In the Bible, Acts 9:5, Jesus appeared to the Jew Saul, a known persecutor of Christians, and said, “Saul, Saul, it is hard for you to kick against the pricks”, implying Saul was fighting his own conscience.

That personal encounter with Jesus converted him and, as Paul, the Apostle, he became the best proselytizer in Christian history.

I am not a religious man, but it has always seemed to me that Jesus’ message had great application in life, where those who elect to fight great power must expect hard treatment from it.

The Empire has always used nefarious men and means to break its critics but under Trump there has been a proliferation of an extremely noxious type of prick against whom one has to kick.

Vice President J.D. Vance is one. A man of malleable principles and acolyte of Peter Thiel who, having vilified the Imperial Boob later kowtowed to him to buy advancement. A slick sycophant, he uses his polished frat boy style to cover his contempt for the underclass, his lust for money, and for ruling class prestige.

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, is another. Son of enemies of revolutionary Cuba, he absorbed the contempt of the well off for the poor and oppressed, adopted the Capitalist Americanism of right wing haters of free Cuba, and rode that bitterness to power.

Mullin, Hegseth, Vance. By his picks thou shalt know him. Everyone a careerist phony, a poseur, and a cold-blooded opportunist. Perfect specimens to serve a criminal ruling class.

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, is the poster boy of members of this set with his pseudo tough guy act, his crass, sexist style, and the unfiltered hardman horseshit he excretes from his pie hole. He shows an uglier horse’s ass persona in public than the rest.

MarkWayne Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security is closest to being the macho tough Hegseth mimes. He relishes showing off his no fear face, predicated on a brief MMA run. Brash, coarse, aggro, he once invited a union head to duke it out in a hearing.

Scott Bessent, Secretary of Treasury, represents the soft side of the gang: suave, well coifed and tailored, his comme il faut style conceals a hard-case Capitalist hedge fund pirate whose intent is to use big money to break nations and people for the Boss.

Doug Burgrum, Secretary of Agriculture, is the embodiment of a man hired to wreck the outfit he runs. As boss of the Forest Service, he hides his drive to cut and cash out all the remaining reserves of Public Land forest to enrich the Timber Beasts.

Finally, in this age when we are assured that one doesn’t have to have a prick to be one, we have Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education. Being CEO of WWE, the ‘wrestling’ goon show, was her preparation for guiding the education of America’s children.

What is it that binds these mutations together and gives them their nasty affinity for each other and their ugly, demented boss? They all have their quirks and quiddities, yet they are united in a concerted effort to make the most evil possible ends prevail. That said, no one—pace, Iago—does evil just to be doing it.

It’s that they have a common purpose and motive, and are united by deep, vitriolic hatred of the mass of unwashed humanity, of the abused, denied, unprivileged billions who, in their hunger and need, physical and emotional, appall and frighten them. Coming from relatively great privilege, they know and fear the stark truth that the exploited and deprived want what they have always had, given them without real strife or bitter struggle, as their birthright.

There is nothing new or strange in this. It has always been the curse of humanity that randomly empowered rich took everything and then denied it all to the masses of downtrodden and poor. The economist and wit Galbraith said “The modern Conservative is engaged in one of Man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior justification for selfishness.”

Financial cabals have always bought politicians to defraud the people, cheating them of the vast profits and massive benefits their labor produces, and that criminal elites hijack and hoard.

In America, as in all empires, the rich appropriated all the nation’s bounty, despite The People’s ownership of Public Lands. They broke unions, and paid bare survival wages, with both parties on the take in their iron control. As Emma Goldman said a hundred years ago, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

Americans have never experienced real catastrophe. The Great Depression, their one taste of hardship, is unknown to them now. They have no capacity, no standards, to judge the dire peril they are in, and can’t envision what war and disaster might be like.

The whole people is troubled by a sense that things are seriously wrong, but remains captive to the deeply inculcated myth that if the politics are adjusted, all will be well. All will never be well. The Empire has crossed the threshold of systemic failure and entered a locked trajectory to dissolution. Breakdown is certain.

Predatory, imperial Capitalism is not modifiable or reformable, and nothing can brake the wheels of history. Only violence, economic or military, can check the monstrous arrogance of the American Empire. The individual, trapped like a fly in amber, can only resist, however he is able, its fixed, inexorable death quest.

William of Orange, his forces slaughtered by Phillip II’s imperial Spain said, “It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere”. Yet even with no hope, the principled will kick against the pricks.