In Brazil, unlike other Latin American countries, the foreign vote was not decidedly right wing. Lula won by over 3.5% of the vote, well over four million votes, a turnaround of over six million votes with a virtually identical voter turnout. In ancient Rome, generals participating in triumphal parades had a man dyed red standing behind them reminding them they were human. At times, in two round presidential elections like Brazil’s, voters do the same, voting against someone in the first round as a warning, but supporting him or her in the second. Nonetheless, the shock of the first round will probably lead to changes in Lula’s governance in areas involving crime and violence, and with respect to more attention to food basket economics.
Because Lula will not be eligible for reelection in four years but many Bolsonaros will be, and because the Brazilian left lacks a viable successor, at least at present, the future does not look as bleak for the Brazilian right as a Bolsonaro victory would have been for the left. Notwithstanding his impressive comeback victory, governing for Lula will prove extremely difficult given the right’s control over Congress. His victory, however, is a serious defeat for President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s aspirations in Latin America and may bode ill for their own parties in the upcoming elections in their own countries.
Had Bolsonaro won, the United States would have quickly entered into long term agreements for natural resources, especially in the Amazon which would have been freed up for development and Israel would have gained another important foothold in Latin America. There would have been significant deregulation and reduction of public spending, except with respect to police and the armed forces. Integration with other Latin American countries would likely have been abandoned, as would Brazil’s leadership role in the BRICS. The Constitution would likely have been significantly amended in a manner making it easier to reshape the Supreme Court and entrench right wing rule, and, given the right’s control of Congress, it still may be.
Interestingly, the orchestrated transportation delays in Lula oriented districts in Northern Brazil were overcome by the two hour voting extensions while the weather delays in the South were apparently not. However, since both sides asked for the extension, neither side can legitimately challenge it.
Pro-Bolsonaro evangelicals may be wondering why God intervened in that manner. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Today I’m daring fate by wearing an old green New York Jets football, Jersey. Number 19, the Keyshawn Johnson model. The Jets, as always, well, at least since Super Bowl III, are addicted to tradition, and not in a good sense. So, to take my mind off this past weekend’s disaster against the Patriots, I let my mind soar and speculate on the divine, albeit in a quotidian fashion. After all, during January of 1969 the divine appeared to answer Jets’ fans prayers amidst promises of never asking for anything again. A deal the divine appears to have taken all too seriously.
Anyway ….
So, I asked myself, seeking to change the focus of my grumblings about inept officials and inept coaches and inept players and all too patient fans: “does the divine prefer the green of vegetation and mountains, or the blue of oceans and skies?”
I recall that back in the nineteen-fifties we assumed that our planet, as seen from space, was green. I think Robert Heinlein had something to do with that. Turns out that, as Frank Borman demonstrated, seen from space our planet is mainly a light blue and white, with only slight traces of green. That was quite a change. However, that does not, as a Jet’s fan, mean that the divine prefers blue. Perhaps green, especially the variant sported by Jets fans, is more exclusive. Perhaps that is why photosynthesis is so amazing.
Imagine, living on sunlight.
Of course, that brings brilliant yellow into the equation.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Abstract: Reflections on Professor Lisa Hilbink’s critique of Professor Ran Hirschl’s perspective on kritarchy (or kratocracy or dikastocracy, to which he refers as juristocracy; i.e., rule by judges); reflections on the reality that the concepts of democracy and rights are not coherent as currently understood, and that neither judges nor legislators possess the ethics and independence necessary to effectively exercise constitutional control; and, criticism of the misuse of linguistics to confuse issues such as democracy and rights and on the dubious nature of current concepts of constitutional control.
This year I ran across an article published by Professor Lisa Hilbink, PhD, entitled “Beyond Manicheanism: Assessing the New Constitutionalism”. It was published in the Maryland Law Review[1] over two decades ago. The version I ran across was an unfinished draft of the article which she shared on Academia.edu during 2005 and one sentence criticizing the now late professor Ran Hirschl, PhD, set me off in an unexpected direction. Dr. Hilbink wrote, at least in the February 2005 draft, that: “Hirschl’s central argument is based on a stark distinction between courts as insulated,…semi-autonomous, professional policy-making bodies on the one hand, and legislatures as faithful mirrors of popular will, on the other.”
While I tend to side strongly with critiques of what Dr. Hircshl referred to as “Juristocracy” in his lauded 2005 book, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism;[2] the quote made me focus on the reality that if legislatures ever truly reflected the beliefs and goals of their electorates, that is certainly not the case today thus, “faithful mirrors of popular will” they certainly are not. Today, their constituents are not those who “vote” them into office but those who finance their campaigns and the political parties that post them. Of course, that’s also true of heads of state and chief executives. Thus, while unelected judges are all too frequently oligarchical and elitist, so too, for the most part, are legislators and the political heads of executive branches.
