Our Neo-Orwellian Regime

A TragiComedy Where Black is White, Invasions are Invented, and Habeas Corpus Means the President Can Deport Who He Wants

If all’s well that ends well, certain things—bound as they are by political gravity—are almost sure to end poorly.  One of those things is lying, misrepresenting facts, saying “the thing that is not”.  Stupefying incompetence is another.  Generally speaking, truth breaks through the barrier of bullshit, and reasserts its big beautiful head, in the end.  I may be wrong, but I assume that that rule still holds today.  You tell me. 

Photo by Ilker Ozmen on Unsplash

As usual in this flooded zone, it’s hard to know where to start.

South Africa, Where Black is White and Vice-Versa

So let’s start with South Africa.  What a startling thing it was to see a group of ethnic white Afrikaners from South Africa coming into the country as refugees by the good graces of an administration that has shut our doors to those who face political persecution!  Not only that, the group gets red carpet treatment on arrival, with senior administration officials including the deputy Secretary of State waiting at the airport to greet them.  Meantime, refugees from elsewhere around the world who had been vetted by the system are now blocked.  Even Afghan nationals who risked their lives supporting Americans during twenty years of war that ravaged their country now face deportation.  

What possible criteria might justify this selection?  For the record, this is a rhetorical question.

If that weren’t enough, in another doozy of an Oval Office meeting, our kayfabe president—characteristically cocksure about facts that are not true—chose to school his South African counterpart about supposed goings on in his country.  By now, foreign heads of state invited to the Oval Office for a private meeting should be prepared for what’s coming.  In an on-camera ambush reminiscent of the shameful attack on the president of Ukraine in late February, a video of uncertain origin purporting to show graves of white South African farmers killed in racially-motivated violence was shown, punctuated with false claims of genocide by the gracious host.  South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, trying to make sense of a confusing situation, remained calm, even-keeled, and professional throughout.  Importantly, he refused to be goaded into what many observers would have seen as justified outrage. (Imagine the tables turned!)  To the extent the images in the video showed what they purported to (credible reports suggested they did not¹), any actual graves were more likely to be of black South African workers than white South African farm owners.  

Criminal violence in South Africa is indeed widespread, but the vast majority of its victims are black.  While the Apartheid regime in South Africa ended in 1990, its legacy of bitter discrimination continues to this day.  The country remains deeply unequal and divided along racial lines.  South African whites, who represent roughly 7% of the population, still own well over half of the country’s land and control much of the national economy and wealth.  Meanwhile, a disproportionate share of black South Africans, who represent over 80% of the population, remain poor, unemployed, and—practically if no longer formally—disenfranchised.  If one used objective, color-blind criteria, it’s pretty clear which group is more deserving of asylum.  

But in the parallel reality inhabited by our president, and emitted like a kind of nonstop smoke screen of mendacity, black and white are flipped.  In this world of alternative facts, attacks (real and alleged) against privileged ethnic whites whose land ownership is anchored in Apartheid’s structural racism, is the greatest crime of all.  I wonder why.

Here I note that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a native of South Africa (from its wealthiest white classes) who left his country the year before Apartheid ended, and a known purveyor of racist propaganda, also attended the meeting.  Seeing him standing behind the couch in the television footage, I wondered to myself in what capacity he was attending.  As a “special government employee” charged with dismantling US government protections against the incursions of private interests?  Or as a private citizen using the peerless leverage he enjoys with the president he purchased, to hawk his Starlink wares or to pressure the South African government to buy them?  I also wondered whether these dueling capacities amounted to a distinction without a difference in the current environment of deepening corruption. And, for that matter, whether he will achieve his dream of building the same kind of patrimonial capitalist system in his adopted country that he left behind in his native home: only family, friends, and certain other select groups need apply. 

The Venezuelan Invasion

The problem with the administration’s use of the word “invasion” in connection with the flow of undocumented immigrants into our country is that it’s meant to be taken literally, not metaphorically.  Concretely, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 enables the president to authorize emergency measures in the case of a “declared war or enemy invasion”.  These measures include “restraining” or “removing” citizens of the hostile nation².  On March 15, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in connection to the criminal gang from Venezuela called Tren de Aragua, asserting it had operational ties with the Venezuelan government and the two were acting in cahoots.  This assertion underlies the controversial arrest and deportation without due process of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members to the Salvadoran gulag, CICOT.  In April, a declassified memo reflecting the consensus of the US government’s intelligence community took issue with this assertion.³  In short, the considered consensus found no demonstrable ties between the criminal gang and the Venezuelan government, and certainly no operational ones.  The administration’s action has been legally challenged and blocked by a judge for this and other reasons.  While it feels almost silly to have to state a plain fact as though it were controversial, we are not currently at war and this is not an enemy invasion, at least not one deliberately organized and directed by a foreign power.

