Hang the Bastards!

"Five or six hundred heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers." — Jean-Paul Marat, "C'en est fait de nous" (July 26, 1790), in Les Pamphlets de Marat, ed. Charles Vellay (Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1911), p. 204. 

Turning the Dials

The editors of Jacobin, together with the Center for Working-Class Politics and the legal scholar Joan C. Williams, have released an extensive new study under the pleading title "Report: The Working-Class Vote Is Not Lost." By "working class" they mean, in essence, voters without a four-year degree (within an income band of roughly $30,000 to $150,000): the same diploma test the mainstream press uses, and a poor stand-in for the actual working class. By "lost," they mean those voters' well-documented drift toward the GOP. 

Some forty thousand voters were shown roughly eight hundred thousand imaginary candidates and asked to choose between them, and the results were distilled into a delightfully whimsical gadget: the "Working-Class Win-O-Meter," billed as "a data-driven road map for winning back working-class voters."

For all its whimsy, the Win-O-Meter is a machine for producing moderation. None of its six dials is labeled "moderation," and none needs to be. On dial two, a path to citizenship for immigrants who "stayed out of trouble" resonates; "abolish ICE," a slogan aimed at a paramilitary force currently carrying out an ethnic cleansing, does not. 

The pattern repeats down the line, with the mealy-mouthed position designated as the most working people can stomach and the left's own demands identified as a repulsive albatross. The report says outright that "moving to the center" carries no consistent advantage, then spends a good deal of its length explaining which positions to move toward the center on. 

Readers of WelcomePAC's "Deciding to Win" will notice the family resemblance. Daniel Goulden at Groundwork's PowerMap has already covered much of what else is wrong here.

The deeper problem is what the study measures. A survey that shows a voter two imaginary candidates can tell you what that voter will accept. It can't tell you what engages them, what turns the problems of their lives into a practice of collective struggle, or whether a given candidate would get them to the polls at all. 

Jacobin has mistaken agreement with an abstract statement for concrete salience, acceptance for passion. And it put the question to the wrong electorate: a general-election sample, when nearly every socialist who has won office in the last decade got there by winning a Democratic primary first.

Trump has proven this first point over and over. He can take any issue that polls miserably when framed neutrally—an issue that shocks and disgusts the average person—and make that issue the central conflict of a news cycle, then of an entire election. He can have his opponents dancing to any tune he chooses, at whatever tempo he sets.  

The nationalist movement did not get where it is by nervously positioning itself based upon the latest round of polling. It seized the country by agitating, by talking and talking and talking to millions of people. By explaining their alienation as the fault of malicious schemes by immigrant foreigners and woke degenerates and radical communists. By an avalanche of propaganda, united in narrative purpose (at least until recent fissures following the disastrous Iran war). 

Polling might help with the messaging, but it never determined the message. The left has to tell just as clear a story, with one stark distinction: their villains are invented; ours commit their crimes in broad daylight. Despite this fact, we react with confusing aversion to weaponizing this difference.

Jacobin half knows this. Dial five reads "Use populist rhetoric and choose the right villain," and the whole study rests upon a set of values they assure us “the working class” uniformly bases their politics upon: "anti-elitism" and "respect for traditional institutions and for playing by the rules." Confidence in those institutions sits near a record low, but follow the rest of the logic one more step. 

The other half of rewarding those who play by the rules is punishing those who don't, and no one in this country has broken more rules, more openly and on camera, than the people currently running its government. The researchers are groping towards an answer—anti-elitism, a break with the status quo, a villain—but balkanize their strategy across six dials, as if a political narrative were a beat you mix rather than a story you tell.

So let's turn dial five as far as it will go. I’ll begin with a simple proposal: hang the bastards! By that I mean something specific. The bastards are those who organized the assault on the Capitol, who built a deportation machine that has killed people in our streets and in its camps, who murdered shipwrecked sailors in the water, who bombed a school in Minab, who armed a genocide in Gaza. 

For each of those acts, the United States Code as it stands already provides death as a remedy. My argument is narrow on purpose. It is not that these men deserve to die by some hypothetical revolutionary tribunal for what they have done to working people, although this would certainly be a welcome series of events. What I claim is that their own laws, passed under our current Constitution, demand that the only response to these crimes be that those responsible are tried, convicted, and executed. 