That should certainly not be the case but, as long as political campaigns are costly and privately financed by non-voters (as demanded by the United States Supreme Court[3]), then the possibility of elected officials acting in the interests of the voters who elect them rather than in the interest of the billionaires who fund them is, at best, improbable. Especially since so much of the expense of being elected eventually winds up in the coffers of the legacy media, a complex of simplistic organizations owned and controlled by the same billionaires who provide the bulk of the political contributions.
The Relative Positions of Dr. Hirschl and Dr. Hilbink:
Dr. Hirschl’s core argument with respect to kritarchy (or kratocracy or dikastocracy, to which he refers as juristocracy; i.e., rule by judges), is, as I understand it, that the post-World War II global trend of empowering courts and recognizing inviolable constitutionalizing rights as a means to limit “democratic abuse of democracy and social justice” (an ironic turn of phrase), is a ruse, and that the reality is that the expansion of John Marshall’s concept of judicial review and judicial constitutional control[4], which morphed in the twentieth century into the concept of judicial activism and the organic constitution, was instead driven by threatened political elites, economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders engaging in “hegemonic preservation” to protect their policy preferences from majoritarian politics.
Dr. Hilbink’s position, on the other hand, criticizes Dr. Hirschl’s “hegemonic preservation” theory which she describes as positing that the global expansion of judicial power is not a neutral victory for human rights but a strategic move by a tripartite coalition of threatened political elites, economic elites seeking to lock in neoliberal market policies and high-court judiciaries seeking to protect their interests from the “vicissitudes of democratic politics”, something accomplished by shifting decision-making from majoritarian legislatures to insulated courts. She does so although acknowledging the empirical weight of Dr. Hirschl’s case studies, by arguing that Dr. Hirschl fell victim to the exact same Manichean trap as the liberal “enthusiasts” he criticizes. According to her, where the legal scholars Dr. Hirschl criticizes romanticize judges as uniquely noble, principled actors operating entirely above the political fray, Dr. Hirschl swings to the opposite extreme asserting that he views judges and institutional design as uniquely self-interested and collusive. While admitting that a court’s origins may not always (or even usually) be pure, she asserts that that does not necessarily mean that long-term institutional impacts are malevolent. In conjunction with the foregoing she differentiates the mother of judicial activism, the United States Supreme Court, from constitutional courts and courts vested with constitutional authority as well as general oversight of legal systems in other countries, seeming to admit that Dr. Hirschl may be correct with respect to the former, but not necessarily with respect to the latter. In that regard, Dr. Hilbink argues that the judicial role in constitutional control is not monolithic and instead, involves massive structural variations such as how judges are appointed, their legal subcultures, and their professional norms, all of which dictate whether a court acts as an elite shield or a democratically responsive partner. Dr. Hilbink finally notes that Dr. Hirschl relies heavily on a rigid dichotomy between “law” and “politics”, implying that there are questions that are purely moral or political and that transferring them to a courtroom strips them of democratic legitimacy to which she counters by asserting that that judicial review and legislative policy-making can be interactive and mutually supportive rather than inherently adversarial.
Notwithstanding their differing perspectives, however, both challenge the romantic, mainstream view that the global expansion of judicial review is simply a natural, benevolent evolution toward human rights and social justice, both arguing that while constitutional courts are highly effective at handling procedural liberties, collective identity, or negative rights, they rarely advance economic equity or redistributive justice and both view the insulation of policy-making from direct popular democracy as a defining hallmark of modern constitutional frameworks.
An interesting debate and convincing performance by Dr. Hilbink. My perspective is somewhat different and more analytically pessimistic for different reasons. I see both centered on the impact of what purports to be democracy in governance and on which of two competing institutions can best reflect and protect it. But, to a great extent, I believe that democracy is and has always been, at least in its current incarnation, illusory and confusing. If the argument is better defined and more limited so as to involve only the concept of majority rule, then any delegation to a select group, whether unelected judges or elected legislators, in each case, where immunity for ignoring the will of the majority is immune from consequences (other than non-reelection or reappointment), has historically been doomed to failure. And the obverse, direct democracy, as Socrates is reputed to have observed and experienced, is not an answer.
