A non-political civil service, diversity, USAID, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Scholarships, federal funding for scientific and medical research—the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, Ivy League universities, “big law”—the great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one.

While in Gaza an intensifying series of air strikes killing hundreds of Palestinians does not constitute an act of war, the US is the victim of a “invasion” launched by Venezuela involving neither ground troops nor air power, but whose “devastating effects” nevertheless justify the suspension of normal due process rights. Truly we are living in the upside-down.

As anybody not living on a desert island without internet access cannot fail to have noticed, Trump has begun his second term in the White House with a flourish. But the speed and comprehensiveness of the rest of his MAGA revolution has left many reeling, not just in the US (or Canada) but across the globe. It is astonishing just how much has been done—and undone—in just six weeks.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Biden has overridden the US judicial system to grant his son a pardon and Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.

We might ask whether, if Harris had been less adamant in her insistence that “I’m speaking!” and more willing to move on Israel, she might have persuaded enough of Biden’s 2020 voters—not only Muslim Americans, but progressives who campaigned for the Democrats in 2020 but were nauseated by Biden’s policies on Gaza—to support her. Instead, they flipped or stayed home.

After a year of bombardment, and with all eyes on the US presidential election, Gaza has become exactly what Naomi Klein and Jonathan Glazer feared—part of the soundtrack to everyday life, background noise we can all too easily tune out. But while life goes on as normal on our side of the walls, the genocide continues, barely within earshot.

According to a recent report by Axios, for the first time, the Biden-Harris administration is explicitly threatening to suspend military aid to Israel unless some very specific conditions are met. These conditions amount to “the most wide-ranging and comprehensive list of US demands from Israel since the beginning of the war.”

On September 27, Israel dropped US-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on the Dahiya residential area of Beirut, flattening six apartment blocks and killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The cost of Nasrallah’s scalp was likely several hundred Lebanese civilian lives. The Palestinian journalist got it right. Their dead don’t seem to count the same way.

As a response to a terrorist attack from an occupied territory, Israel’s Gaza campaign is wholly exceptional, at least among Western democracies that claim to be governed by international law. Israel exists in a state of exception, to use the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept, in which the rule of law is suspended and the normal rules don’t apply.

There are many ways of measuring the evil that Israel has done to Palestinians. But the true measure of our evil lies in the West’s complicity in maintaining Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and in particular, in the support it has offered Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza in response to October 7.