The case of Kilmar Abrego García, shunted from detention in one country to another, with no end in sight, recalls the World War II-era classic of dystopian fiction The Twenty-Fifth Hour by Romanian writer C. Virgil Gheorghiu. The wartime transnational detention system, harrowingly depicted in the novel, was seen by Gheorghiu as an inevitable manifestation of our technocratic civilization that exalts the machine above humanity, ultimately resulting in the treatment of human beings as mere cogs in the state-industrial apparatus. This process is more advanced today with the current hypertrophy of the technosphere, which is related to the re-emergence of abuses approaching those of the fascist era, and ultimately bodes poorly for humanity's future. In Episode 294 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes an unsparing look at this grim juncture for the human race.

Kilmar Abrego García, released from extrajudicial detention in El Salvador, now fights deportation to Uganda. Hundreds of the Venezuelans sent by the US to the Salvadoran prison gulag have now been returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap. But El Salvador remains on the growing list of human rights offendors cultivated by the Trump regime as surrogate detention states. The Trump State Department's farcical "Human Rights Report" seeks to sanitize dictator Nayib Bukele's anti-crime police state. And adding to the Orwellian nature of the Trump-Bukele axis, the US Justice Department has dropped charges against MS-13 leaders who collaborated in the consolidation of the new Salvadoran dictatorship. In Episode 293 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg exposes the perverse charade.

Trump is pointing to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's tattoos to justify his indefinite detention without charge in the ultra-oppressive Salvadoran prison gulag. These notoriously include a cannabis leaf, demonstrating the continued propaganda utility of the "Reefer Madness" stigma, even as a multi-million dollar legal industry emerges. But the White House actually added the characters "MS13" (name of the notorious Salvadoran gang) to the shot of Abrego Garcia's knuckles in a crude photoshop job—despite transparent denials from Trump. Lubricating the emerging transnational mass detention program with this Orwellian post-truth stratagem, the Trump regime meanwhile moves toward actual deportation of US citizens. Bill Weinberg raises the alarm in Episode 277 of the CounterVortex podcast.

At an April 29 rally in Michigan to commemorate the first 100 days of his term, Donald Trump focused on his border crackdown and deportations above all else. While he touched on the economy and bragged of firing "unnecessary deep state bureaucrats" in his speech, his racist attacks on migrants took center stage. Those attacks accelerated and entered uncharted territory the following week: the administration launched massive immigration raids, targeted sanctuary cities in an executive order, prosecuted migrants for breaching a recently declared "military zone" near the border, separated families, and even deported US citizens.

US-directed repression and counter-insurgency in El Salvador in the 1980s allowed the imposition of "free trade" or "neoliberal" regimes in the generations since then—ultimately culminating in the adoption of CAFTA. This, in turn, has exacerbated the expropriation of the traditional lands of the peasantry by the agro-export oligarchy. It also led to the hypertrophy of the narco economy and a new nightmare of violence, which Nayib Bukele has exploited to establish a new dictatorship. This dictatorship is now openly in league with Donald Trump, and has in fact become critical to his fascist agenda. In Episode 275 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks down El Salvador's historical role as a laboratory of genocide and police-state methods for US imperialism, and the imperative of trans-national resistance.

The Trump administration's deportation policies took center stage this week as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele visited the White House, courts continued challenging the legality of the deportations, and a Maryland senator travelled to El Salvador in an attempt to make contact with a man known to be wrongfully deported.

New UN data shows that more than 1,200 people were killed and 522 wounded in Haiti between July and September. This represents a 27% increase in casualties compared to the second quarter. Figures could get even worse, as a new wave of coordinated gang attacks is terrorizing areas that had previously been spared. About 10,000 people were forced to flee parts of Port-au-Prince, while nearly 22,000 more were displaced in Arcahaie, north of the capital. Gangs also fired at a UN helicopter used by the World Food Program to deliver aid and at US embassy vehicles, while a Catholic charity's hospital clinic was vandalized and set on fire. On Oct. 31, a new UN report projected that 5.4 million Haitians—nearly half the population—will face crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity by February 2025. Despite the ever-rising violence, the US government continues its deportation flights.

Amid global protests over the genocide in Gaza, the hypertrophy of digital technology and its colonization of every sphere of human existence continue to advance, portending the ultimate eclipse of human culture and real life, the death of literacy, and the hegemony of saturation propaganda. While the Arab Revolution of 2011 was facilitated through social media, those same platforms are today being used as conduits for propaganda and disinformation lubricating the reconsolidation of dictatorships. This is all about to get much worse—with propaganda especially getting exponentially more sophisticated—through the advent of artificial intelligence. What is urgently mandated—ultimately, even to be able to effectively oppose genocides and dictatorships—is a revolution of everyday life, reclaiming human reality from digital totalitarianism. The uprising in El Salvador against the mandatory imposition of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 still stands as a glimmer of hope, pointing the potentiality of this kind of revolution—even if the aspiring autocrat Nayib Bukele, who made Bitcoin a national currency, put down the uprising and is now consolidating an authoritarian regime. Bill Weinberg rants against the digital Borg in Episode 242 of the CounterVortex podcast.