiotics, swallowed with diet drinks, and starched with carcinogens--that forms the backbone of what I call Dietetic Capitalism. Diet drinks spawn a bacterial regime that promotes weight gain.

 

There is much more in this book of particular interest to those who pursue gut-brain health as they think, teach and write about the contemporary condition, including some further refinements of what a few critics call "affect theory".  But here we focus on an upshot not pursued in the book itself:  how the health, mood, stress, and inflammatory benefits and liabilities pondered in this little book are stratified by Dietetic Capitalism.  Working class people, if and when they have slipped away from ethnic culinary traditions, are pressed toward unhealthy diets by their income levels, stress levels, available stores and restaurants, engrained gut demands, and feelings of depression about the future looming before them. Upper middle class people can go to organic stores and enjoy excellent restaurants. Our immune systems are less apt to be compromised if we do so; our brain processes somewhat less apt to fall into Parkinson’s or Dementia; our stresses less often apt to drive us inexorably to comfort foods with spiral effects on health and attitudes; our sicknesses less often to pull us into the stress of medical bankruptcy. Fast food agribusiness, stores, and restaurants treat people and livestock ruthlessly as mere objects of profit, when they can get away with it, pumping as much surplus value out of them as possible.

Not everyone in privileged settings eats a healthy diet, of course.  Intelligence, judgment and forbearance are needed to pursue that course, even when the opportunity is there. Donald Trump, the billionaire, eats horrible food; it shows in everything he does, says and thinks. His diet was once an insistent, impulsive  choice, and it has now become an addiction. Perhaps a fecal transplant could help start a dietary transition. It would only be a first step, of course. My stool sample is available, if needed. But I am not willing to travel to Russia for the operation.

Do not talk about capitalism writ large without including Dietetic Capitalism as an insidious mode of class/race exploitation. Michelle Obama realized this. Drives to reduce class inequality must include demands to increase healthy microbiome opportunities for pregnant women, babies, children, adults and old people in every walk of life. Key words here are “opportunity” and “detailed knowledge”. Information about precisely how such tangled processes work on and in our bodies is critical. Such accounts show us when and where to expect an upsurge of gut pressure and how best to counter it. Generic information in this domain only convinces until it is time to eat.  This is precisely the juncture at which Mayer becomes most pertinent to the war against Dietetic Capitalism.

To work, such detailed knowledges also require intensive support of local and organic produce. The urban gardens springing up everywhere are promising signs. It will additionally, however, require intensive regulation of food additives, food information labels, livestock conditions, the use of feedstock antibiotics, carcinogens, and corporate TV food advertisements designed to exploit the gut. All these must be joined to real reductions in income inequality and tough working conditions to reshape the stress, gut, comfort food, inflammation, and health compromising dynamic now in play.

Dietetic Capitalism reveals a lot about the insidious character of other capitalist modes of exploitation. It slides into the gut, circulates through the blood stream, seeks vulnerable objects to exploit, spawns addictive practices, and encourages denialism. 

Romand Coles & Lia Haro — Trump-Shock, Resonant Violence and The New Fascism

Romand Coles (left), Professor at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University & Lia Haro (right), Research Fellow in Sociocultural Anthropology at Australian Catholic University.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? 

Since the U.S. election, daily surges of Trump-shock – awful disorienting blasts – have regularly defied our standard ways of making sense of political life. Something is happening here, indeed. But, each unpredictable wave throws our paradigms into disarray. We are perpetually swept into the wake of an event that scrambles the measures of consistency and inconsistency we desperately try to employ. Trusted weapons of analysis and resistance cannot find their aim fast enough to keep up with the whirlwind.

While the new regime bears important similarities to classic fascism--rapid intensifications of white supremacist nationalism, dismissive attacks on reason, autocratic leadership, deepening entwinements of state and capital, disenfranchisement, the attack on liberal and representative democratic institutions, and the increasingly open right-wing populist violence – this new fascism relies on distinctive dynamics that must be illuminated to move toward understanding – and ultimately transforming – our current condition. To this end, we offer the following theses as a modest, preliminary contribution to a theory of the emerging fascism:

1. Beyond the substantive elements of what is shocking about Trump himself, he is a hyper-intensification of shock politics as such.  Neoliberal shock politics, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, functions by creating and capitalizing on crises that send shockwaves throughout the polity that disorganize, dismantle and subsequently reorganize lifeways, institutions, and spatio-temporal regularities. While previous shocks have typically had at least the illusion of a substantive character – financial meltdowns, fiscal crises, terrorist threats, natural disasters – Trump-shock manifests more in the very character of the waviness itself, the chaotic aggressively disjointed temporality, of 140 letter pulses, refusing accountability, disavowing predictability, with a serial blast-like character that disorients all who are geared toward ordinary political reasoning and conduct. 

