Sad Irony

by Bill Lasarow

August 30, 2025

Valerie Hegarty, “Stove with 4th of July Cake and Teapot (The Covid Diaries Series), 2020, foamcore, cardboard, paper-maché, magic-sculpt, wire, acrylic mediums, acrylic paint, 55 x 36 x 27”. Courtesy of the artist.

America, the beating heart of the democracy revolution for 250 years, is rapidly forming a secret police force — a gestapo if you will — and constructing a network — a gulag — of detention centers. Let’s call them what they are: concentration camps.

A word to the not-so Supreme Court, since nearly all lower court judges do seem to understand this not very complicated truth. Things like gestapos and concentration camps are not consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Not remotely close to it. Not in its plain language, not legalistically, not nuttin’.

Yet the 2025/26 fiscal year budget for the federal government has been funded by Congress to spend $170 billion on just such an anti-Contitutional system. Congress and the not-so Supreme Court have stepped aside as the dictator overtly politicizes the Pentagon with test runs in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with more assault plans waiting in the wings. With the new numbers dwarfing anything the evil empire of the Soviet Union ever spent on its system of totalitarian suppression, this will not be a system that anyone will return from once absorbed by it. Think these first several months have been troubling? The fun really gets started with the new fiscal year, November 1, 2025.

Mark Bradford, “Amendment #8,” 2014, mixed media, 48 1⁄4 × 60”. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and © 2014, Mark Bradford. Test to the 8th Amendment: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Are you a high school student writing a column for the school paper? Are you a successful attorney who volunteers some of your free time to the ACLU? Perhaps you are a celebrity accustomed to the applause and accolades of a vast public? Maybe you publish a nice little art platform like SquareCylinder? Constitutional rights today exist only on paper. No mater how innocent, good hearted, or publicly known you may be, once you are delivered into this system you will be released from it only at the pleasure of those who run that system, and ultimately only if the dictator points his thumb up. Most likely you will disappear into it, never to be seen again. Miranda rights, due process, cruel and unusual punishment, even a call to your attorney? Inconveniences now dispensed with.

So while most (no, not all) media discussion revolves around the Big Bad Bill’s tax provisions going mostly to the 1% and shrinkage of Medicaid for the 50%, both topics legitimately important, that oppression-funding $170 billion detail remains too abstract and radical for most Americans to come to grips with. No matter what happens in next year’s mid-term elections the die has been cast. It will take more, far more, than a resistant Democratic House majority to prevent it from happening. Such a majority can only slow it down and, with sufficient political will, begin the process of reversal. But that is the necessary starting point.

Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire: Destruction,” 1836, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 63 1/2”. Courtesy of the New York Historical.

Without at least that, however, the glide path will remain open no matter what the majority of American voters think. And within the three years leading up to 2028 the Founders’ vision will not be blurry but blinded, and the republic that they founded will be obliterated. Towards that end, the so-called Republican Party, today in fact the Fascist Party of America, is busy working to rig the upcoming 2026 mid-term and render elections for the foreseeable future moot and the America conceived by the Founders dead, dead, dead.

Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.