This is the third of four reports on Germany in crisis. Part 1 of this series is here and Part 2 here.

BERLIN— I return briefly to those singular moments when Olaf Scholz stood next to President Joe Biden at a press conference on Feb. 7, 2022, after concluding private talks in the Oval Office. This was the occasion when Biden declared that if Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory—as he was by this time confident they would have no choice but to do—“then there will no longer be a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”

Take a moment to view the video record of this event. What do we see in those two men? Let us consider their demeanor, their gestures, their facial expressions, what each said and left unsaid, and read what we can into them. I read a 77–year history.

In Biden we have a man calmly matter-of-fact as he states his intention to destroy the expensive industrial assets of the country represented by the man next to him. We note his perfect aplomb, the dismissive wave of his hand, as he puts on full display his indifference to a close ally’s interests and, indeed, sovereignty.

I have until recently attributed Biden’s astounding coarseness as he stands with Scholz to the gracelessness that has marked the whole of his, Biden’s, political career. But I reflect now, as I think of this occasion in the light of all that preceded it, there is another way to judge it: After decades of overweening dominance within the Atlantic alliance, Biden saw no need any longer to disguise America’s hegemonic prerogative. Indeed, in the C–SPAN recording linked above we see the face of a man who takes malign pride in this exercise of raw power.

For his part, Scholz stood at a separate lectern, per protocol, and said nothing in response to Biden’s remark. His demeanor, Scholz’s, indicates he was neither surprised nor angry. He seems, rather, resigned, apprehensive, faintly regretful, faintly submissive. In his face we read the apprehension of a soldier who has just accepted his commanding officer’s baleful battle plan. My guess is he was also wondering what in hell he would say to his government and to Germans on his return to Berlin.

The best way to understand this very pregnant occasion, which has to count as unique or very nearly in the annals of trans–Atlantic diplomacy, is to look backward and then forward from it.

What a long span of time lay between the Germany of the early 1980s, Helmut Schmidt’s Germany, and Olaf Scholz’s Germany, the Germany that fairly cowered as it stood on a dais with America 40 years later. Schmidt, a Social Democrat given to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, had stood with other Europeans to defend Germany’s interests against President Ronald Reagan’s blunt attempts to impose America’s Cold War disciplines. Scholz, a Social Democrat of a very different kind, was not inclined to defend Germany against Joe Biden even when its very sovereignty was at issue.

How did Germany come to this? I grew convinced, after some days’ reporting here, a city the Iron Curtain long divided, and more time elsewhere in Germany, that Cold War and post–Cold War politics do not of themselves give an answer to this question. No, as I found often during my decades as a correspondent, one must resort to psychology and culture fully to understand politics and history, the latter being in some measure expressions of the former.

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The Allies’ plans for the nations they vanquished in 1945, which in a brief time amounted to America’s plans, were never short of ambition. At the Potsdam Conference, a few months after the fall of the Reich, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin divided Germany into four occupation zones: Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union would administer one each. Berlin was in the Soviet zone but was similarly divided. Millions of German settlers had to be repatriated from lands the Nazis had conquered—a messy undertaking marked by never-now-mentioned suffering. A de–Nazification program began immediately, and the German military was to be dismantled, although both of these objectives were complicated, to put the point mildly, as the wartime alliance with Moscow gave way to the Cold War the Truman administration insisted on provoking.

But it was in the matter of German hearts and minds that the remaking of the Reich into another kind of country tilted from ambition in the direction of hubris. This was a psychological operation the sweep and magnitude of which may never since have been matched. Only the post–1945 Japanese have undergone anything similar to it. This project was at first shaped and executed by Rooseveltian New Dealers. It was a year or two before Cold War ideologues dispensed with the high ideals in favor of the rigors of late–1940s, early–1950s anti–Communism. The Japanese, not without a subdued bitterness, call this “the reverse course.”

I do not know what the Germans call it, but the postwar volte-face amounted to the same thing. The project was the same across both oceans. It was not to engender authentic experiments in democracy, bottom-up attempts, as the orthodox historians advertise this period. It was to enlist Germany and Japan as Cold War soldiers. Democratization became mere pretext, inasmuch as democracy by its very definition can be neither exported by any country nor imported by any other. In this way, I may as well add, these two nations were the templates Washington applied in many other places during the Cold War. Pretend to democratize, cultivate submission: This was the true postwar project.

To put this point another way, to the extent Germany and Japan made themselves democracies in the postwar decades, this was not because of America’s influence so much as in spite of it.