The socialist left should run on prosecuting them, count by count and name by name. No one else will; no one else has the strength, the ability, or the inclination. The Democratic establishment has passed on every chance at accountability since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the War on Terror, upholding the rotten American tradition of forgiving racist murders that dates back at least to the pardon of the veterans of the Confederate rebellion. 

It is hard not to read the left’s current avoidance of this type of direct political conflict as downstream of the worst impulses found in the Democratic Party itself. 

Perhaps more importantly, the voters who will choose the left's candidates in 2028 are already asking for it. The liberal base is out for blood, and is in love with the insurgents. They are right—our job isn’t to correct these impulses, but to organize for them.

A pedant will point out that the federal government hasn't used a rope to carry out an execution since 1963. Fair enough. The title is poetic license. The sentence is anything but.

The Lamentations of the Democratic Base

To be clear, we need to listen to the people, to come to their struggles and articulate exactly what they are struggling for. But it matters a great deal who we're listening to. 

Jacobin's forty thousand were voters of every stripe, Democrats and Republicans and independents and whoever else, and the question put to them was a general election question: which of these two imaginary people would you rather see in office come November? A reasonable thing to want to know if you were placing bets in October with the candidates already decided. 

But if the socialist movement is to adopt a strategy of using electoralism as an effective method for agitation and revolution, which it must, we won’t get anywhere near November without first getting through a Democratic primary. Nearly every socialist electoral victory in the last decade, from AOC to Zohran Mamdani, got into office by winning over the Democratic base first. 

As much as these politicians come out of DSA, their constituents and voting base are not DSA members. The new socialists radicalized by these experiences almost universally began their political progression as Democratic base voters.

That is the effective logic of DSA's electoral strategy on the Democratic ballot line, and it will be our only hope in 2028. Before AOC ever shares a debate stage with JD Vance, she has to get past a cabal of Vichy Democrats—and she'll do it (or won't) with voters the Win-O-Meter casually side-steps as too tainted with education to be worth listening to.

Liberal Currents and the Center for Strategic Politics asked those voters last month what they want from the next Democratic president. And what they want is justice. Seventy-seven percent want members of the Trump administration prosecuted for actions taken by DHS agents, the murderous thugs who carry out its terror. The sniveling fascist Stephen Miller drew seventy-three percent all on his own for his role in the actions of ICE and CBP. Seventy-two percent want prosecutions over the blatantly illegal boat strikes in South America.

Sixty-nine percent want Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth behind bars, and sixty-six percent want accountability for all the chicken hawks who dragged us into war with Iran. Fifty-seven percent want members of both the Trump and the Biden administrations prosecuted over their merciless genocide in Gaza (good!).

Fifty-nine percent said they would feel positively about the military removing Trump from office to "safeguard the Constitution," which tells you less about Democrats' love of juntas than about how few other exits they can see, and how few solutions have been provided by the dregs who try to pass themselves off as party leadership.

What else would anyone expect? The establishment is composed of people who have watched masked DHS agents drag their neighbors out of Home Depot parking lots into concentration camps and gun down protesting American citizens—and responded by sending out press releases. They watched (and voted for) their own party shipping bombs to Israel and then lectured those in campus encampments about civility. They watched a president deny their state's disaster aid out of pure spite, just like the rest of us. 

Unlike the rest of us, this produced no fire in their bellies. Instead, the Democratic establishment, more than anything, seems to be nervous about the revolutionary fervor within the Democratic base, desperate to stamp it out, perhaps through condemning Hasan Piker. But the people still demand justice.

It is with great spite that I say the same poll shows the base is still stubbornly fond of the party's familiar faces: Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg both sit at seventy percent favorable, Gavin Newsom at sixty-three. That is the left's failure, not the voters'. We have not yet given the people anyone better to be fond of, any figure who might believably carry out their will, protect their lives, and, perhaps most importantly, win and crush their enemies. 

It seems clear that the base is casting about for a champion to carry their cause forward, and is unsure of who is capable of doing so. Let me state one obvious fact: not one of those three is going to prosecute anybody (Harris and Buttigieg would be indicting their own former colleagues on the Gaza count, and Newsom spent last year trading pleasantries with Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk on his podcast). But this just means that the first candidate willing to say out loud what these voters already want is going to find an awful lot of people waiting to hear the message.

