dystopia

And so the verdict is out. United States President Donald Trump’s name has been cleared of ignominious association with the late disgraced financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. This is according to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years behind bars on sex trafficking charges.

Earlier this year, US Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly informed the president that his name appeared in the so-called “Epstein files”, the content of which Trump had said on the campaign trail he would be quite keen on releasing.

Once in office, however, he spontaneously decided that the Epstein case was old news, going so far as to reprimand those in his own MAGA base who were “stupid” and “foolish” enough to continue insisting that the files be declassified.

Now, the US Justice Department has released transcripts of a July interview between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, and Maxwell, who had nothing but praise for the president’s moral solidity:

“I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

There was no limit, it seemed, to Maxwell’s admiration for the president. “Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me… I like him, and I’ve always liked him,” she declared.

Never mind Maxwell’s reputation as a serial liar who was charged with two counts of perjury for lying under oath – charges that were dropped following her conviction on other counts. Surely the obsequious tribute to Trump’s allegedly upstanding nature has nothing to do with the fact that Maxwell is presently seeking a presidential pardon from the same man.

At any rate, the shining appraisal should at least help un-bunch the panties of many Trump supporters who have been dissatisfied with his handling of the Epstein matter. Far-right influencer and self-categorised “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer, for example – whom Trump has praised as “terrific” and “very special” – welcomed Maxwell’s testimony as proof that the president “has always been an honourable person”.

Expressing her hope that “these transcripts will quell a lot of the nasty, salacious lies and rumors that were spread by bad actors online”, Loomer appeared confident that harmony would soon be restored among MAGA adherents.

To be sure, there’s nothing more uplifting than the members of a movement founded on hatred and discord getting along with each other.

For his part, Trump has now announced that he “couldn’t care less” about the US Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files to Congress.

Speaking to reporters, the president nonetheless maintained that the “whole Epstein thing is a Democrat hoax” – a result of the Democratic Party’s inability to cope with Trump’s spectacular success at the helm of America: “So we had the greatest six months, seven months in the history of the presidency, and the Democrats don’t know what to do, so they keep bringing up that stuff.”

As with most calculations emanating from the president’s brain, the proclamation of the “greatest” time period bears no correlation with reality. Indeed, pretty much everything that has transpired over the past six or seven months has been decidedly less than “great” – not that Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden presided over anything particularly inspiring.

On the domestic scene, Americans continue to be plagued by rising costs of living that for many folks make existence itself unsustainable. Basic rights like healthcare, education, nutrition, and housing have long been converted into for-profit industries, and gun violence constitutes a veritable national pastime.

Under Trump’s guidance, US law enforcement agencies have gone about abducting and disappearing undocumented workers, international scholars, and US citizens alike. The nation’s capital, Washington, DC, has also been militarised with the deployment of National Guard troops to supposedly “fight crime” in the mostly safe parts of the city.

On the international front, meanwhile, the past six or seven months have not only seen Trump bomb Iran in egregious violation of international law but also persist in sustaining Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars.

Just days ago, the United Nations officially declared famine in Gaza – a logical result of the US-backed Israeli policy of enforced starvation.

And all of this against a backdrop of planetary self-combustion that is only being sped up by the Trump administration’s prioritisation of climate change denial.

Considering the rather apocalyptic panorama, Trump’s de facto character certificate from Maxwell is at best entirely irrelevant – a political soap opera in which one convicted criminal kisses the rear end of another convicted criminal who happens to be president of the United States.

Maxwell’s testimony is simply icing on the dystopian cake. And as the world goes up in flames, the character certificate at least sums up where the US is currently at – however many “greatest” months into 2025.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

It has been a year since the Southport attack, which triggered furious racist riots in the streets of the United Kingdom. Unruly crowds, galvanised by false claims that the perpetrator was Muslim, went on a rampage, attacking mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, homes, and individuals they perceived as Muslim.

As the riots were raging, I was finishing my novel, The Second Coming. The book is set in a dystopian future in which a Christian militia inspired by English nationalism seizes London, bans Islam, and exiles Muslims to refugee camps in Birmingham. The events unfolding in the streets as I was writing the final chapters made me realise that today, we are much closer to the dystopian world in my novel than I had imagined.