In the U.S. zone, administrators in and out of uniform assumed control of all forms of information. All newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasters were shut down. American journalists (some of whom went on to illustrious careers) were assigned to reinvent German media to suit what was to be a new democracy. The propaganda programs accompanying this reinvention of mass media, in time heavy with anti–Soviet messaging, were immense, extending from reeducation projects and radio talk shows down to mass-distributed leaflets. The literature about this period gives the impression of an undertaking that excluded no uttered or written word and no image from official scrutiny.

A brief digression.

One of the memorable television programs of my early childhood was a popular law-and-order serial called Highway Patrol. I remember it well even after many years. There was something charismatic about the weekly episodes and their star. Broderick Crawford was the jowly, gruff, sloppily dressed chief of police in a never-named California town. He would sweep into crime scenes and fling open his patrol car’s door amid sirens and clouds of dust, barking orders into his hand-held radio—famously responding to his officers with the unforgettable “10–4.”

This is the second of four reports on Germany’s various crises, the history that produced them and how Germans, other than the neoliberal elites who now hold power, think about their way forward. Part 1 of this series is here.

POTSDAM—A single, brief phrase always comes to mind when I think of Germany. Whatever may be the specific matter to hand, sooner or later my thoughts go to three words that seem to me — and to many others, given they have survived so long in the discourse — to capture some essence of the nation and its place in the world.

“Germany is Hamlet.” For a long time I attributed this pithy observation to Gordon Craig, among Germany’s great 20^th century historians. Craig (Germany, 1866–1945; The Germans) was noted for succinct observations of this kind. He saw Germany as a nation divided in history between its humanist achievements (Goethe et al., Kant et al., Thomas Mann et al.) and its regrettable givenness to varieties of absolute power.

Over time I discovered the true author of this exquisite mot was Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876), a poet and a political radical who dedicated himself and his work to the democracy movement that led to the (failed) Revolution of 1848. Freiligrath compared Germany with Shakespeare’s famously divided character in 1844—this out of frustration with a native conservatism that held Germany back from the great change he saw as the pressing need of his time.

I don’t see that what Freiligrath meant cancels out what Craig meant more than a century later. And I don’t think either characterization of Germany as… what?… as a profoundly ambivalent nation cancels out the meaning the notion acquired, almost inevitably, in the second half of the last century.

Geography proves destiny in Germany’s case, as it does in various others. It faces Westward to the Atlantic world but also Eastward to the Eurasian landmass. Ambiguity has consequently marked the history of its relations in both directions. Otto von Bismarck cultivated sound relations with Russia during his years as chancellor, 1871 to 1890. That was when Germany first became Germany and the celebrated prince was showing the world what Realpolitik was all about. Then came the two world wars and Germany’s disastrous military campaigns, Eastward and Westward alike.

In the postwar era this ambiguity, this state of “in between,” is best understood not as Germany’s burden but its great gift, and it is with this gift it could have given another to the rest of us—the gift of a bridge between East and West. How different would our world be had post–1945 Germany been left to its fate and, by being truly itself, offered the world what it was singularly able to give.

It is in this context we should understand the arrival of the postwar order in Germany and what befalls the Federal Republic as we speak. Germans were not made for the Cold War and its West–East binaries, destructive as these were to the remarkable release of human aspiration that followed the 1945 victories. Defeated Germany was among Washington’s pivotal clients as it turned against Moscow, so recently its ally, and set out to establish America’s global primacy. This has served Germany and Germans very badly.

The Germany of the immediate postwar years, Konrad Adenauer’s Germany, was a reconstruction project. The new Federal Republic’s first chancellor counted restoring the German economy among his highest priorities. Germany under Adenauer—an anti–Communist, a Europeanist, an early supporter of NATO—was a well-behaved American dependency. But by the early 1960s, the Kennedy years, there was renewed concern in Washington as to West Germany’s eventual place in the Cold War order. And where Germany went the Continent was likely to follow, as the reasoning of the time had it.

This anxiety was not unfounded. A decade after the Iron Curtain divided Germany, in 1949, the Federal Republic was beginning to prosper by way of its Wirtschaftswunder, its “economic miracle” (which was no more a miracle than the postwar Japanese “miracle”). Germans began to look outward. In due course they would gaze eastward to the Soviet Union: It was a nation of manufacturers with a resource economy next door. Europe was looking in the same direction. This was precisely what Washington’s policy cliques had begun to worry about. By this time it was a given among these people that America’s national security interests and the global supply-and-demand of energy were more or less inseparable. We can take the case of Enrico Mattei as a measure of America’s concern.

