This Will be a Brutal Year

by Bill Lasarow

“We live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

— Presidential aide Stephen Miller, New York Times, 01/06/26

The current president’s pardons issue this message: “If you break the law to protect me, you will be supported, and if you uphold the law to restrain me, you will be persecuted.”

—New York Times Editorial, 01/01/26

Molly Crabapple, “George Floyd protests,” 2020. Courtesy of the New York Review of Books.

Kudos to the citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Kudos to the now-adult victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Kudos to Marc Elias. Kudos to Canadian PM Mark Carney. Kudos to Rachel Maddow’s ongoing survey of citizen resistance around the country and her team’s transition to MS NOW. Maybe the most important point is that these kudos barely scratch the surface. The national backlash continues to build, as it must, and will for years to come. Right through the mid-terms and then on to the next cycle. The very public Congressional testimony of Jack Smith made this abundantly clear, just as sub-zero weather hit much of the country. In Thousand Oaks I picked my wife a bouquet of fresh roses (yes, we will prune them … next week; lots of plants mistook our January as the arrival of spring) that have been fresh on our table for more than a week. These are not late season stragglers, and our millions of demonstrators are not holdovers from an earlier era.

It is fair to say that, speaking as a proud Boomer, this is our kids (and grandkids’) world. But the year 2026 is one that has long concerned me. We will celebrate the 250th Fourth of July, hooray.

Taryn Simon, “The White House Pen,” 2015, photograph. © Taryn Simon courtesy of the artist and the New York Times.

Now some reality: what we have seen entering the second year of the Fascist Party of America’s rule enters its first full year with a Fascist Party-designed budget. Indeed, this commentary on what is to come in 2026 began taking shape well before the end of 2025.

The stories of rapid expansion of what is to be the concentration camp system, or gulag if you will, designed not for immigrants but American citizens are now multiplying. It is easy to dispose of those voters if you know how. The murder of Renee Good (a last name, as some say, from central casting) summed it up when Caligula, at his most lying evil, without having so much as the victim’s name, declared her to be a radical domestic terrorist. Naturally, as the truth-telling videos emerged, he proceeded to instruct his willingly compliant AG to launch DOJ inquiries into the dead victim … oh, and her spouse. “Fucking bitch” indeed. As for the killer, nada. Such a joke, especially as Good’s dad was a MAGA voter.

Now we must process Alex Pretti, a bolder warning shot at us American citizens. Native born. An ICU nurse. White. And Liberal, liberal, liberal. You betcha’. Hey, my name is Spartacus.

Alejandro Cartagena, “Carpooler #21” from the series “Carpoolers,” 2014 photograph. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Do not flinch from the malevolent, mafia-driven actions taken by Caligula’s networkers. And don’t assume that their current move is of any tactical value other than to seize attention and to provoke. And tease. They know their boss. They let him be the boss. He alone wields the power of the pardon.

Where will the polls be in three or six months? What will they look like after Labor Day? How positively enormous, not forgetting the already enormous appeal of Nancy Pelosi’s purposive, relentlessly for-the-children brand of liberalism. Not forgetting the organization Indivisible’s essential role. Not forgetting a whole national network of more localized organizations, all dedicated to the very principles of the American Founders, to the progressive reforms of the administrations from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR to Johnson.

I made this point a long time ago: Stephen Miller for the first fiscal year has the vastly increased budget control that allows for a continuing influx of new ICE agents and a large network of concentration camps intended to harbor not just non-citizen immigrants, but tens of thousands of white American liberals.

David Deweerdt, “Untitled (06),” ink and acrylic on mylar, 39 3/8 x 27 1/2”. Courtesy of Ryan Graff Contemporary, San Francisco.

The shootings could become mass events (to our eyes; mass demonstrations in Iran have so far led to over 6,000 killings and 40,000 incarcerations) as the November elections draw close. Add together the budgets overseen by Miller, Noem, and Patel their group of annual budgets leap from about $9 Billion to over $40 Billion. This is the very definition ofjj big and intrusive government, not exactly the conservative idea of small government.

The corruption of certain officers of the law is rooted in their racism and sexism, a return to the era preceding the success of the Civil Rights movement. The descendants of the Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society have been there all along, never gone away, but never before had they seized control of the US government. Now we are dealing with the worst American crisis since the Civil War, and the year of State Terror Has Arrived.

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.