Andrew Quirk takes us through the crazy world of MAGA freaks and ICE thugs ahead of the November mid-term elections in the United States.
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When legendary punk rockers, Mick Jones and Joe Strummer penned the punk anthem, ‘White Riot’, they probably didn’t have Steve Bannon in mind. Yet a month out from the 2026 United States’ mid-term elections and here we are. To the billions already spent on US elections we can now add the hundreds of millions spent on wargaming election outcomes.
Election violence is an unavoidable kitchen table discussion for any intending voter. If you’re a kid from a minority group you could offer Mum and Dad advice based on the latest immigration raid at your school.
Racist svengali and ICE impresario Steven Miller is now the ascendant influence in the senile decrepitude that constitutes Trump’s orbit. When Yemeni war texts leaked by way of the app Signal in March 2025, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth were caught discussing the murder of people thousands of kilometres away. Yet it was neither the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of War and Drinking, who gave the order to go. It was the President’s Vice-Chief of Staff, Steve Miller.(1)
Rasputin crossed with a brownshirt complete with a touch of concentration camp commandant; this man oozes the particular cruelty of those who are as cowardly as they are violent. An intimate of fear both for purposes of intimidation and motivation, he exudes the swirling pus of the MAGA vortex.
Fancy yourself an ICE agent, charged by pinko liberals in a new communist justice department for the immigrant scum you just bashed. How itchy is your finger?
Widespread paranoia is the framing for destabilisation, the fracture for the alternative narrative legitimating a coup.
Your boss is $20 million up on oil trades occurring an hour before the Tumpster posts. Now 20 years near the top of a hedge fund never made you a billion, but to liquidate a $20 million property portfolio on legal fees? Everyone potentially pardoned by Trump has a series of vulnerable underlings unpardoned and willing to give up on unpardoned crimes to save their own skin. Have you thought about it? Your boss has.
And then there’s peak freak. A cabal of spivs, speculators, warmongers and sexual predators. Libertarian congressman Thomas Massie retired with a deliberate blast at the “Epstein class”, named a half-dozen billionaires and multimillionaires, all of them accused of sex crimes, (at least) all of Epstein’s associates, and all having socialised in varying degrees with Trump.(2) The total number criminally investigated?
Only the poor old former Duke of York, is being investigated for ‘…misconduct in public office’.(3) Meanwhile the King of Australia is left keeping up the weak chin of an inbred genetic inheritance, somehow hoping that a stiff upper lip will exhaust the politics of his brother’s pastimes to an unremembered historical footnote.
Yet it can’t be forgotten that Virginia Guiffre committed suicide on 25 April 2025. Outside of Maxwell and Epstein no one has ever been charged for any offence arising from trafficking, anywhere.
Across the ditch, (the real one, the Atlantic, not the body of water between two American poodles in the South Pacific) they’d like to keep it that way. Andrew Mountbatten’s co-star Donald J. Trump has installed his private lawyer as the US Attorney-General in order to forestall any further Epstein file releases. The previous Attorney-General, Pam Bondi, was sacked for releasing three million pages and, unfortunately for her, she did actually release three million pages.
Included were but one of four files from a Jane Doe 4 complainant, detailing allegations of sexual assaults against Epstein. The missing three files become immediate journalistic fodder for America’s public broadcaster NPR and the online publication The Daily Beast.(4) This combined with public pressure from Democrat congressman Ro Kahana and Libertarian independent Thomas Masie forced the release of the other three files on 5 March 2026 and Pam Bondi’s tenure suddenly had a use by date.
United States Department of Justice Epstein file release data set 12.(5) The details are appalling but now publicly available in the United States at least.(6) On 6 March 2026 Donald John Trump joined William Jefferson Clinton in not having matters pertaining to the presidential penis published in the American empire’s paper of record The New York Times.(7)
For the last 50 neoliberal years American politics has been a giant switch and bait. Do you want your neoliberal suppository Republican, or lubricated, Democrat style? If you are a sober-minded plutocrat or merely worth several tens of millions of dollars, the scary part is your fear of what you regard the truly ‘juvenile’ behaviour of the Democratic Socialists of America on the populist left.
As a rich person you consult your consultant. They consult their AIs and the groupthink taxonomy that goes broadly as follows:
- The Republican old guard, silent, powerful. Resentful of the Trump-aligned oligarchs whose antics disturb “this thing of ours”.
- The Resistance – yes, they do actually call themselves that – are the Democratic pro-war centrist extremists, usually described as militarist Keynesian. Better described as Keynesian nihilists.
- MAGA, unpopular but still motivated. By way of ICE now armed and violent, not unusual in itself by American standards, but noticeably more stupid and violent than the average cop.(8)
And, of course, the Democratic Socialists of America. A bunch of thieving commie fuckers, no more explanation needed.
In this competitive landscape there’s always going to be a market laggard. A casualty taking a hit on the debit side of the ledger: Israel. To be clear, a country with a free supply of bombs currently being dropped on nine countries – although I haven’t checked the news in the last 20 minutes – can hardly be said to be down and out.