Mattei was a senior bureaucrat in Rome who, after the defeat in 1945, reorganized the Fascist regime’s petroleum holdings into Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the oil company commonly known as ENI. Mattei was ambitious for ENI. And going by the many agreements he negotiated, he seems to have had interesting politics. Among other things, ENI’s contracts awarded three-quarters of profits to the nations that owned reserves—an unprecedented percentage at the time. In 1960 Mattei concluded a large, very significant oil accord with the Soviet Union—again, on terms well beyond the exploitative contracts common among Western oil companies.

This was a daring move, as Mattei plainly understood. He thereupon declared that he had broken, or helped to break, the petroleum monopoly the U.S. had long enjoyed via the famous “Seven Sisters.” Eisenhower’s National Security Council had been attacking Mattei as antithetical to American interests since the late 1950s. And the Soviet agreement appears to have landed as an especially hard blow. Two years after signing it Mattei was killed when his plane crashed during a flight from Sicily to Milan. Subsequent investigations, of which there have been many, have continued for decades. In 1997 La Stampa, the Turin daily, reported that judicial authorities in Rome had concluded that a bomb planted onboard had exploded Mattei’s plane in midair.

Although the Mattei case remains officially unresolved, there is now a plentitude of evidence that he was the victim of an assassination conducted by the CIA in its not-unfamiliar collaboration with the Mafia, possibly with the connivance of French intelligence. “Common knowledge among Europeans,” a German friend told me recently. “We know what happened to Mattei the way you Americans know what happened to Kennedy.”

Stopping just short of absolute certainties, as we must, we can read the Mattei affair as a measure of how sensitive energy ties between Europe and the Soviets were by the mid–Cold War years. The point of trans–Atlantic conflict was clear from the first: Europeans viewed contracts with the Soviet Union simply as business—sound, logical economics; for the Americans they were instruments bearing dangerous geopolitical consequences. And it is on this question the Germans and the Americans have found themselves repeatedly at odds for many decades.

Soviet and post–Soviet Russia as a market for German products and services was until recently important, certainly. Russia’s imports of German manufactured goods—a vast range of them—kept the trade balance in Germany’s favor for many years. But the main event for the Germans came to run in the other direction, as the trade account eventually indicated. Russia needed German manufactures because it was weak on the industrial side; Germany needed Russian resources more pressingly because it is not well-endowed by way of raw materials.

I am sick of reading that the Israelis’ genocidal murder spree in Gaza is justified as a matter of self-defense.

I am sick of reading nothing at all in corporate media, while reading daily in independent media, about the Israelis’ genocidal murder spree in the West Bank.

I am sick of reading nothing in mainstream media about the Zionists’ plan to construct a version of Eretz Israel, Greater Israel, that never existed.

I am sick of reading about Zionist settlers in the Occupied Territories without any mention that they are all criminals.

I am sick of being told that Hamas is “a terrorist organization,” ditto Hezbollah, when these are no more or less than liberation fronts.

I am sick of reading that Hamas tortures hostages and the phony accounts of mistreatment coming from those Hamas has released.

I am sick of seeing no photographs in Western media of the scarred and three-quarters starved Palestinian hostages Israel lets out of its jails in exchange for decently treated Israeli hostages.

Released Palestinian prisoner. Did any Israeli POW emerge looking so emaciated and with similar experiences of torture? pic.twitter.com/8WCt0LdtPI

— tim anderson (@timand2037) February 9, 2025

I am sick of America’s silence — in government, in the press — as Israeli settlers and occupation forces shoot American citizens of Palestinian background — two of them, in recent days, children and one of whom died.

I am sick of Western media’s silence as the Israeli military targets, hunts down, and murders hundreds of non–Western journalists reporting from Gaza.

I am sick of The New York Times’ incessantly repeated sentence, “The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.”

I am sick of reading that the Zionists’ military will investigate its own war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I am sick of people such as Sheryl Sandberg still pretending that The New York Times’ infamous takeout alleging Hamas’s sexual misconduct on Oct. 7, 2023, has not been thoroughly exposed as systematic Israeli propaganda.

I am sick, for that matter, of seeing Jeffrey Gettleman’s byline in the Times, as if this out-and-out punk did not decisively discredit himself as well as his Zionist-supervised newspaper when he reproduced Israel’s fabrications in his “Screams Without Words” “report” in December 2023.