My Observations:
With reference to the foregoing, I have long felt that linguistic abuse as a means of obfuscating reality has, to some extent, been a weapon well-used by lawyers, politicians, journalists and academics to confuse the electorate. I have written concerning that as it applies to the term “democracy” which, rather than reflect the concept of majority rule, has been so loaded down with contradictory concepts and platitudes as to make it, as a concept, unworkable. That is especially true when democracy is defined as a concept melding majority rule with liberty and pluralism, each of which is at odds with the others. As opposed to majority rule, liberty is a purely individualistic concept grounded on individual autonomy and pluralism is grounded on the rights of minorities vis a vis both individual and majority rights. The term “rights” is as incoherent but for different reasons. Rights purport to involve something inherent rather than granted and thus subject to neither conditions nor limitations, no matter how reasonable. How unreasonable is that? Based on that definition, no rights exist, have ever existed and can never exist, as is demonstrated by the reality that rights are respected by governments only when convenient. The purported solution? Keep expanding their scope into even more improbable, albeit worthy areas (like the environment, peace and social welfare). That is not to imply that something aspirationally similar to rights, perhaps involving mandatory government spending priorities, would not be meritorious, but all we have, anywhere, are artfully phrased non-functional “guarantees”. I note that “guarantees” are generally unattainable oxymorons, at best implying reasonable efforts.
Conclusions: So, what was the question???
Well, I think the question relating to my diatribe concerning the nature of democracy and of rights was, or should have been, where does the concept of a constitution fit into the foregoing? Or perhaps, where should it fit in. Not in the organic sense of establishing and regulating the branches and organs of governance but in the more esoteric sense of seeking to create a just and workable balance between majority rule, liberty and pluralism and to create a mechanism to at least approach the concept of rights. And to determine just how calcified related decisions should be, calcified in the sense that a constitution seeks to impose current values on future generations while ignoring important aspects concerning the values of generations that preceded us. That would then bring us to the questions raised by Drs. Hirschl and Hilbink as to what kind of institution could most effectively act as the enforcement mechanism for constitutional goals, dictates and aspirations. At that point, their arguments would acquire significant relevance, although perhaps as starting points for evolution towards a truly efficient, just and objective means of constitutional control, something which may well prove as solely aspirational as the “rights” and respect for “democracy” that most constitutions purport to guarantee. At least so long as the humans involved remain so prone to elitist self-preservation and the cancerous quest for ever increasing control, regardless of their roles.
Calvo Mahé, Guillermo. “Sobre el control y la revisión constitucional: Un análisis comparativo centrado en las repúblicas”; XII Foro de Tendencias Contemporáneas de Derecho, Universidad de Caldas, Nov. 2017, Manizales.
Hilbink, Lisa (2006): “Beyond Manicheanism: Assessing the New Constitutionalism”; 65 Md. L. Rev. 15 (2006); University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Baltimore.
Hirschl, Ran (2004): Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism; Harvard University Press; Cambridge.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad (e.g., NewsX World in India); and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
[1] Hilbink, Lisa (2006): “Beyond Manicheanism: Assessing the New Constitutionalism”, 65 Md. L. Rev. 15 (2006); University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Baltimore.
[2] Harvard University Press; Cambridge. The book won the American Political Science Association’s Law & Courts Section 2021 Lasting Contribution Award.
[3] See, e.g., Buckley v. Valeo (1976); Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010); McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014); Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz / Senator Ted Cruz Committee v. Federal Election Commission (2022); and Federal Election Commission v. NRSC (2026).
[4] Which I have criticized in diverse articles, some of which are listed at the conclusion of this article.
The following is the transcript for the segment by Guillermo Calvo Mahé in a special report by India’s NewsX World with respect to the Bolsonaro Dynasty in Brazil, a reality regardless of the final results of the 2026 Brazilian Elections. It has been slightly edited to correct grammatical issues and provide context and updating information has been added: _______
On Sunday October 4, the Brazilian electorate followed the path of most recent Latin American elections, at least as far as the Congress is concerned, rejecting the progressive left and embracing the conservative right. In that context, a question arises as to whether Brazil’s turn to the right is a reaction against what the public perceives of as a moribund and corrupt economy (notwithstanding significant progress in minimizing poverty during the current administration) or whether it reflects the crystallization of a Bolsonaro family dynasty (given the fact that so many members of the Bolsonaro family are now in elected positions of power). Jahir Bolsonaro, the family’s patriarch, was 38th president of Brazil, having served in that role from 2019 to 2023 and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1991 to 2019. Previously, he served as a captain in the Brazilian army. However, he has been in prison serving a twenty-seven year sentence for organizing an attempted coup against his successor, the current president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is currently running for reelection against Jahir Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio.