The scenes and images that helped me shape this fictional world were inspired by the England I lived in during my youth, when racist violence was rampant. Gangs of white youth would hunt us down, especially after the pubs closed, in wave after wave of what they called “Paki bashing”.

Knife attacks and fire bombings were not uncommon, nor were the demands by far-right groups, such as the National Front and the British National Party, for the repatriation of Black (ie, non-white) “immigrants”.

Attending school sometimes meant running through a gauntlet of racist kids. In the playground, sometimes they swarmed around, chanting racist songs.

As a student, I lost count of the number of times I was physically attacked, at school, in the street, or in pubs and other places. When I lived in East London, I was with the local youth of Brick Lane, where hand-to-hand fighting took place to stop hordes of racist attackers. These assaults were not an isolated phenomenon. Similar scenes took place across the country, with the National Front and British National Party organising hundreds of marches, emboldening white supremacist gangs.

Around this time, some of my peers and I were arrested and charged with “conspiracy to make explosives” for filling up milk bottles with petrol as a way of defending our communities against racist violence; our case came to be known as the Bradford 12. These struggles, whether in Brick Lane or Bradford, were part of a broader fight against systemic racism and far-right ideologies that sought to terrorise and divide us.

The overt, street-level violence of those years was terrifying, but it came from the margins of society. The ruling political class, though complicit, avoided openly aligning with these groups. A case in point is Margaret Thatcher, who in 1978, as the leader of the Conservative Party, gave an infamous interview in which she said, “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.” It was a subtle nod of approval for racist mobs, but as prime minister, Thatcher still kept far-right groups at an arm’s length.

Today, that distance has disappeared. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other prominent members of Labour regularly echo far-right rhetoric, promising to “crack down” on those seeking sanctuary here. His Conservative predecessor, Rishi Sunak, and his ministers were not different. His Home Minister Suella Braverman falsely claimed grooming gangs had a “predominance” of “British Pakistani males, who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values”.

While the old crude white racism has not disappeared, a more vicious form – Islamophobia – has been fanned over the past few decades. It feels like the old “Paki” bashing gangs have been replaced by a new crusading wave that equates Islam with terrorism; sexual abuse with Pakistanis; asylum seekers with parasitic hordes about to overrun the country.

This is the soil in which the Reform Party has taken root and flourished, in which ever cruder forms of racism are made respectable and electable. When both Labour and the Tories have become havens for a complex web of political corruption, Reform’s simple anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes are projected as an honest alternative. This has propelled the far-right party to the top of polls, with 30 percent of voters supporting it, compared with 22 percent for Labour and 17 for the Conservatives.

In this environment, it was rather unsurprising that for the anniversary of the riots, the Economist magazine decided to run a poll focusing on race rather than on issues of economic decline, social deprivation and the never-ending austerity to which the working people of this country have been subjected. The survey showed that nearly 50 percent of the population think that multiculturalism is not good for the country, while 73 percent thought more “race riots” will happen soon.

The nurturing of violent racism at home has run parallel with England’s long history of enacting it abroad. The new face of racism is fed on old imperial tropes of savages that need to be tamed and defeated by civilised colonial rule. These racist ideologies, which welded the empire together, have come back home to roost.

They are playing out in the racist violence on the streets and in the state’s repression of Palestine supporters. They are also playing out in the UK’s unwavering political and military support for Israel, even as it bombs hospitals and schools in Gaza and starves children. Empire taught Britain to use racism to dehumanise entire peoples, to justify colonialism, to plunder, to spread war and famine. Genocide is in Britain’s DNA, which explains its present-day collusion with genocidal Israel.

Against this backdrop of racist, imperial violence, people of all colours and religions and none have mobilised. While they may not have stopped the genocide, they have laid bare the hypocritical barefaced lies of the British political elite. Only this sort of solidarity and challenge to racism can stop the dystopic world of my book becoming a reality.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.