Then there are the millions who have stopped showing up at all. A person who has decided voting is pointless isn't going to be coaxed back by a precise formulation of immigration reform meant to make consultants swoon. They come back for someone who tells them who did this to them. Who answers their burning questions: who took power from them, and why?—and who promises to back up this identification with concrete action.

And further, the people are eager for names. They will demand promises that those people answer for their crimes. The core of the Democratic Revolutionary community has to be drawn from these two groups, the furious base and the disengaged, while the swing voter comes after, which is fine, since vacillators are always the ones most worth considering last.

We have a fresh example in Florida. Angie Nixon won a statewide Democratic Senate primary this year as an open member of the DSA while being outspent sixteen to one. She did better the less education voters had (take note, Jacobin!), and she won Black voters by thirty points. Nixon did not locate the resonant formulation of anything. She served as an avatar of Democratic Revolution in the South. She pointed at an enemy, got herself arrested in Ron DeSantis' office, and was rewarded with a shot at a Senate seat.

The Win-O-Meter never asks any of this, because its designers were too busy working out what a voter in November might tolerate. Meanwhile, the people who will actually choose the candidates voters might be asked to tolerate holler that they want somebody to pay. 

These Jacobins have no nerve! And what nerve am I asking of Girondin magazine, then? What would I have them tell socialist candidates to run on? What should lead the headlines of their papers and the titles of their videos?

Simple: Hang the Bastards! We socialists are the only ones who can, should, and will do it.

That second sentence likely warrants some explaining. The Democratic establishment had its chances at accountability and passed on every single one. It is a long and inglorious tradition in liberal politics to forgive the grave crimes of oligarchs and nationalist militants. 

I’ve visited the shrine at Washington and Lee University that houses the traitorous bones of Robert E. Lee. He was given forgiveness, even glorification, like all the Confederates, while John Brown was given the rope. This crop of fools is no different than those who made such destructive choices then.

In January 2009, with the torturers of the Bush administration and the crooks of Wall Street in plain view, Barack Obama told the country, "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backward," and essentially nobody was charged. Not a banker held accountable, nor a lawyer thrown in jail. 

Then, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland dithered for nearly two years after January 6th to appoint a special counsel to look at Trump himself, just enough time for the partisan Supreme Court to decide yet another election. 

Every time the reflex is to look forward, which is why the demand for accountability belongs to the left. "Law and order" and "lock her up" were theirs for a decade; we should take both, and this time we intend to collect. 

Abolish the police-state, but leave the cages open long enough to see the fascists thrown inside. We’ll release them when we’re done replacing the prisons with something better under socialist governance.

Their Own Laws

Our enemies have earned a sentence of death by their own actions, under the laws passed under our decrepit constitution. I mean this literally, and I mean the laws as they are. The United States Code in all of its byzantine authoritarianism, passed by Congresses made up of slavers and pedophiles and capitalists, already provides for death as a penalty for most of what follows below.

Geese's Project 2029 proposal—our blueprint for a Democratic Revolutionary government's first term, from adding at least ten seats to the Supreme Court to convening a new constitutional assembly—calls for an Anti-Fascist Prosecutorial Task Force. A task force needs things to do, and there is no reason to wait until January of 2029 to start assigning them targets. 

So what follows is a people's indictment, drafted early. I am not a prosecutor, and Geese is not a grand jury. But most of the evidence was broadcast live, the statutes are public, and the defendants committed their crimes and went on to confess their sins to the whole world on television and the internet.

A word on Marat before we begin. In the summer of 1790, he believed five or six hundred heads would have secured the Revolution, and he warned that a false humanity would cost millions of lives. He was impatient, and he had every reason to be. 

I am willing to be more patient than Marat, but I cannot promise to be more patient than the American people. This is something any candidate seeking to bear the flag of Democratic Revolution ought to understand well. 

The scum named below are technically owed something they never gave to their victims: a trial. I am willing to let these murderers face a fair trial. The evidence is overwhelming, and the cases are clear-cut. Let every fact come out; it will not save them. 

Quite the opposite: a trial is needed, desperately needed, so that every piece of evidence can be paraded publicly. They must hang, and it is indeed one of the tasks of the Democratic Revolutionary movement to hang them, and to help the whole world understand why it must be so.

