James B. Greenberg, Professor Emeritus
@zavaletas.bsky.social
James B. Greenberg is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology.
In this essay I trace the long struggle over who counts as “We the People.” From the Constitution to Chinese exclusion, Japanese incarceration, Mexican repatriation, to Trump, it explores the enduring conflict between civic citizenship and ethnocultural nationhood. substack.com/@jamesbgreen...
We the People: The Struggle Over Belonging in America
How competing visions of the American nation have shaped who belongs—and who has rights—from the founding to Trump.
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Status isn’t just displayed—it’s engineered into everyday life. From boarding lines to debt burdens, class now shapes who moves first, who waits, and who is seen. An anthropological look at how inequality is performed—and normalized. #Class #Inequality #Anthropology
An anthropological rant about status and class
The boarding process as a ritual of sorting and an entry point into thinking about class and status
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Oil routes burn, markets tremble, and power shifts at home. War with Iran isn’t just foreign policy — it’s an engine reshaping the U.S. economy, civil liberties, and political order. My new essay looks at the domestic stakes behind the headlines. #Iran #StraitOfHormuz #EnergyCrisis #USPolitics
James B. Greenberg (@jamesbgreenberg)
Check out my new post!
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We live in a world where the consequences of what we consume are hidden from us by distance, markets, and infrastructure. What happens when obligation dissolves but impact does not? #ClimateChange #PoliticalEcology #Anthropology #Sustainability #Environment
The Distance That Binds Us
Ecology, Morality, and the Consequences We No Longer See
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In Tututepec, a Mixtec stela still receives offerings centuries after conquest. It is not a relic, but part of a moral landscape—where humans, animals, ancestors, and place exist in reciprocal relation, obligation, and restraint. #Tututepec #Anthropology #Mesoamerica #SacredLandscape #MoralEcology
The Moral Landscape
Animals, reciprocity, and ecological limits in Mesoamerican worlds
jamesbgreenberg.substack.com
Modern authoritarian states no longer need mass killing to produce mass suffering. They govern by deciding who will be protected — and who can be left exposed. #Necropolitics #Authoritarianism #Immigration #HumanRights #Democracy
The Grammar of Abandonment
How Modern Authoritarianism Governs Through Exposure Rather Than Extermination
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What’s being built in plain sight isn’t ideology—it’s capacity. Detention, surveillance, selective enforcement, and legal ambiguity form a system that no longer depends on political will once operational. #Democracy #Authoritarianism #Power #Surveillance #RuleOfLaw #USA
The Machinery of Oppression
How Enforcement Infrastructure Becomes the Engine of Political Power
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“Remigration” isn’t about return—it’s about erasure. A neutral word repurposed to sanitize exclusion, discipline labor, and redefine belonging as bloodline rather than civic life. Language is doing political work again. #Anthropology #Authoritarianism #Migration #Democracy
The Return of Erasure: Remigration and the Nation’s Bloodline Logic
How Authoritarian Language Rebrands Exclusion as Administration
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Trump Trump’s attack on Somali Minnesotans reveals how whole communities become targets through tone, not law. As suspicion moves into daily life, protections weaken unevenly, showing the early mechanics of democratic erosion in the U.S. #Immigration #Democracy #AuthoritarianDrift
From Legal Belonging to Collective Suspicion: Somali Communities and Authoritarian Drift
The Politics of Suspicion and the Slow Unmaking of Equal Citizenship
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Trump’s domestic-terrorism order reframes dissent as danger and loyalty as security, turning institutions into tools of division. What looks like policy is really a test of allegiance—and a warning about who counts as belonging and who does not. #Authoritarianism #DomesticTerrorism #Citizenship
The New Lines of Division: Trump’s Rhetoric, Domestic Terrorism Orders, and the Politics of Loyalty
How Trump’s domestic terrorism order redraws the boundary of belonging—and why loyalty has become the hinge on which citizenship turns.