I am sick of hearing that anti–Semitism is rampant in America because it is “anti–Semitic” to object to the criminal conduct of a nation that has earned no right to exist. I am sick, I may as well add, of walking around being told I am an anti–Semite by this preposterous definition.

I am tired of reading that bombing Yemen is a justifiable act when the Houthis and the South Africans, they alone, act according to international law when they attack the Zionist terror state in the courts and on the seas.

I am sick of being told the jihadist murderer who seized control in Damascus last year is acceptable because he wears a suit when he has to and is not Bashar al–Assad.

I am sick of the incessant use of the word “unprovoked” when Western media describe the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

I am sick of hearing that Moscow’s stated intent to de–Nazify Ukraine has no legitimacy because there are no Nazis in Ukraine.

I am sick of the suggestion that I am to take Volodymyr Zelensky to be anything more than a puppet of Washington and a rampant crook beholden to the Nazis who do not exist in Ukraine.

I am sick of listening to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, tell me that Russian President Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a tyrant intent on reconstructing the Czarist empire when, statesman to stateswoman, she is unworthy of carrying Putin’s attaché case.

I am sick of listening to American and European officials state with phony gravity that Russia intends to invade the whole of Western Europe.

I am sick of reading that China “claims Taiwan” as if the island is not historically Chinese territory. And I am sick of hearing that China could “invade” Taiwan, its own territory, at any moment.

I am sick of watching ignoramuses (ignorami?) such as Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Kristi Noem — U.S. attorney general, F.B.I. director and secretary of homeland security — act as if they are serious human beings properly assigned to some of America’s highest offices. This is to leave unmentioned the frightening primitive who employs these people and his crypto-fascist aide de camp.

Alas, readers, there is so much to be sick of in the world at the hands of those who purport to lead the Western half of it. I have not the time and my esteemed editors would not give me the space to offer a complete list.

But we must record our sicknesses, all of them — our maladies, our fatigue, our shared nausea, our unrelenting tsouris as we make our ways through our days. Let us remind each other of them whenever occasions arise, for our sicknesses are the beginning of our objections and our objections, best outcome, the beginning of action.

If I had to describe in a brief phrase the burden of being alive in the third decade of the 21st century I would say it derives from the distance those who run the Western world have taken us from reality.

Think of those items on my (very partial) list of sicknesses. Each one is a painful reminder that we in the West have lost our moorings and, indeed, our humanity and reason — each one an expression of the state of unreality imposed upon us.

This thing we call reality is full of suffering, as the Buddhists will remind us whenever we ask them, and we always speak of it in these terms. “Get real!” we insist to one another, as if this is a bitter undertaking we would rather avoid. But don’t we realize, when reality is taken away from us, how what is ever difficult is equally ever to be celebrated?

Politicians on either side of the international date line, West and East, are no strangers to lying and misrepresentation. There are no angels in high places in the world as we have made it, no philosopher kings (which, I come reluctantly to wonder, may be our best way out of the chaos of our time). But it is only as empires end, if I read history correctly, that societies enter into what Hannah Arendt used to call “an Alice-in–Wonderland atmosphere.”

The worst part of living this distance from reality — or maybe the best part — is the knowledge, even if it is only subliminal, that we cannot go on like this. The American imperium, which is the author of all our vaporous conceits, cannot go on indefinitely pretending about Israel’s innocence, and who the Russians are, and the evil intent of Chinese, and all the rest.

This is not only impossible to imagine: It is by definition impossible plain and simple. It is impossible according to the laws of history.

I come now to the true burden of all our maladies. Our Sandbergs and Zelenskys and Gettlemans and von der Leyens: These, a few of the clowns populating our time. They are what D.H. Lawrence used to call “T.I.P.s,” temporarily important people. But they serve to remind us that to live again in any kind of better world we must make it ourselves.

This is the first of four reports on the crises that now beset Germany — what they are, the history that produced them, and how Germans think about finding their way forward once again.

I thank Eva–Maria Föllmer–Müller and Karl–Jürgen Müller of Bazenheid, Switzerland, for their unsparing assistance as I reported and wrote this series.

Of the many things said — insightful things, wise things, some foolish things — as the results of Germany’s national elections arrived on Sunday evening, Feb. 23, the most remarkable to me was the exclamation of the Federal Republic’s new chancellor-to-be: “We have won it,” Friedrich Merz declared before his supporters in Berlin as the exit polls, which proved accurate, gave the conservative Christian Democratic Union the largest share of the vote.