The chaos of Trump-shock sends waves of distracting, disorganizing, and dispersing energy through the polity in ways that defract and overload the circuits of critical response to the emergence of an extreme right-wing political regime that will consistently enhance capitalist circulation and vilify difference beyond all bounds. As the regime moves steadily toward the extreme right (a climate change denier takes charge of the EPA, Goldman Sachs steps in to head the Treasury, a multi-billionaire moves to privatize education, and a rabid purveyor of white supremacist hate assumes control of strategy ‘to see what sticks’), minute by minute twitter flares and ‘protocol smashing’ phone calls repeatedly draw away energy and attention. By incessantly provoking frenetic scrambles to react to each appalling new event, Trump-shock disables proactive movement and oppositional initiative.

2. Most fundamentally, Trump unleashes an extreme sovereignty of perpetual disruption, confusion, and contradiction, rather than embodying a power that imposes and is bound to a single order or a coherent, consistent ideology (though his regime surely orders and ideologizes).

  

 We can understand this as a nominalist mode of shock sovereignty that operates through radically disordered ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. While efficient and formal causalities of state and leader are still highly operative, technologically intensified and diffused modes of resonant causality assume transfigure the fascist machine. 

Trump-shock admits of no otherness, not even of himself an eyeblink prior to the present. In that way, Trump exemplifies power as instantaneous event with no stable form. This perpetual hyperspeed exceptioning makes Agamben’s State of Exception seem quaintly stable. Trump-shock is like the sovereignty of William of Ockham’s God, manifested in the fact that he can be bound by no law he had made, even to the point of totally changing the past willy nilly.

    In the extremity of Hobbes’ explication, such sovereignty is epitomized in the fact that there can be no law prior to nor uttered by the sovereign to which the sovereign can be held accountable, because law can be none other than the sovereign’s interpretive event at each instant. Hobbes writes: “To him therefore there cannot be any knot in the law insoluble, either by finding out the ends to undo it by, or else by making what ends he will (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot) by the legislative power; which no other interpreter can do.” (Lev., XXVI) Trump displays this power in an endless series of chaotic tweets, spinning out myriad unpredictable, ephemeral, and contradictory stances. 

   Analysts and opponents, missing the performativity of this power and the power of this perfomativity, often scurry to measure the veracity of his missives according to traditional frameworks (law, ideologies, empirical facts) - or even their consistency with his own past statements. Thus, for example, when Trump claimed to The New York Times that “the law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” pundits jumped to reference U.S. Code, presidential tradition and constitutional law to assess the correctness of the claim. We suggest that the substance of his claim adheres to the nominalist event - the energized sword that Hobbes describes. The affective energies and powers of this event, however, are not missed by those hungering to unleash themselves from all restraints of democratic norms and accountability.

3. The power of nominalist shock functions through a modulation of resonant violence that is ubiquitous and also unaccountable. 

The affective energies of this movement of will to power animate significant portions of the polity – particularly on the neo-fascist right. As Trump’s Twitter shocks surge directly into the pockets of over 17,000,000 followers, many are propelled into barrages of raging threats against those he vilifies--directly or indirectly. In this way, the violence of shock-sovereignty exceeds the formal channels of the state (themselves horrifying). For example, when Trump tweets condemnation of a union organizer in Indiana or a woman at a rally, hundreds of threatening communications (including murderous violence) to the targeted follow almost instantaneously. 

Picture by Johnny Silvercloud

Just as Trump-shocks come anytime and all the time – these expressions of resonant violence can emerge explosively from anywhere and everywhere. This unpredictable ubiquity is amplified by the intimate relationship between the Trump regime and neo-fascist right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News, which spontaneously launch their own call and response shock waves that vilify, threaten, and enact violence. Rather than being met with condemnation from the president-elect, they resonate with and are amplified by previous and coming 3 a.m. kindred tweets from Trump Tower. In turn, these frequently drive mainstream news cycles that perpetuate the resonance in more subtle and insidious ways. 