Count One: January 6th

The Constitution says treason "shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." The statute says a traitor "shall suffer death," or go to prison for no less than five years. In Ex parte Bollman (1807), Chief Justice John Marshall held that levying war requires "an actual assembling of men for the treasonable purpose."

On January 6, 2021, an organized and partly armed crowd assembled, broke into the Capitol, and stopped the count. The only real question is whether that purpose was treasonable, and the counter-revolutionary Washington Presidency answered that for us long ago.

After the Whiskey Rebellion, John Mitchell and Philip Vigol were convicted of treason in 1795 for forcibly resisting a federal excise. John Fries was convicted in 1799 for leading armed resistance to a federal property tax. As Justice Benjamin Curtis later summed up the old rule, "any combination forcibly to oppose the execution of any public law of the United States" is levying war. 

For what it's worth, Washington pardoned Mitchell and Vigol, and Adams pardoned Fries. Even then the story ended with a pardon. Let us end the wretched tradition here, for all that is holy.

The electoral count is the execution of the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act, essential to ensuring the people's choice of President is respected. It is the closest we come to pretending to rule our own lives, as crooked and malformed as our system is. I could think of no act more worthy of the name treason than trying to snuff out these sparks of popular sovereignty. 

Juries have already found the underlying facts. Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 2022, and Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys in 2023, for conspiring "by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States." Trump commuted Rhodes' sentence and pardoned Tarrio on his first day back in office. The facts survive the pardon. What separates seditious conspiracy from treason is the statute, and the statute of limitations.

The five-year limit ran out this past January on nearly every non-capital federal offense committed on January 6th. Capital offenses have no limit at all. One of the only federal January 6th charges still alive is the one which demands perpetrators "shall suffer death." (18 U.S.C. § 2381). Let us follow that logic where it leads us, a saving grace despite the failings of the last several years. 

Who can be charged? Marshall again: once war is actually levied, "all those who perform any part, however minute, or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as traitors." 

This was somewhat narrowed in subsequent case law, but the broader point stands that the force of law reaches past the rioters to the organizers. The fake-elector scheme isn't treason on its own, since it used no force, but it belongs to the conspiracy whose violent act was the assault on the Capitol. 

There are serious objections to be had, and I won't pretend otherwise. The corrupt pardons sold to those who participated will be dealt with further below, but beyond this, Marshall himself warned that treason "should not be extended by construction to doubtful cases." 

The doctrine I'm leaning on is old and out of favor, and one of its most famous outings, at Christiana in 1851, was aimed at men accused of resisting slave catchers. It lost. No American has been convicted of treason since the years after the Second World War, and the last indictment came in 2006. The issues inherent in trying Trump himself I leave to the section on immunity below.

I deny none of these issues. But we are dealing with the highest tasks of a Democratic Revolutionary Government: holding traitors to the people to account, and such stakes require breaking out every weapon we can muster. If the doctrine was good enough to throw at abolitionists, it is good enough for the men who tried to overturn an election. Let us set a precedent for what happens to those who seek to rule over us as petty tyrants. 

Count Two: The Department of Homeland Security

Earlier this year I made the case at length that the goons who stalk our streets, who man our concentration camps, who murder our brothers and sisters, are murderers, all. I will add that the hypothetical prosecution of these thugs is the most popular of all options presented in the Liberal Currents poll, at seventy-seven percent.

The law here is a pair of Reconstruction statutes, written in part to put Klansmen in prison. 18 U.S.C. § 242 makes it a crime to deprive anyone of their rights under color of law, and § 241 makes it a crime to conspire to do so. Both provide that "if death results," the defendant "may be sentenced to death." Excessive force violates the Fourth Amendment, and deliberate indifference to a detainee's medical needs violates due process. 

On January 7, 2026, DHS murdered Renee Good, a mother and legal observer who was peacefully protesting the ethnic cleansing. Less than a month later, Border Patrol agents tackled Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse holding nothing but a phone, pinned him to the ground, and shot him roughly ten times. 

On July 7th an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, on his way to work in Houston. Six days later, agents in Biddeford, Maine, fired through the windshield of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25; he was not the man they were looking for. On September 20th, an ICE agent in Austin shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in the back while he was making a DoorDash delivery, and prosecutors then charged him with assaulting the officer. 

