This article has been republished from Carter Moon’s Substack. Subscribe here!

It’s plainly apparent that the world we lived in on December 31st is slipping away. The murders by agents of the state of Renee Nicole Good and now Alex Jeffrey Pretti make it obvious we are in a new escalation of the fascist war against the rest of us who don’t want to live in their Christian Nationalist nightmare. It is clear that the illusion that we live in a free country is slipping away for millions of people. It is a terrifying thing, but it’s also a moment where you can feel people facing reality in a way I’ve frankly never experienced in my life.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a pretty remarkable speech at Davos this past week. He admitted that the “rules-based order” governing international relations is failing. He explicitly says:

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false — that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

It’s been apparent that the rules-based international order was fraudulent for most of my life. The Iraq War was entirely illegal and no one in the US was ever meaningfully brought to justice over it. The Obama administration carried out drone strikes around the world under the auspices of “law enforcement operations” against terrorism. The final death knell has been Israel’s genocide in Gaza with the full backing and military support of the US. It is plainly apparent that there aren’t any meaningful guardrails left to stop the kind of wanton, evil carnage we saw in World War II. But it feels like a significant departure for the sitting head of state of a Western country and close ally of the US to admit this out loud. Of course, Carney seems primarily motivated to say this as Trump pugilistically tilts towards impulsively seizing Greenland; he feels called to speak up now that Europeans are under threat from US chauvinism, rather than people from the Middle East or Latin America. But Carney’s words were backed up by actions; he affirmed Canada’s commitment to NATO and lowered tariffs on Chinese EVs.

This last piece feels particularly significant to me; China is making some of the best and cheapest EVs in the world right now, which will significantly help the world reduce its carbon emissions — if they’re adopted fast enough. While we have to end our car dependency as much as possible, it’s undeniably a good thing if wealthier countries can get more of their citizens into EVs as efficiently as possible. Canada embracing EVs is also a clear signal that they recognize that China is the rising superpower in the world, which it obviously is. American hegemony has in no insignificant amount been possible through our control of the global oil market; the embrace of EVs is deeper than just cars, it’s a recognition that the US empire will not continue to be the sole imperial or financial superpower for much longer.

Let’s consider that control of the oil market for a moment. Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro while leaving Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez in power seems puzzling on the surface. Trump’s made a big show of wanting Venezuela’s oil, but the oil companies don’t really want to deal with the massive cost of investing in their infrastructure, and the US doesn’t currently need the oil anyway. You could write this off as Trump being a bumbling idiot, but I actually think it’s more nuanced than that. The Trump administration didn’t want Venezuela selling oil to Russia and China, circumventing the US sanctions on Venezuela and selling oil in a gray market the US can’t control. Keeping Rodriguez in power signals that Trump wants to be able to control the flow of oil from the country, more so than actually caring about “restoring democracy” or even punishing a socialist regime for challenging US hegemony. As long as Trump can take back control of who Venezuela sells oil to and how, it will be worth it to him.

We obviously can’t keep living in a world where Trump and the US empire keep getting away with this. As the planet edges closer to total climate annihilation, our species can’t allow for a military superpower to keep toppling sovereign countries to keep oil as the dominant energy source for the world. But the good news is we might finally be at a tipping point where other countries are recognizing that. It’s important to remember that while the UN has been able to do little to stop the US from facilitating Israel’s genocide, the rest of the world has consistently condemned what we’re doing. The UN may be toothless in many respects, but it has made it abundantly clear that the rest of the world knows what’s happening and can’t abide by it. One would hope this would come with more meaningful direct consequences for the US, but it’s important to remember that a consensus exists outside of this country that sees one of the great atrocities of our time for what it is. The rest of the world is facing reality, even if our own leaders aren’t willing to.