Operating according to resonant probabilities, these shock waves have a Teflon-like quality in relation to calls for accountability that follow logics of formal and efficient causality, for they come less from a single location and more from resonances among nominalist shocks that move too quickly in and out of being to be caught at rest.

4. This form of power both draws on and transforms what we conceive of as a neoliberal smart political energy grid that has been taking shape in recent decades. 

A smart energy grid is one that employs a variety of modes of (political) energy production, transmission, consumption, and blackout in highly flexible and responsive ways to maximize power. No longer relying on a few central nodes of power generation, they work with increasingly interactive forms of energy production to create even and usable flows of power across a wide area. Elemental to the neoliberal grid are mutually amplifying currents between overwhelming episodic energies of political economic shock, on the one hand, and myriad quotidian energies associated with radically inegalitarian circulations of goods, finance, capital, bodies, and media resonances. 

Each shock wave simultaneously summons new flows and resonances that maximize capitalist power and profit, energize vitriol, and enhance capacities for future shocks while shutting down impediments to capitalist metastasization. These amplificatory currents are immanently connected with affective currents of fear and rage that both energize and are energized by capitalist intensities - particularly in manifestations of xenophobia, white supremacy, and fundamentalisms that are hostile to reasoning and science. Trump draws on and proliferates these existing flows of power as well as intensities of shock. 

As shock politics moves from being episodic to becoming itself quotidian and accompanied by dispersed resonant violence, the neoliberal dynamics are at once amplified and rendered more unstable in ways that may ultimately short-circuit the grid itself with intensities and counter-energies it cannot handle. 

5. 

Efforts to parse truths, reveal contradictions, or selectively negotiate and collaborate with this mode of power are both 

blind to and disguise what it fundamentally is - a new fascism that exercises and enhances nominalist sovereignty 

through disordering ordering and hyper-prerogative power

. 

The Italian term fascismo referred to the fascio littori--a bundle of rods attached to a battle ax symbolizing strength through unity and the bolstered authority of the Roman civic magistrate. In the Twenty-First Century, the ax becomes the chaotically moving nominalist cyber-sword of shock plugged into the neoliberal power grid of circulations and affective resonances, such that even within government all that is solid melts in the air. In the first

weeks of the Trump administration, the nominalist cyber-sword has been quickly turned on the agencies and processes of American government. In this process, chaos is not only a means of dissolving the recalcitrance of other branches of government and agencies but also a principle of governance itself.

Consider the example of the so-called Muslim ban executive order, the “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” order issued January 27, 2017.

Preceding the release of the order, different members of the regime leaked multiple, contradictory versions—sowing seeds of speculation and confusion. Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway even claimed it may never be released. In rolling out the order, Trump did not consult department heads including the very relevant State Department nor did he vet the order with the Office of Legal Counsel. The Department of Homeland Security saw the text of the order only shortly before it was released. In the midst of all this interpretive confusion, the execution of the Order was left largely to the judgement of officers of Customs and Border Protection. What all this begins to show is the extent to which the Trump regime enables, deploys and tolerates a high degree of chaos and unpredictability as a mode of reinventing government. While such mayhem in an earlier moment would be an indication of weakness and disarray, the new fascism operates through disordering-ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. Nominalist sovereignty seeks to liquify government to the ever-changeable will of the sovereign. In the ceaseless exercise of prerogative power and its chaotic effects, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception almost seems quaint. Prerogative power doesn’t quite capture this phenomenon. Rather, it is a kind of hyper-prerogative power in which each communicative and ordering action intensifies and proliferates a whirlwind of contradictory and confusing qualities that endlessly call forth new exercises of prerogative. 

   Clearly, radical democratic politics must target the classical manifestations of fascism we noted at the outset. As we do so, a monumental challenge will be imagining how to resist and contest the unprecedented apparatus of surveillance, security, and militarized policing whose potentials have been constructed since 9-11, but whose uses are likely to take countless new and horrifying forms. 

    Yet, we believe all of this will hinge upon our capacities to counter the shock politics and resonant violence characteristic of the new fascism. This will require engaging in a double politics. On the one hand, we must escalate sustained modes of direct action carefully-targeted to short-circuit the worst aspects of the regime. On the other hand, we must develop a radical democratic politics that shocks in a different way, that overwhelms the unaccountable vitriol of Trump-shock with dramatic engagements and magnetic enactments of receptive solidarity. This will take great creativity among those who oppose Trump and neo-fascism. Stay tuned.