By ABC News's count, immigration agents have shot at least 21 people since Trump took office and killed eight, three of them American citizens. Thirty-seven people died in ICE custody from October 2025 to September 30th of this year, the deadliest on record; at least 56 have died since Trump took office. 

ICE's own death reviews found that staff in Miami failed to order Johnny Noviello's medications, take his vital signs, or examine him; that staff in Florida failed to start CPR on Marie Ange Blaise after she had no pulse; and that Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, 32, in respiratory distress from COVID and pneumonia in Arizona, was managed with an inhaler. In El Paso, the medical examiner ruled the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide: asphyxia from compression of his neck and torso while he was being restrained. 

The agents who pulled the triggers and the officials who let detainees die answer under § 242. For the architects, Miller above all, the route is conspiracy under § 241, and that means proving an agreement. 

Miller has never been shy about saying what he wants, and the agreement is in the public record. In May 2025, after reportedly telling a room of ICE officials to "just go out there and arrest illegal aliens" at Home Depots and 7-Elevens, he went on Fox News to announce "a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day." 

Days after Renee Good was killed, he went back on Fox: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties." And within hours of Border Patrol killing Alex Pretti, he called the dead nurse "a would-be assassin" and a "domestic terrorist." 

He wants us blotted out; he wants a white country empty of those not descended from the original colonizer stock. He wants to kill anyone who stands in the way.  

Count Three: The Boats

Since September of last year, the United States has carried out seventy-nine strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific and killed 238 people. Among those that have been identified by name, we know of are a bus driver, a mototaxi driver, several fishermen, and a futsal player.

The first strike set the pattern. On September 2, 2025, eleven men were aboard a speedboat in the Caribbean. Admiral Frank Bradley consulted a legal adviser and ordered the attack. Two men survived it and clung to the wreckage for about forty-five minutes. Then Bradley ordered another strike, and they died too. The Washington Post reported that Pete Hegseth's instruction had been to kill everybody; Bradley later told Congress there was no such order. 

All I know is that some set of nebbish “warriors” sat behind a computer screen and accepted orders from morons and monsters to kill people from the sky against every code the military has ever written down. They did not care when they were treading water for their lives, when all that was moral and right demanded mercy. The point was to take their lives away without ever having to look them in the face. 

The administration's legal cover is particularly flimsy: a classified opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel claiming the cartels are waging a "non-international armed conflict" against the United States. This does happen to provide the people's necktie multiple routes to slither around the Fascists’ necks. 

Suppose we grant the truth of the matter: there is no armed conflict between the nebulous cartels and the American people. In such a case, the administration is left with no war and thus no combatants. That makes the strikes premeditated killing on the high seas: first-degree murder under 18 U.S.C. § 1111. The penalty is "death or imprisonment for life.”

Now suppose we indulge the administration's fancy, and carry on with the fiction of an imaginary war. Then the law of war applies, and the War Crimes Act makes it murder to kill people "placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause." Two men clinging to a wrecked hull for three quarters of an hour are the quite literal textbook case. If death results, the defendant is "subject to the penalty of death," and the statute expressly reaches members of the U.S. armed forces. Either path leads to the same destination, and is thus fine by me. 

The defendants are the chain of command below the president: Hegseth, Bradley, and everyone who passed the orders along and carried them out. Every fucking one. Superior orders have never been a defense to a manifestly unlawful order, and it is hard to imagine an order more manifestly unlawful than one to kill the survivors. 

They chose to enter into the imperialist military, and shrank from their one opportunity to redeem their choice. Let them follow their commanders to the gallows.

Count Four: Minab

On February 28, a missile strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing 156 people, including 120 schoolchildren. A preliminary Pentagon review found the United States likely responsible and blamed outdated coordinates from the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

Last month a UN fact-finding mission went further, finding "reasonable grounds to believe" the strike was a war crime, that the school was "the intended point of impact," and that the United States "directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object." Witnesses describe a second strike landing where survivors had taken shelter after the first.

The War Crimes Act folds in the Hague Regulations of 1907, among them Article 25, which prohibits "the attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended." Where death results, the offense is capital. 