One answer to the unexpected results of the initial round of the Brazilian elections which involved not only the presidency but the Chamber of Deputies, a significant part of the Senate and the powerful state governors seems to be that, come what may during the final round of presidential voting on October 31, Jahir Bolsonaro has managed to install his family firmly in control of the Congress and in likely control of the presidency. If so, that would quickly lead to his from imprisonment and expand Bolsonaro family control of the federal judiciary as well.
So, who are the members of the evolving Bolsonaro family dynasty? Let’s start with Flavio.
Flavio is not his father’s clone nor a mere figurehead. He has his own 23 year political career including eight years as a senator and, although his father is certainly Flavio’s political mentor, they have differing styles and different focuses, something Flavio emphasizes:
Flavio’s presidential campaign stressed down to earth economic issues and concerns rather than abstract ideological issues and Flavio used a more restrained personal style, reaching out to centrist voters as well as focusing on conservative themes. Still, like his father, he also stressed his relationships with the United States and Israel would be much more positive, his relations with China more limited and that his interests in the BRICS coalition would be secondary at best.
As in all recent elections in Latin America, Flavio’s stressed the problem of allegedly rampant crime and a decline in morals urging a return to traditional Christian values and was highly critical of the threats of an emerging socialist state.
Flavio’s campaign focused on sophisticated use of targeted and tightly focused social media rather than on the mass, amateur WhatsApp forwarding networks used by his father and, perhaps thanks to his brother Eduardo’s US contacts, his use of the Internet was extremely well financed by, among others, the Rockbridge Network, a group co-founded by U.S. Vice President JD Vance and backed by prominent right-wing donors and Silicon Valley investors such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and supporters of Israel.
Of course, a political dynasty such as that established in India by the Nehru–Gandhi family, in the United States by the Kennedy and Bush families or as is common in many Latin American countries, is a complex concept, but it is one that the family’s patriarch, Jahir Bolsonaro, has apparently mastered.
The second round of the presidential election is not clear cut as most believe given that 40 million voters either did not participate (notwithstanding Brazil’s mandatory voting requirements) or cast null or none of the above ballots in the first round of voting and, as October 25 approaches, polls indicated that it is tightening, although Flavio remains in the lead, but, even if enough voters who failed to participate in the initial round were pulled into the Lula camp to overcome Flavio’s initial two million plus lead and a Lula comeback took place, a Bolsonaro political dynastic structure seems firmly in place, one that, given the age of its diverse members, could last for decades.
For example, in addition to Flavio, Jahir Bolsonaro’s current wife, Michelle, Jahir’s third wife and Flavio’s second step mother, is virtually the same age as Flavio and an ambitious political power on her own, especially among evangelical Christians and among conservative women, two constituencies largely responsible for Flavio’s success in the first round. She is also extremely powerful in the Liberal Party, the political party that sponsors the Bolsonaro family, even more so than Flavio. In the recent elections she attained the highest vote ever for the Brazilian Senate. But Flavio and his brothers have had serious conflicts with Michelle and their goals and ambitions are not always compatible.
In addition to Michelle, the Bolsonaro clan now boasts a number of other members of Congress with current and future electoral aspirations. Flavio’s brother Carlos (age 43), the family’s social media and digital genius, is now in the Senate; 28 year old Jair Renan, Flavio’s half-brother, is now a deputy in the Chamber of Deputies; Flavio’s brother Eduardo, age 43, is a former Deputy who fled to the United States when threatened with possible prosecution for lobbying foreign powers to intervene in his father’s trial (he was convicted in absentia) but used his exile very successfully to cultivate strong ties with members of the Trump administration and is likely to return and resume his political career; and, Jahir’s brother, the uncle of the clan, Renato Bolsonaro, age 62, also won a seat in the incoming Congress. There are also Michelle’s two daughters waiting on the sidelines (one in her teens and the other in her twenties), the eldest from a previous relationship.
So yes, Flavio Bolsonaro successfully used economic discontent to pull ahead of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the initial round of voting but a Bolsonaro political dynasty definitely seems to be coalescing in Brazil although perhaps, who will lead it, is not always clear. _____
As an update with respect to the election itself, it appears that foreign interference in the second round of Brazil’s presidential elections has significantly intensified, including alleged intervention by Meta in favor of Flavio Bolsonaro. The Lula campaign has formally accused Meta’s platforms (Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp) of having utilized biased algorithms, restricted content distribution, and disabled advertising capabilities to systematically disadvantage Lula and favor Flavio.
