#michael eastman

[a-state-of-bliss]

'Urban Luminosity' by Michael Eastman

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Michael Eastman, Buenos Aires, 2017

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From Made in America

Michael Eastman

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Abstract Wall #2, Havana. Photo by Michael Eastman

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Michael Eastman. Reflections. New York. 2011

Digital C-print

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Black and White in Color

Michael Eastman, 1980

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Michael Eastman - Blue Bedroom, Havana, 1999

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Railing, Photo by Michael Eastman, 1982

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Blue Bedroom, Havana, 1999

- Michael Eastman

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Michael Eastman

[a-state-of-bliss]

Barcelona Courtyard by Michael Eastman (1996)

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[thephotoregistry]

From Made in America

Michael Eastman

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i t, 1990 📺 dir. tommy lee wallace

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Katherine Stewart at The New Republic:

Even before he took office, Donald Trump spoke of emergency: America is in the grip of a “woke” and weaponized federal government, he warned. Then came the catch: With the nation in such a state, the normal rules weren’t going to apply anymore. In the weeks since he has taken office, they haven’t, and we’ve seen the result: The president has set up opportunities for grift through meme coins and other means; he has violated administrative laws and usurped the power of the purse from Congress; he appears to be turning the Department of Justice into his personal legal team; and his billionaire co-president, Elon Musk, is involved in decisions related to agencies (supposedly) regulating his businesses, just to name a few. The goal posts have shifted so far that they can no longer be spotted on the playing field.

Those who study autocracy will tell you: All this talk of emergency is an emergency in itself. The road to authoritarianism is paved with this trope—the dire pending calamity that only the strongman has seen, and which only he can solve. The idea of a shared predicament adds gloss to the unthinkable, so that it starts to seem reasonable: Your pets aren’t safe living in the same neighborhood as Haitians, so 20 million people need to be deported, posthaste. The emergency, should it come, may not be entirely real. What is real is that before you know it, this rhetorical bait and switch has cleared the way for the further consolidation of authoritarian rule. It’s never been a more important time to learn to recognize this trick, and learn to decode it. Even as we speak, the preparation appears to be underway. President Trump recently earned another cycle of disgust by posting a paraphrase of a quote traditionally attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Whether or not Napoleon said it, he certainly meant it. He came to power in a 1799 coup on the pretext that the French republic faced an emergency. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, meant it in the same way, when he invoked the quote to justify the mass murder of 77 people, most of them young people at a summer camp.

The rhetoric of the emergency has been a part of MAGA from the beginning. In an influential essay published pseudonymously in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, the essayist and former speechwriter Michael Anton described the Clinton-Trump contest as “The Flight 93 Election.” A triumph for Clinton, he intoned, would be the moral equivalent of a terrorist attack on the United States. In the face of such a threat, any and all means of resistance were called for; it was time to rush the cockpit. Anton was recently confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s nominee for director of policy planning.

The same language showed up again in Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for a “conservative” administration coordinated by the Heritage Foundation. The federal bureaucracy has been weaponized, the document warns, and the wokesters are on the cusp of seizing power. The next president has at most two years to save the country. Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the project, menaced that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” An internal document prepared by staffers and fellows at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank where Russell Vought prepared for his return as Trump’s director of Office of Management and Budget, listed as top priorities “promoting Christian nationalism” and invoking the Insurrection Act as a means of mobilizing the military to put down domestic protest. The radicalized intellectuals behind MAGA didn’t just fall into this kind of authoritarian claptrap on their own steam. The trope of the emergency has a long history, upon which they’ve ably drawn. It’s all there in the annals of the Claremont Institute, a think tank with deep connections to MAGA and the Trump administration. (Claremont board member John Eastman, for example, was “co-conspirator 2” in the charges special counsel Jack Smith laid against Trump for conspiring to commit election fraud in 2021.)

Two twentieth-century political philosophers figure centrally in the backstory of the Claremont Institute and allied intellectuals at the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, and elsewhere. The one they don’t mind talking about is Leo Strauss. A German-Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually landed at the University of Chicago, Strauss is important to the men of Claremont chiefly for the distinction he draws between “exoteric” and “esoteric” political philosophy. The exoteric stuff, as the men of Claremont appear to understand it, is what you tell the masses, that is, the people who show up at rallies and sit in the pews of conservative churches. The esoteric message, they seem to believe, is for the initiates, the Ivy-educated cadre that may be expected to assume command of the machinery of the state. But the thinker who arguably matters more in understanding the radicalized MAGA intellectual is Carl Schmitt. A conservative Catholic with a sex-addiction problem who managed to get himself excommunicated from the church, Schmitt defined a genuine sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Which is a nice way of saying “he who is above the law.” Schmitt also articulated the importance of the “state of emergency” as a means of separating out the genuine sovereign from the effete liberals who would otherwise betray the people and give in to the enemies of the state. He associated these woke wimps with the rationalist German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he accuses of trying to base the legitimacy of the state on reason and liberal values. All this is music to the ears of Claremont intellectuals, who vie with one another in their condemnations of Hegel and the rational “administrative state,” which they associate with the dread evil of wokeism. For example, Charles Kesler, the longtime editor of the Claremont Review, implicitly follows Schmitt when he identifies the administrative state with all that is bad in America. It is helpful to know that Schmitt was a full-on Nazi. When Hitler declared an emergency and seized control of the government in 1933, Schmitt was exultant. At last, the ghost of Hegel has been killed off, he enthused. He lobbied hard for a position as adviser to the Nazi government, and he did his part to condemn the work of Jewish scholars.

Tyrant 47’s talk of “emergencies” as a tool to use to stifle freedoms should be a serious concern.

[dirtyriver]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 40th Anniversary Comics Celebration, 72-page one-shot featuring contributions by various creators associated to the series like Jim Lawson, Ciro Nieli, Tristan Jones, Paul Harmon, Steve Lavigne, Andy Suriano, Ronda Pattison, Pablo Tunica, Freddie E. Williams II, Sophie Campbell, Tom Waltz, Lloyd Goldfine, Khary Randolph, Emilio Lopez, Dan Duncan, Erik Burnham, Sarah Myer, Luis Antonio Delgado, Chris Allan and more.

Main cover by Peter Laird (old unused pencils) and Kevin Eastman, variant covers by Sophie Campbell, Isaac and Esau Escorza, Simon Bisley, Michael Dialynas, Vincenzo Federici, Khary Randolph, Emilio Lopez, Michael Cho, Dave Wachter, and Ben Bishop