Let’s consider for a moment why Trump’s gestapo are specifically immigration agents. Why do immigrants come to the US? It is overwhelmingly due to the effects of US imperialism. The map at the top of this article shows all the countries the US has in some way been involved in violently overthrowing. Inevitably, the countries most destabilized by this violence inevitably have people who flee, and many of them end up on our shores. The price of violently destabilizing these countries for our own benefit is that we have to accept their refugees, something even Ronald Reagan sort of understood. But for the last generation, conservatives have begun to viciously reject the notion that we owe anything at all to these people whose lands we invade, bomb, and plunder. The root of their fascist poison is a bedrock belief that all the brown people deserve to die elsewhere rather than seek meager survival in our borders.

It’s no accident that MAGA is particularly fixated on Venezuelan refugees, people who have fled here as a direct result of Trump’s sanctions against that country. It’s estimated that the sanctions caused 40,000 deaths in the first year they were in effect. People have fled Venezuela out of desperation and ended up scattered across Latin America; some of them have made the incredibly perilous journey all the way to the United States, often on foot. Stephen Miller is particularly fixated on expelling Venezuelans because they are a living reminder of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies.

But of course, sanctions are a bipartisan project in the United States. The Lancet Global Health published a report last year showing the totalizing devastation of sanctions between 1970 and 2021. It’s estimated they have been responsible for 38 million deaths around the world. This kind of economic violence, the ways in which the US and other Western powers withhold resources from desperately poor people in the Global South, is barbaric. It is, underneath everything else, the reason we’re in this mess. This global economic order built off the legacy of colonialism may use the flowery language of universal liberalism, but it has always been a lie. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have overseen this carnage; both parties have affirmed that this is just and moral state craft. Note that Biden did not lift the sanctions against Venezuela and that he deported 271,000 immigrants in the first year of his first term. Democrats of this century have only been able to promise a more professionally well-managed imperialism, and that increasingly rings hollow to a majority of people. It’s why instead of abolishing ICE, the best Hakeem Jeffreis can do is make the brown-shirts wear badge numbers.

As beneficiaries of imperialism, we go to elaborate lengths to suppress this reality. The manufacturing of consent to see the US as a noble, shining beacon on a hill is remarkably effective. For a brief window in the late 1960s, it seemed as though there truly might have been a crack where people horrified by the Vietnam war were putting the pieces together — right before most of the movement leaders, people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton who were bringing that new consciousness to the people, were summarily executed. It’s similarly been clear that many young people are putting the pieces together on just how evil imperialism is as they watch the genocide in Gaza unfold, which is precisely why Biden had to order police around the country to crack their skulls.

It’s not until this moment, this sudden rupture where American citizens are being executed by jack-booted thugs in high definition from a dozen different angles, that people are finally waking up. The reality of what we live under is finally laid bare. And the incredibly heartening thing is how vehemently people are fighting back. The bravery of the people of Minneapolis has been truly, genuinely historic. The strike that was carried out on Friday may be entirely unprecedented in US history: 50,000 people in the streets in -40 degree weather and the city essentially completely economically shut down. What makes it so significant is that so many businesses, churches, and cultural institutions shut down; it wasn’t just unions and their members in the street, it was a level of almost spontaneous consensus, planned in 10 days. It’s impossible not to believe that ICE executed Alex Pretti as retaliation for this. May his memory be a spark that lights an inferno.

I know these are incredibly scary times and I have just laid out some very dark things we spend a lot of time trying to avoid thinking about. It truly is impossible to feel rooted in reality hour by hour any more. We are now in the collapse, one that’s been in motion for my entire life, but that is finally undeniable to anyone with eyes. I have absolutely no idea what happens next. But I can tell you that it is your duty at this moment to find your neighbors and start figuring out how we’re going to survive the flood. It is your duty to find a rapid response network in your community and put your body on the line with them. It is your duty to commit yourself to your neighbors’ survival, to commit yourself to the universal sanctity of human life. I tell you all this as someone who is dedicating most of my waking hours to this work myself. I know this feels daunting and overwhelming, but I will remind you that thousands of Minnesotans didn’t believe they were ever going to participate in a historic general strike a week ago. You have no idea what you’re capable of until you try.