The core allegations against Meta have involved accusations that the Meta AI engine is intrinsically biased. For instance, the AI system reportedly refused to generate campaign images or content when using the prompt “Lula 13” but readily generated them for “Flávio 22”. The Lula campaign specifically claimed that Instagram restricted Lula’s official profile from promoting feed posts, froze or interrupted video view counts and temporarily caused his profile and other left-wing leaders to disappear from search results prior to the first round of voting. The allegations have neutral support; for example, the non-profit group Ekō alleged that Meta broke Brazilian electoral laws by approving foreign-funded, AI-generated ads that spread disinformation and hate speech. A separate study from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found over 1,600 irregular political advertisements on Meta platforms funded primarily from the United States and Israel which violates Brazil’s ban on foreign electoral spending.
In mid-October 2026, Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court ordered Meta to take immediate action to guarantee equal treatment for both candidates. The court mandated that Meta apply identical criteria for its AI tools and barred the company from suppressing political content or search results to cause a campaign imbalance. Meta was also issued a tight deadline to submit granular, profile-by-profile explanations of any restrictions applied to Lula’s accounts.
As expected, Meta denied any political bias rejecting all claims of “deliberate” bias or political engineering, stating that its systems do not distribute content based on ideology and are applied equally worldwide. In its defense, Meta cited widespread, unrelated global technical issues. The company stated that a freeze on Instagram Reels view counts impacted creators across more than 100 countries and was not isolated to Lula’s account. Similarly, a brief disruption to ad-creation tools affected users globally rather than targeting specific campaigns.
Notwithstanding the abovementioned, given time constraints, none of the foregoing is anticipated to have a significant impact on the highly polarized electorate. Indeed electoral violence and threats of violence, primarily from supporters of the Bolsonaro which have sought to intimidate the electorate may be more important. For example, on October 7, 2026, a major fire devastated UFPE’s Innovation Directorate building in Recife, destroying pharmaceutical, computer science, and genetics laboratories. This incident followed two other fires at the institution within an eight-day span, causing an estimated R$100 million in damages and obliterating two decades of scientific research. The fires broke out immediately after students held protests on campus supporting President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and opposing Flavio Bolsonaro ahead of the October 25 presidential runoff election. Because the fires occurred hours after students received explicit bomb threats attributed to Bolsonaro supporters, Brazil’s Federal Police and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the matter. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Kritarchy (or kritocracy) is the term for rule by judges or the judiciary. It seems the inevitable consequence of vesting the judiciary with the power to “interpret” constitutions and, when constitutions are deemed supreme, to effectively control government in the form once exercised by dictatorial political bureaus (politburos) and the central committees in one party states. Unless the “judges” charged with constitutional control (control being the end result of purported review) are democratically elected for fixed terms, something which only occurs in Mexico and Bolivia (but even there, the nomination process is controlled by traditional branches of government and, in Mexico, the term is long, 12 years) they are obviously antidemocratic elites. Kritarchy is thus a specialized form of antidemocratic oligarchy rather than an aspect of democracy which sort of makes sense, given that constitutions, by their nature, are inherently antidemocratic, in the sense that democracy requires majority rule. However, given the reality that in purported democracies popular apathy is more the rule than popular participation, democracy as such is more a fable than a reality. A majority is more than a plurality and when large segments of a population do not participate in democratic elections, real majorities (50% of the eligible electorate plus one) are rarely if ever attainable.
Kritarchy is defended as essential to protect human and minority rights from democratic abuse, an obvious fallacy as that assumes judges who prioritize such concepts and that is no more likely in a judicial tribunal than it is in a popularly elected legislature or even, in a popularly elected autocracy. Since the Biden administration’s 2013 destruction of the selection of federal judges in the United States through political consensus via the filibuster (Murphy is still chuckling about that), federal judges in the United States have been more politically biased in their decisions than ever, making it clear, in the cradle of judicial review, just how wrong the infamous decision in Marbury versus Madison (really John Marshall versus his despised cousin, Thomas Jefferson) was. And an incoherent Kritarchy such as that which runs rampant in the United States today is, procedurally, as bad a form of government as currently exists.
Thus we find ourselves, politically and economically, where we do, rule by judges bought and paid for by plutocratic kleptocracies with merit a sort of pejorative, except in the Hobbesian sense of merit, i.e., merit being equated with brute power. It’s as ironic as is the reality that many, perhaps most, perhaps virtually all evangelical pastors are politically tied to Zionism which, when it involves religion at all, insists that the purported Christ, about whom such evangelical pastors incessantly preach, is deemed by their Zionist overseers as, at best, condemned to an eternity in Hell drowning in a pool of molten excrement. Seemingly, the blind leading the blind would be quite an improvement over the deaf, dumb and blind simians who “guide” us today.