Merz is one of those political figures given to speaking before he thinks, and nobody seems to have taken this outburst as anything more than the election-night utterance of an exuberant victor. I heard it differently. To me, Merz’s four words betrayed a nation in crisis: its politics and economy in disarray, its visionless leadership, its pervasive malaise, the deepening fractures among Germany’s 83 million people — Germany’s inability, let’s say, to talk to itself or understand, even, what it means to say, “We have won it.”

The low-minded Merz’s “we” means the CDU, which he leads, and its longtime partner, the Christian Social Union. But how narrow a notion of winning is this for someone who purports to be not merely a national leader but a leader of Europe? The CDU/CSU won not quite 29% of the vote, just enough to form a new governing coalition. That leaves 71% of German voters who didn’t win anything.

The next chancellor’s “we,” to go straight to the larger significance of the German elections, should alarm all of us across the West, not only in Germany, given where Merz and his coalition partners intend to lead the Federal Republic. They have made their radical intent clear even before Merz formally assumes office. It is to dismantle the most advanced social democracy in Europe in favor of a swift, radical rearmament — shocking all by itself given Germany’s history — and a return to the Cold War’s ever-perilous hostilities. The speed of this turn appears to be taking everyone by surprise: On Monday, April 1, the Bundeswehr began stationing an armored brigade in Lithuania, the first long-term deployment of German troops abroad since World War II.

History, which I invoke throughout this series, haunts this transformative moment like a ghost. Many are they who saw in the postwar republic a promise that the trans–Atlantic world could take a new direction, that the West might cultivate — I’ll go to shorthand here — a more humanist, or humanized, form of democracy. In the 1960s, Ludwig Erhard, economics minister under Konrad Adenauer, fashioned the soziale Marktwirtschaft, the social market economy, a model considerably at variance with the free-market fundamentalism the United States was by then imposing upon the world. It made unions powerful and gave workers seats on corporate boards, among much else, and in so doing prompted the thought that Europe’s social-democratic tradition might at last tame capitalism’s excesses.

In the late 1960s, Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic foreign minister and subsequently chancellor, developed his long-celebrated Ostpolitik, a policy that opened the Federal Republic to its East Bloc neighbors and the Soviet Union. This was a rejection not only of Washington’s Cold War binary; more than this, it was a decisive reply to the anti–Russian animus that has scarred German history for a century.

To know this history now is to recognize the February elections as a defeat of considerable magnitude that extends, again, well beyond what was so recently Europe’s most powerful nation. Friedrich Merz and his coalition partners — who will include a Social Democratic Party that has cravenly repudiated the very tradition it once championed — has abandoned more, much more than the Federal Republic’s past. Anyone who entertained hope that the Continent might serve as a guide to a more orderly world is in some way bereft now, left with one less reason to hope the wandering West will find its way beyond the cycle of decline into which it has fallen.

Merz is a man of contradictions, which admittedly does not distinguish him among centrist politicians in Germany or anywhere else in the West. He will be distinguished now as the German people’s hopelessly contradictory leader. His most pressing domestic responsibility is to revive an economy the coalition of neoliberals led by his hapless predecessor, Olaf Scholz, has driven very nearly into the ground. Take your seats as this disaster in the making unfolds.

Merz is a virulent Russophobe — he is as vigorous in this as any postwar political figure, I am told — and he is strongly committed to escalating Germany’s support for the war in Ukraine. But bringing the German economy back to life simply cannot be done unless Germany determines to restore its dense, altogether natural interdependence with Russia, notably but not only on the energy side. The resort to building a trillion-euro war machine is a beyond-words act of political desperation: The extent to which it succeeds as economic stimulus will be the extent to which it destroys German social democracy while — not to be missed — burdening the government with enormous debt. As to the folly of the U.S.–inspired proxy war in Ukraine, each commitment the new government makes to continued support of the corrupt, Nazified regime in Kiev — financial support, military support, political support, diplomatic support — will alienate a greater proportion of the German citizenry.

Germany’s predicament is the West’s, cast merely in higher relief: It must change, it must find a new direction — its voters demand these things — but Germany as its leadership is currently constituted cannot change. Germany is arguably singular among the Western powers in that treading water — the ceaseless see-saw of the centrists, if I may mix metaphors — is no longer a workable dodge. The nation simply does not have time for that if it is to avoid an ever-increasing rate of decline.