Some might raise the objection that artificial intelligence was likely used in carrying out this attack. This will not protect them. Ultimately, bloody human hands are the ones who carried out the attacks, just as stupid human minds began the damned war in the first place. Human beings, future defendants, picked the target, ordered it hit twice, and knew of the operation taking place while doing nothing to stop it, and in fact allowed it to happen. 

Those who pressed the buttons will not be spared. God will condemn these child-killers, and so must we. They are the lowest of the low, and they will burn in hell. The least they deserve is to hang by the neck until dead. 

Count Five: Gaza

The federal genocide statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1091, carries death where death results, has no statute of limitations, and reaches American nationals. In September of last year, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Officials in two American administrations supplied the bombs. 

It's not quite as simple as that, though. Genocide is a crime of intent. Section 1091 demands proof of a "specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part" a people as such, and most genocide cases die on that element, because most genocidaires have the sense not to make clear their vile intentions, hiding instead behind the fog of war. Israel's leaders did not bother. 

Two days after October 7th, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a "complete siege" of Gaza (no electricity, no food, no fuel), explaining that "we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly." Three days later, President Isaac Herzog declared that "it is an entire nation out there that is responsible." 

As the ground invasion began, Benjamin Netanyahu told the country to "remember what Amalek has done to you," summoning the people to scripture that commands Israel to annihilate "both man and woman, infant and suckling." He complained that "no one will allow us to starve two million people, even though that might be just and moral until they return the hostages." 

The statute lists "conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group" right alongside killing. The International Court of Justice quoted Gallant and Herzog by name when it ordered Israel to prevent genocide in January 2024, and the UN Commission of Inquiry found that Herzog, Netanyahu, and Gallant had all incited it.

The Americans who armed them need not have shared that intent (although many surely did), only known it. Since the Srebrenica trials, the Hague tribunal has held that an accomplice to genocide must know of the killers' intent but need not share it. Our own Supreme Court said in Rosemond v. United States (2014) that one who "actively participates in a criminal scheme knowing its extent and character intends that scheme's commission." 

The Biden administration knew the extent and character of the Israeli’s crimes because it was told, again and again, by everyone up to and including itself. In December 2023 Biden whinged to donors about Israel's "indiscriminate bombing." That same month Blinken twice declared an emergency to rush tanks and artillery ammunition to Israel without waiting on Congress. 

On January 31, 2024, in a lawsuit naming Biden, Blinken, and Austin as defendants, a federal judge in Oakland wrote that statements by Israeli officials "indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people," and implored the three men "to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege." 

That spring, USAID and the State Department's own refugee bureau told Blinken that Israel was blocking American humanitarian aid. On May 8th Biden conceded that "civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs." Two days later, Blinken told Congress he did "not currently assess" that Israel was restricting aid at all. 

They knew what the Israelis wanted to do, the whole world did, and still they sent bombs and guns and intelligence. That is the crime of crimes, spelled out for all to see.

Joe Biden, in his elderly fearfulness, issued preemptive pardons covering his family from targeted prosecution. He also pardoned his chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and the members of the January 6th committee. 

Not on that list, and so shielded by nothing, are former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and genocide Joe himself. The list certainly does not end there. Fifty-seven percent of Democratic voters want members of both administrations prosecuted over Gaza. Doing so shows the country we mean business and that our program is no partisan score-settling. Further, it puts the indictment squarely against the Democratic establishment, where Geese has always stood. 

No Democrat who served Joe Biden will ever bring this count. When I say we are the only ones who can do it, this is what I mean. If you want to drain the swamp, here lie the creatures of the black lagoon, the genocidaires of our generation.  

What Stands in the Way

There are two great legal roadblocks between these defendants and a verdict. As a general principle, the socialist movement should bend to neither.

The first is Trump v. United States (2024), in which the Supreme Court granted the president immunity for his "official acts." In practice, it shields Trump's own orders as commander in chief, which is why the counts on Minab and the boat strikes fall easiest on his subordinates. 

The decision can be overturned by an expanded Court (the Project 2029 proposal calls for no fewer than ten new seats), narrowed so that Trump's specific conduct falls outside the definition of an official act, or simply ignored by a militant movement and the president it elects. 