We humans are a strange, incoherent and evolutionally counterintuitive species. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
During September 12th and 13th of this year I had the privilege of participating in a brief forum conducted by India’s NewsX World on the 2026 BRICS Summit, as it was taking place, and of interacting with senior military, judicial and diplomatic personnel from various countries, including the Peoples’ Republic of China, The Union of South Africa and, of course the Republic of India. It was a very rewarding experience. The following are some of my observations on the summit, and its results.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi did a masterful job of balancing diverse interests and perspectives including those of three countries in active military confrontations, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, as well as beautifully dealing with endemic border friction between the host country, India, which currently holds the presidency of the BRICS, and the Peoples’ Republic of China which will assume the presidency during 2027. It seemed that Mr. Modi and Chinese President Xi were carefully laying the groundwork for strategic continuity among the BRICS community, a very welcome attitude.
The Unanimous Joint Resolution addressed numerous critical issues, including many down to earth pragmatic projects that touch the everyday lives of their citizens in areas involving health, livelihood, culture and human rights. There had been concerns that the increased membership of the BRICS, now comprising eleven full members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the UAE; alongside ten partner nations, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, would render consensus unlikely and consensus is required because, unlike the European Union or the United Nations, unanimity is the rule, sovereignty and equality being a pillar of the group. Of course, there was another possibility, that a forum more democratic and inclusive than that provided by the United Nations Security Council could, even if with divergent interests and goals, through compromise, consensus and real diplomacy among equals, attain social, political and economic objectives that have alluded older and more structured institutions, institutions where oligarchical constraints limit productive long term solutions. Seemingly, at least for now, the latter succeeded thanks to the collaborative efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
On the issue of dedolarization, the Indian perspective prevailed, perhaps because the European Union’s experience with the Euro has made BRICS members unwilling to follow suit, sovereignty in the European Union having become passé at best, but also because of two other important factors: first, India’s unwillingness to antagonize the United States, something with which a number of other members and partner nations concur, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and now Bolivia; and secondly, because the BRICS countries have developed and are in the process of expanding fiscal solutions to the abuse of the United States dollar as the principal international means of exchange. Chief among such emerging modalities are BRICS Pay, central bank digital currency proposals and, bilateral agreements such as those in place between the Russian Federation and the Peoples’ Republic of China as well as Iran and, the New Development Bank.
BRICS Pay is a collaborative cross-border payment system developed by the BRICS economic bloc to facilitate transactions using local national currencies while bypassing the U.S. dollar and Western-dominated networks like SWIFT. BRICS Pay functions as a cloud-based connector linking national payment systems (such as Brazil’s Pix or China’s CIPS) enabling retail (QR code-based) and business to business transactions directly in member currencies, removing the need for a U.S. dollar intermediary.
Central bank digital currency proposals, under the leadership of India, seek to connect central bank digital currencies for smoother, dollar-independent cross-border tourism and trade settlements using blockchain technologies. The plan focuses on connecting existing national fast payment systems and sovereign digital currencies rather than creating a new single currency union. The initiative builds on the 2025 Rio de Janeiro declaration which encouraged efficient and interoperable cross-border payment mechanisms within the bloc in order to lower transaction fees and bypass multiple intermediary banks for businesses, exporters, and travelers.
The BRICS New Development Bank already provides an alternative (albeit limited by capital constraints) for emerging and developing economies to the abusive controls imposed on loans through the United States controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It aims to fund infrastructure and sustainable development across emerging economies, positioning its future around local currency financing, digital asset integration and expanded cooperation among diverse economic states of development. To date, the New Development Bank has provided alternative financing options for development projects across the Global South, having funded close to 100 projects totaling over $32 billion. It is currently primarily funded by the Peoples’ Republic of China but new members Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could, should they chose to do so, vastly increase its current capitalization. An interesting indirect aspect of the existence and potential evolution of the New Development Bank may be the leverage it provides the BRICS with respect to making control over the World Bank and International Monetary Fund more democratic and their operations less intrusive, one of the goals set forth in the Joint Resolution.
Other very pragmatic proposals I found intriguing include the BRICS Global Value Chains Action Plan 2026–2030, an invoice discounting mechanism for trade finance; a dedicated micro, small, and medium enterprise digital platform launched by India during 2026 to connect users with access to knowledge, finance, and international markets; and, a micro, small, and medium enterprise cooperation portal and a startup innovation fund. However. to me, the most important aspect was the call to resurrect international law, virtually assassinated by Israel and the United States, and to reform major international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund which have never met the needs of the vast majority of the world’s population (almost half of which resides in BRICS member nations), but have instead, represented oligarchic interests interested in looting the less developed world and maintaining traditional privileges.
Lugubriously lethargic lassitude is the art form the legacy media has perfected on behalf of its masters to keep us from realizing what has happened to the world we hoped to leave as a legacy for our descendants, the world we thought we’d be able to glimpse and, at times enjoy, the world we were promised if we would just work hard and behave.