Even so, with results like Michigan’s Senate race, where DSA challenger Abdul El-Sayed spent about US$17 million against the US$63 million of the pro-Israeli candidate Hayley Stevens, the panic extends beyond the Israel lobby to the Democrat centrist extremists. At roughly US$22 a vote for the winning candidate and US$86 for the loser, the lobby as the American left-progressive magazine Prospect speculates, may be facing a “diminishing point of return on these investments”.(9)
As a wealthy person you don’t have to hedge, supporting any particular candidate or combination thereof is nought but a bet. What guarantees a system corrupted to the specificities of extractive capitalism is money: the lobby groups and business associations.
This is a method that guarantees investment returns in hundreds of dollars for every ‘invested’ dollar. From the tax-free income of the provincial car dealer to the outright theft of tax dollars by the finance-tech-military complex. The return is now a lucrative US$14 on every dollar ‘invested’ according to Pentagon cheerleader, the Rand Corporation.(10)
Capitalism is nothing if not a consensus Beast, its oligarchic factions can be at variants, the conflict between them can be brutal and someone can always be sacrificed to satisfy the masses. Most of the time these fractions can slither around or over each other. The unconscious dialectics of power in the raw, the efficacy of the ruling ascendant faction and a baked-in result of a superior regime of accumulation.
Capitalism becomes conscious, that is to say, becomes capable of dialectical thinking about itself, when the extremities of the reigning regime of accumulation jeopardises the system as a whole. When neo-liberals like Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, note that capitalists read Marx you should believe them. Professor Harari is after all, Maximum Middle Brow, even the suburban lawyer can get a bad AI summary of Das Capital.
As the investing suburbs look to their lords and masters – the oligarchs, the CEOs, the bankers – they share the undercurrent of anxiety. Those DSA fuckers again.
As John Bellamy Foster noted in Monthly Review “the financial oligarchy owns the propaganda machine, is able to bribe politicians in the centre and periphery… The people do not have much of a choice, but without formally abolishing democratic procedures, the financial oligarchy cannot fully guarantee itself against undesirable ‘accidents’.”(11)
Is Donald Trump such an accident? If needed, what is the alternate ruling class strategy? That should become clearer after the first Tuesday in November when the unhuddled masses have their say.
Footnotes
(1) Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” The Atlantic, 24 March 2025.
(2) Representative Thomas Massie’s remarks on the floor of the US House of Representatives, 31 August 2026. Calling for further investigation and prosecution of Epstein associates, Massie named 14 individuals: Jes Staley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, David Copperfield, Lapo Elkann, Tom Pritzker, Glenn Dubin, Frédéric Fekkai, Edoardo Teodorani, Jean-Luc Brunel, Daniel Siad, Ramsey Elkholy, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Lesley Groff. Massie described them as Epstein “co-conspirators”.
(3) Thames Valley Police, 19 February 2026: the statement announcing that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested “on suspicion of misconduct in public office”. The subsequent police statement said he had been “released under investigation”. He was not charged.
(4) Stephen Fowler, NPR, 24 February 2026, investigation comparing the Department of Justice’s 30 January Epstein-file release with the evidence index from the Ghislaine Maxwell prosecution. The index showed four FBI interviews with the woman subsequently referred to as Jane Doe 4; only one corresponding FBI 302 was initially available in the public release. The Department of Justice released three additional interview records on 5 March 2026 following press and congressional scrutiny. The Daily Beast subsequently reported on the released records.
(5) US Department of Justice, Epstein Files, Data Set 12, FBI interview memoranda concerning Jane Doe 4, including EFTA02858481, EFTA02858491 and EFTA02858495.
(6) Stephen Fowler, NPR, 5 March 2026, ‘Justice Department publishes some missing Epstein files related to Trump’.
(7) The New York Times, 6 March 2026. Columnist and NYT warhorse Maureen Dowd who covered the Clinton years, was familiar with a bald eagle ‘characteristic’ rumored to identify the genital proboscis of a prominent person. A chopped-up column was once returned to Ms Dowd with the comment that, “the NYT does not do penis jokes”. See also Dowd’s discussion of her campaign reporting and New York Times editing in the Harvard Institute of Politics’ campaign symposium/oral-history material. Harvard Institute of Politics symposium material.
(8) US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Summary of Documents Newly Received from DHS Whistleblowers, 23 February 2026. Documents supplied by Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers concerning ICE recruitment and training recorded:
- removal of tests including judgement pistol shooting and criminal encounters, and required practical examinations reduced from 25 to nine;
- reductions in training and instruction in the use of force, legal authority, criminal and civil proceedings;
- training reduced from 72 days to 42 days;
- minimum recruitment age reduced from 21 to 18, and removal of the upper age limit;
- elimination of the Spanish-language requirement.
(9) David Dayen and related coverage, The American Prospect, Michigan Democratic Senate primary, 2026.
(10) Christian Cox, ‘Lobbying for Government Appropriations’ The RAND Journal of Economics, vol. 54, no. 3 (2023), pp 443-483.
(11) John Bellamy Foster, ‘The US Ruling Class and the Trump Regime’ Monthly Review, vol. 76, no.11, 1 April 2025, quoting Stanislav Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers: the Structure of US Financial Oligarchy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), pp. 323-24.