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When Trump calls Americans “traitors,” he’s not venting—he’s redefining dissent as disloyalty and narrowing who counts as part of the nation. That shift has real consequences for public safety and for democracy itself. #Democracy #Authoritarianism #Treason #USPolitics
The Autocrat’s Accusation: The Deadly Politics of Calling Americans Traitors
How Trump’s expanding use of the word traitor reveals a governing strategy, erodes democratic norms, and exposes Americans to rising political danger.
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Climate models were never crystal balls—they’re tools for understanding a world in flux. Five years ago uncertainty loomed large. Now the danger comes not from what we don’t know but from how fast change is outpacing politics. The science isn’t the problem. Delay is. #ClimateChange #PublicScience
Climate Change, Models, and the Politics of Uncertainty
Why climate models matter, why uncertainty is not our enemy, and why the real danger now comes from delay, not doubt.
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The science is settled. The timeline is not. The new denialism isn’t disbelief—it’s delay. #ClimateAction #ClimateDelay #FossilCapital #DiscoursesOfDelay #Policy #Power #Anthropocene
Climate Delay as Policy
How Power Turns Truth Into Inaction
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Why do so many deny what they can already feel and see? Climate denial isn’t ignorance—it’s meaning preservation, a cultural defense against moral reckoning. #ClimateChange #Denialism #Anthropology #PoliticalEcology #PublicAnthropology
The Logic of Denial: Climate Change and the Preservation of Meaning
How culture, faith, and fossil capital converged to turn scientific evidence into moral resistance.
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A century ago, Edward Bernays taught America how to sell with emotion. From Madison Ave to MAGA rallies, we’ve become fluent in persuasion and strangers to truth. The question now is what we’ve sold of ourselves. #Propaganda #Democracy #Bernays #Advertising #Authoritarianism #MediaCulture
The Century of Persuasion: How Madison Avenue Rewired the American Mind
The Rise of Emotional Capitalism and the Fall of Public Reason
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Between Halloween and the Day of the Dead, we flirt with the border between life and death. Our fascination with vampires and zombies reveals how power feeds, obedience spreads, and the living forget what it means to be alive. #Anthropology #Necropolitics #Authoritarianism #DayOfTheDead #Democracy
The Living and the Dead: An Anthropology of Power and Obedience
Vampires, Zombies, and the Necrostate We’re Becoming
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Trump’s Asian trade deals were hailed as triumphs, but behind the spectacle lies fragility. Allies play to his ego, not his strength—managing his volatility while rebuilding global trust without him. #Trump #Trade #Economy #Asia #Authoritarianism #GlobalPolitics
The Illusion of Trump’s Asian Trade Deals
The Spectacle of Strength and the Economic Fragility Beneath It
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Born at the dawn of the atomic age, I grew up watching mushroom clouds on TV. A lifetime later, Trump’s order to restart nuclear testing revives the old theater of annihilation—where destruction itself becomes the language of power. #NuclearSpectacle #Authoritarianism #ClimateJustice #StatePower
Alice Barton (@alice22)
“Dormant since 1992, the Nevada Test Site remains the nation’s only facility capable of full-scale nuclear detonations. Its very name—security site—carries an irony: for decades, the desert has served...