Anyone who has followed Venezuela’s political implosion over the past quarter century knows that the administration’s assertion was, to put it euphemistically, a stretch.  The intelligence community was exceedingly cautious and conservative in describing its evidence-based conclusions.  (I suspect that behind closed doors many intelligence analysts believe the administration is knowingly twisting the facts so as to justify the flagrant misuse of the Alien Enemies Act).  Unsurprisingly, it now faces political pressure to change its tune.⁴  And to think that I thought we had learned the lesson of what happens when intelligence is “fixed” in this way.  The fact is the Venezuelan government barely controls the capital city and its own inner circle, much less any one of dozens of criminal groups and syndicates inside and outside the country. 

At one time the richest country in South America with the largest proven oil reserves in the world and a magnet for immigration, Venezuela has been transformed by a criminal, corrupt-to-the-core, authoritarian regime into a borderline (if not full-blown) failed state.  As a result, roughly 25% of its population—close to 8 million Venezuelans—have been forced to flee the country over the past decade plus.  Most have fled to neighboring countries in South America, notably Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, but some have come north to the United States.  Acknowledging this political reality, the US government had granted about 600,000 Venezuelans permission to reside legally in the United States in what is called temporary protected status (TPS).  The Trump administration has since stripped more than half of these people of their protected status, and threatened to deport them.  So long as the thuggish regime of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro remains in place, many of these people would face a grim fate at home.

The ironies multiply.  As a former American diplomat who spent almost 15 straight years serving in South America, one is that the United States under our current president reminds me of Venezuela under the charismatic authoritarian leader Hugo Chavez—the very man who set his country decisively on its delusional course of self-destruction.  First elected in 1998, Chavez promised the forgotten mass of Venezuelans a big beautiful bonanza—of revenge against corrupt elites if not exactly riches.  Along the way, he dismantled the country’s democratic institutions piece by piece—its independent judiciary, free press, autonomous congress, constitutional limits on running for president etc.—and triggered his country’s slow-motion collapse. He died of cancer in office in 2013, handing the frayed reins of his crumbling country to his incompetent vice-president, Nicolas Maduro.  For his part, Maduro has since stolen at least two elections and clung to power based on criminal deals and outright repression while his country has almost literally fallen apart around him. 

A preview of coming attractions in the United States?

A Quick Note on Habeas Corpus

Distinguished Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem proposed a fanciful definition of habeas corpus during her May 20 Senate testimony: “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country…”.⁵  New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan had to jump in and, like a high school teacher correcting a glib freshman student who was winging it, read aloud an accurate definition of that centrally important latin phrase for the record.  Like many other observers, I was so stunned by what I heard that my head was spinning.  In fact, at first I thought she was joking.  How could she not be?  She is a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed cabinet secretary!

Only the subject is dead serious.  Habeas corpus is absolutely foundational to our legal system and democratic form of government.  One could argue it is the cornerstone concept protecting individual freedom against the potential tyranny of the state: the right to know what you’re being accused of and to stand in body before one’s accuser in court.  In other words, the right not to be kidnapped off the streets by masked individuals who may or may not be police, detained indefinitely without formal charges, and (in certain cases) deported to a prison in some tyrannical tinpot foreign country and left there to rot out of sight out of mind.  That’s right, many of us have already stopped paying attention.

It turns out willful ignorance, incompetence, and the absolute absence of qualifications really are the principal requirements for service at the senior-most levels of this administration. The more senior the position, the deeper the levels of ignorance and incompetence required. 

The problem here, as I suggested in the beginning, is that these kinds of situations, assuming they end, rarely end well.

1. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/24/nx-s1-5408981/trumps-debunked-burial-site-video-reopens-wounds-says-victims-son. Many other such reports rebutting the false allegations are in circulation.

2. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/alien-enemies-act-explained

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/us/trump-venezuela-gang-ties-spy-memo.html

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/politics/gabbard-intelligence-venezuelans-tren-de-aragua-trump.html

5. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kristi+noem+habeas+corpus&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:ef1bd117,vid:qPK41OPq6VY,st:0