Any government of a Democratic Revolution must treat the judiciary as a field of struggle, where the people's will can be declared "legal" just as the oligarchs' will has always been assumed sacred.

The second is the pardon, and it is the likeliest obstacle of them all. Trump has already pardoned some 1,500 January 6th defendants and seventy-seven co-conspirators of his 2020-2021 coup. Nobody should expect him to leave office in January 2029 without pardoning everyone who might ever be asked to stand trial, along with anyone else willing to pay tribute to the Don, almost certainly himself included. 

Biden made the practice respectable, in his bipartisan, Delaware fashion, by handing out preemptive pardons on his way out the door. Trump will not be shy about following the weak-kneed example.

Preemptive pardons are older than most people think, and their history should make us angry. The very case that calls the pardon power "unlimited," Ex parte Garland (1866), concerned a Confederate senator whom Andrew Johnson pardoned for his treason before anyone had charged him with it. Reconstruction died in no small part because its enemies were forgiven before they were ever tried. We should not, must not, make the same mistake again.

There are practical answers. A pardon covers the offenses it names and no more, so every proclamation must be read closely and every crime outside its scope prosecuted. Trump's January 6th proclamation, for instance, pardons "individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol," language so sloppy that Lawfare has cataloged the ways Trump’s own Justice Department has had to stretch it. 

The last president to pardon an insurrection wholesale was Andrew Johnson, whose 1868 Christmas Amnesty forgave every Confederate, an equally traitorous decision. Whether a president can pardon himself has never been tested, nor has Trump’s obvious policy of selling pardons to the highest bidder ever been challenged, as it should be. 

And there's an irony to use. This administration has itself declared that the pardons Biden signed by autopen are void. Very well. We will take them at their word that a pardon is a piece of paper a later government is free to question. 

These pardons mean nothing to anybody but the people they save from accountability. They are crooked, warped, disgusting things worthy only of contempt and obliteration. To the dustbin with them.

The Tasks of a Revolutionary Community

Some of what this regime has done lies beyond the reach of any statute, and it's worth being honest about where the law runs out. The criminal wars, the denial of disaster aid, the endless corruption. 

There is a truly limitless list of the crimes of the past several administrations; not just Trump, but every President going back decades. If we are breaking out calls to hang the bastards, surely George W. Bush and his cronies top the list of bastards.

But the thing about our Constitutional system is that reform is utterly impossible. A congressman may vote to overturn an election, a president may starve the states that voted against him of disaster aid, and the Constitution protects them both. None of it is a loophole. 

The document was written by slavers to protect property from majorities, and it is working exactly as designed. The fiends of finance capital like it that way; they profit hand over fist while changing very little beyond gutting the meager administrative agencies haphazardly built over the past century. Everyone else, from the unions to the peaceniks to liberals to socialists, finds themselves stalled in the same sclerotic mud. 

There is no accountability for the elites. There are only the patronizing plans of managers and would-be managers, tinkering with dials to appeal to the broadest pool of voters in the aggregate.

The Project 2029 proposal answers this with a demand for a democratic constituent assembly and an entirely new constitution. The docket above is where that project starts, because a government that can't punish the people who tried to overthrow it will not survive long enough to write anything. 

It will take an executive empowered and intimidated by the mass movement that put it in office, and a movement that knows exactly what it wants done. The tasks of a revolutionary community begin exactly where the statute book ends.

So, back to Jacobin, and to the question I put to it earlier. What should lead the headlines of their papers and the titles of their videos? This. Count by count and name by name. 

Every left candidate running in 2028 should be asked whether they will prosecute those who supplied the bombs that slaughtered the people of Palestine, who built a continental network of concentration camps, who attempted to end democracy once and for all (as they will again). Every candidate of the left should say yes, and say it loudly and often.

Jacobin has a staff of serious people, sure of their ability to rationally persuade the liberal intelligentsia. But the people are past all that. Show the voters one candidate who promises to try Pete Hegseth for murder and another who promises a path to citizenship for immigrants who stayed out of trouble. I have a guess as to which one the Win-O-Meter will like better.

Marat thought a false humanity would cost millions of lives. On current evidence, he may be proven right again. We have a little over two years to cultivate sufficiently ruthless demands so that we all might live, and it starts with deciding, out loud, what we intend to do with them.

Hang the bastards!