It is the hopeless state that assails us when we seek to exercise our political duties and go to the polls with no real choice at all, all the available candidates having already been bought and paid for with our money but certainly not for our benefit.
It is the residue we’re left with when those who own and control us abuse us, and we’re left without recourse in the face of their immune impunity.
It is our reaction when we are forced to realize that Jeffrey Epsteins rule our world through their bought and paid for proxies and that we can, at best, sit and watch as children are abused and Palestinians are slaughtered for fun and profit, hoping that the vision of German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” will not apply to us, at least not in the near future.
It is what being inside a societal black hole’s event horizon feels like for those not among the Chosen. It is what being aware feels like in the Dystopia we live in, one where we sometimes envy those blissfully unaware among us, those who make it possible. It is what we feel when we’ve come to realize that the metaphorical sign atop the gates of mythic Hell joyfully proclaiming the death of hope already apply to us. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
I apparently wrote the following in 2012, revisited it on June 1, 2017 for some reason, and am again revisiting it. Today is the 27th day of August, 2026. The time spanned is interesting but, perhaps even more, so is the relevance. The protagonists are, I assume, Citadel classmates, some of whose names have been changed to protect the guilty:
We were supposed to play softball against a group of local VMI alumni but the day which had started out under a bright golden sun set in a field of robin’s egg blue had made a drastic turn about ten minutes before game time and we’d retired to a local Irish pub where we’d had a dart tournament of sorts instead. After we’d split a few pitchers, a few of us wound up, a bit tipsy in the basement bar at Mike’s house.
We’d shot the shit for quite a while, getting a bit more buzzed as we watched Sunday afternoon football, then finding ourselves in that twilight waiting for the Sunday night game, buzzed enough to take on the world’s problems, … again. We’d all been political science or history majors but most of us had gravitated towards the business world after a sojourn exploring rice paddies of Southeast Asia.
I hadn’t been paying all that much attention, truth be told, I might have been snoozing, until a bit of acrimony crept into our discussions.
Bill had once explained his theory of legitimized violence to me in the context of what he referred to as our reverse Robin Hood socioeconomic system. “Since impunity is rampant”, he’d said, “new mechanisms need to evolve to create and police social justice and that, at least in a state of transition, must involve successful challenges to the state monopoly on legitimate use of violence. The bad guys now own all major states and most if not all minor states so the conditions that led to the implicit decision to surrender personalized use of violence no longer exist. But unlimited violence won’t work either.”
He was off on a similar vein again, this time, trying to put terrorism into some kind of ethical context. I think most of us acknowledged the problem but few saw terrorism as the answer. So Woody, I think, asked Bill if he had any kind of workable solution.
“Terrorism has no boundaries so while in the short term, it provides a kind of superficially reactive sense of justice, it in fact adds to injustice” Bill explained. “There is no accepted terrorist ethic, if there were, then it wouldn’t really be ‘terrorism’, it would be something else.
“Like what” Woody had asked? He and Bill, for the time being, seemingly engaged in a somewhat too serious albeit hypothetical soliloquy. Bill’s vocabulary was a bit too sophisticated for a lot of people but you get used to it after a few decades.
“We’d need to invent a new term I guess” Bill had replied, “but first we’d need to carefully consider what applicable parameters could maximize effectiveness while minimizing harm to the innocent, and in the context of the kind of class-based abuse that we have, determining who is innocent is a fundamental problem.”
“Suppose”, he’d continued “a financier manipulates the law to cheat a million people of their retirement savings but because he then has so much money, he buys protection, not only from prosecution or even civil legal claims, but buys enough security to assure his personal welfare can’t be threatened. Then suppose a victim, in order to exact some kind of compensation, kills the man’s brother; an innocent person who did not benefit directly from the financier’s wrongdoing. Does that involve terrorism? Does that involve justice? Or suppose the victims hire someone to bomb a facility owned by the financier, one undoubtedly insured, and a number of employees and customers are injured there. Does that involve terrorism? Does that involve justice? Probably not, in either case. But what else can victims do? How can they make the costs of wrongful conduct so high that despite the unwillingness of the state to see justice done, such conduct will be made too risky?”
“That’s the million dollar question” Chuck chimed in (so he wasn’t asleep after all). Woody poked him, laughing. “Remember when questions were cheaper? Groucho Marx and the $64,000 question?”
“You mean Karl Marx don’t you” grumbled Frank. Frank was a completely honest guy but a dyed in the wool Republican for whom the state could do no wrong.