A remarkable number of German voters switched in February from one party to another — voter migration, this phenomenon is called — in what looks to the naked eye like a perverse game of hopscotch. Most of the voters who abandoned the Social Democrats — and there were very many, as a collapse in the SPD’s support indicates — went to either the CDU/ CSU (the latter rooted in conservative and Catholic Bavaria) or — believe it or not — to the Alternativ für Deutschland, the populist, right-wing nemesis of the long-reigning Social Democrats.

It gets yet more odd, according to an analysis cited by an election-night commentator named Florian Rötzer. “Many from the CDU/CSU did indeed switch to the AfD,” Rötzer remarked as the results tallied, “but strangely enough also to The Left [Die Linke] and the BSW [the left-populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht]. The Left gained massively, but former [Die Linke] voters switched to the AfD to a lesser extent and to the BSW to a greater extent.” As to Die Grünen, the now-ridiculous Greens — along with the Social Democrats the big losers Feb. 23 — they surrendered voters to Die Linke, a predictable-enough move, but also to the AfD.

Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is time to do something — something very few of us have considered until now.

Rashid Khalidi, in a stinging opinion piece in The Guardian, asked, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” Khalidi posed this question after the university where he taught for many years capitulated to the Trump regime’s demands that it compromise academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association while submitting its programs of study to political purview. All this in response to charges that anti–Semitism is rife among students demonstrating against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Khalidi — some poetic justice here — is the emeritus Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Among his books is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan, 2020). Here is part of what he published in The Guardian:

“It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to….

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17–month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland….

These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by The New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university….”

When Immigration and Customs goons arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s demonstrations at Columbia, Homeland Security initially said only that he “engaged in activities aligned with Hamas.” The State Department subsequently cited a provision in the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Sheer Charade

Last week the Trump regime added new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, asserting that he withheld information on when he applied for permanent residency status last year. Even the Zionist-supervised New York Times sees through this ruse. “The Trump administration,” it reported, “appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case.”

Amid these legal maneuvers President Donald Trump declared on social media, “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Since then ICE officials — masked ICE officials—have arrested a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the same grounds: A DHS spokesperson explained this week that “Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” Tufts officials have been told Ozturk’s visa has been revoked.

I read now that a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama was arrested Tuesday and similarly charged. Alireza Doroudi is an Iranian in the U.S. on a student visa.

Consider these events and what Trump regime officials say about them.

The imperatives imposed by the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. long, long ago destroyed what integrity remained among U.S. mainstream media. Now they are destroying institutions of higher learning, the Justice and Homeland Security departments and altogether American law.

And all of these institutions proceed, or pretend to proceed, as if nothing at all is amiss. The Justice Department pretends it is just, Homeland Security pretends it protects the homeland, the Trump regime pretends it acts lawfully, Columbia’s administrators — and here come numerous other capitulationists like them — pretend they are guardians of free intellectual inquiry and an uncensored discourse on their campuses.

To what extent has America embarked on a departure from reality that may be unprecedented in history but for empires in their waning decades? The fact that this is a serious question, and I consider it so, is suggestion enough that this perverse national journey has begun.

I think of an essay Arthur Miller published in the Dec. 30, 1974, edition of New York Magazine. “The Year It Came Apart” was a long, anguished look back to 1949, when, the noted playwright considered, postwar America began to lose its way. “Nothing any longer could be what it seemed,” Miller wrote. This is among the phrases that comes to mind now: Nothing in our public life can any longer be taken as being what it pretends to be — as authentically itself, this is to say.

Here is the full passage in Miller’s piece to which I refer. The ellipses are mine:

“An inner fabric began to tear apart…. We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology call Spectral Evidence….

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.”

I come to Simius Cognitius, who publishes a private blog from his farm in central Massachusetts (fortunate fellow). He wrote the other day:

“For all sane and rational people, what is now being officially and legally defined as ‘anti–Semitism’ in our once proud but now pitiably fallen nation, has now been elevated to a Moral Imperative.

The only way for any individual to maintain her or his sanity in our morally broken nation, which now officially declares that it is illegal to express any criticism, any at ALL, of a group of people who are wantonly murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including tens of thousands of children and babies, right out in broad daylight, right before our very eyes… the only way to stay sane in such a morally depraved and insane nation, is to criticize that group more vigorously.

Once more, for emphasis … If criticizing Jewish people [CN: Zionist leaders] for their utter moral depravity, for actual mass-murder of even children and babies, is anti–Semitic, then it becomes a Moral Imperative to openly express one’s anti–Semitism.”