Smash And Grab

A Conversation With Nikhil Pal Singh From Caracas to Minnesota, from Iran and Cuba to the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, from the Persian Gulf to the waters of the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, Donald Trump and his henchmen are collapsing US foreign military and domestic policing operations into a single, unified domain of imperial impunity. A domain where anything goes; where Trump and his minions, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and US ‘Homeland Security’ chiefs, consider themselves free to carry out military/policing operations without restraint, largely immune from Congressional oversight, and beyond the reaches of international and domestic US law. Their preferred  modus: sudden, highly dramatic acts of violence and murder that can be parlayed into media spectacles, staged for instant transmission to the American public and the world on Donald Trump’s “Truth Social” platform. “Smash and grab” operations, American historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls these. In a recent article for the journal Equator, Singh unpacks the Trump regime’s core innovation: the expansion of the borders of US state power, collapsing foreign and domestic violence into a single domain of impunity. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription “Homeland empire,” US academic Nikhil Pal Singh calls this. Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU, focusing on the intersection of contemporary US history and political theory. Singh’s first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, was recognized as the best work of US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians. Singh’s other works include Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, Race and America’s Long War, and Reconstructing Democracy: Black Intellectuals in the American Century. Listen to our complete conversation with Nikhil Pal Singh. Click on the play button above, or go here.