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When I first read Orwell’s 1984, it felt like science fiction. Today it reads like journalism. Big Brother isn’t fiction anymore—it’s Clearview AI, data brokers, and loyalty scoring dressed up as administration. #Surveillance #Authoritarianism #Orwell #CivilLiberties #Democracy #PoliticalEconomy
Constructing 1984: The Enemy Within and the Authoritarian Surveillance State
How the “enemy within” frame is weaponizing surveillance, turning contracts and databases into tools of authoritarian control
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Hurricane Melissa was not just another storm. While the seas rise, the state erases the evidence. Denial doesn’t stop the damage—it shifts the costs, silences the vulnerable, and turns disaster into political theater. #ClimateCrisis #HurricaneMelissa #PoliticalEcology #ClimateDenial #Democracy
When the Storm Speaks and the State Goes Silent
Rising seas, silenced science, and the political economy of denial
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Trump’s war on universities isn’t about budgets. It’s the authoritarian playbook—a ritual purge erasing inquiry, silencing memory, and hollowing the civic infrastructure of democracy. #Trump #Universities #Authoritarianism #HigherEd #Anthropology #Pluralism #AcademicFreedom
Trump’s War on Universities
Ritual Erasure and the Attrition of Civic Infrastructure
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DEI is being weaponized: inclusion recast as betrayal, equity as tyranny. This isn’t rollback of civil rights—it’s a rewriting of who belongs in America. #DEI #Belonging #Exclusion #CivilRights #Authoritarianism
The Weaponization of DEI: From Civil Rights to Cultural Erasure
How Trump’s rollback of diversity and inclusion is less about policy than about rewriting belonging, legitimacy, and citizenship itself
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On Oct 20, demolition began on the East Wing. Two days after No Kings Day, Trump answered protest with a palace. Architecture is no longer background—it is the script of power. #NoKingsDay #Democracy #Authoritarianism #Architecture #Trump #History
Trump’s Palace: Monumental Architecture and the Performance of Sovereignty
Monuments as Power, Palaces as Sovereignty
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White Christian nationalism isn’t new. It’s a revival—rooted in conquest, slavery, and segregation—dressed up as patriotism and faith. The struggle isn’t only against policies, but against who counts as American. #WhiteChristianNationalism #Democracy #History #CivilRights #ReligionAndPolitics
One Nation Under God: The Deep Roots of White Christian Nationalism
How religion, race, and power forged a sacred story of belonging that still shapes American politics
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Trump isn’t a puppet or a fool. His intelligence lies in spectacle, improvisation, and domination. That makes him more dangerous, not less. #Trump #Authoritarianism #Spectacle #Democracy #Politics
The Politics of Spectacle: Improvisational Dominance and the Erosion of Governance
Improvisational dominance, ritual politics, and the dangerous intelligence of performance
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White Christian Nationalism collapses America’s plural worlds into one sacred story. Cultures are never fixed—our shared dynamism may be the best defense. #Pluralism #Anthropology #Democracy #Culture #ReligionAndPolitics
One Nation, Many Realities
How White Christian Nationalism Collapses America’s Plural Worlds into a Single Sacred Story
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Trump’s grotesque AI videos aren’t rants. They’re ritual acts of sovereignty, where humiliation becomes justice and spectacle becomes rule. To confront authoritarian power, we must first read the machinery of meaning. #Spectacle #Authoritarianism #SymbolicPower
Spectacle, Scatology, and the Authoritarian Mind
Symbolic Warfare in the Age of Generative Media
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Is Trump a Russian asset? That may be the wrong question. His open volunteering to the fraternity of autocrats—through flattery, spectacle, and sabotage—poses a deeper threat to democracy. #Trump #Putin #Authoritarianism #Disinformation #NationalSecurity #Democracy
The Volunteer: Trump, Putin, and the Theater of Affinity
Trump’s admiration for Putin is not espionage but affinity—a ritualized theater of power that weakens institutions, corrodes alliances, and leaves the republic exposed.
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Trump’s America First policy, mafia-style diplomacy, and gutting of research budgets have left America weaker, more isolated, and open to rivals abroad. #ForeignPolicy #AmericaFirst #Trump #Alliances #PoliticalEcology #SoftPower #TradeWars #NecronStateAbroad
Trump’s Disastrous Foreign Policies
How Trump’s mafia-style diplomacy, tariff wars, and gutted research budgets left America weaker, isolated, and more vulnerable abroad.
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Citizens stood shoulder to shoulder against intimidation. The No Kings Day protests reveal the courage, solidarity, and moral clarity required to resist creeping authoritarianism. #NoKingsDay #CivicCourage #Authoritarianism #DemocracyUnderThreat #Protest #Resistance #CommunitySolidarity #Freedom
The No Kings Day Protests
Defiance, Civic Courage, and the Moral Ecology of Resistance in the Age of Authoritarian Drift
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