Bill glanced at his friends, worried that perhaps he was being a bit too open. They’d all studied political science together decades before but the others had wandered into different fields. He had too but after his divorce he’d returned to academia and a very different world view. Still, while they frequently disagreed, there was a lot of respect shared so he opened up. “Cute, guys, if only this wasn’t so serious. Desperate people take desperate actions, and way too much of the world is full of desperate people. A bit of ethical guidance could save a lot of lives.
“Ethics? Terrorist ethics, you’ve got to be kidding” chided Frank.
“Well financiers’ ethics sure aren’t about to make a surprise appearance” responded Bill. “The fact is, an analogy to ethical and legal norms involving the concept of self-defense might alleviate the collateral damage. Maybe there is a basis for resort to violence that can at least be tied to standards so that suffering by the innocent can be minimized, but it’s a tough call. One argument I’ve heard involves concentric zones of responsibility-benefit with the victimizers in the middle, kind of like bulls’ eyes, and the purely innocent on the outside.
Huh (from several of the people present)?
“Well” answered Bill, the innermost circle has those most directly responsible with each next circle including a proximate prioritization of blame or responsibility. It’s a nexus based chain. Let me give you an example. The person responsible is in the central circle, following circles might include that person’s accomplices, then that person’s guards, then people who benefit directly from that persons improper actions, then persons who benefit indirectly. After a series of circles like that you arrive at the mass of people who have no links. Only action involving the latter would be pure terrorism while only action against the person responsible would be fully justified. As one gets further away from the center, justification decreases while the label of terrorism becomes more apt. Of course, defining who merits occupying the center is the rub.
Woody thought for a bit and then asked, “Well; how does that affect tax payers? Many of us support activities that might be considered culpable while others don’t, but we all have to pay them.
Bill seemed prepared for the question and replied fairly quickly “The problem there involves the ability to implement the ethical paradigm. How to tell which taxpayers are more blameworthy and which are more innocent, and even harder, how to act separately in such a general context. Obviously the supporters of the policies that are blameworthy are less innocent than the opponents, but the group is too homogenous to differentiate.”
“Tom, you’re the lawyer” said Chuck. “I know law and ethics have all too little in common, but what do you think of Bill’s observations?”
Tom kind of grinned. “That depends on whether he can pay the legal fees. I’m pretty sure he’ll be needing a lawyer, soon.”
“Fuck all of you” shouted Frank, apparently a bit more buzzed than the rest. “And God bless America.”
Realizing he may have talked a bit more openly than was healthy in the current climate, Bill glanced at his watch and exclaimed “Where the Hell has the time gone, we need to do this again sometime but as for me, I’m out ‘a here.”
Most of the others agreed, called for their tabs and got up, all except for Frank and Tom, who decided they needed to talk a bit more.
“Shit” Bill whispered to Woody as he left, “I forgot just what Frank has been doing during the past few years”.
“You can’t be serious Bill” Woody whispered back.
“Then why are we whispering” observed Bill? “Why are we whispering?” _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
On August 13 of this year (2026), Sue Seboda published an article on Substack entitled “Will the SAVE Act Save America or is it just more spitballs and sledgehammers…”. It follows a multipart series of articles Sue has written and published on Substack dealing with the history of immigration and immigration legislation in the United States, a decent fairly objective effort worth reading, as is her latest article which can be accessed at https://sueseboda.substack.com/p/will-the-save-act-save-america?r=lwzkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. Sue strikes me as being on the conservative side of the political spectrum but objective and open minded. I like her work. I, on the other hand, am and have long been a democratic socialist along the lines of Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela, Pepe Mujica, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. (not to be confused with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin or even Leon Trotsky).
Sue’s article deals with very significant issues, issues that also impact other critical issues not dealt with in the article such as the nature of the federal decennial census used to apportion Congressional representation and distribute federal funds and the issue of birthright citizenship, all of which should probably be dealt with concurrently via a federal constitutional clarifying amendment after robust debate that results in legal requirements that deal with real problems in a manner avoiding discrimination based on race, gender, religious beliefs or national origins but definitely limits the roles of non-citizens in United States institutions. The article focuses on the pros and cons of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), a proposed Congressional bill that would requires individuals to provide documentary proof of United States citizenship (such as a passport or certified birth certificate) when registering to vote in federal elections.
If formal participation in the political process by undocumented migrants is an important issue, an even more critical issue has been ignored and is generally ignored, the role of foreign governments and their agents, advocates and representative in the United States electoral and political system and the role of campaign contributions from sources ineligible to vote in the elections impacted, including political action committees, corporations, labor unions, chambers of commerce and individuals. That is a real clear and present danger. The two great villains in the foregoing, albeit not the only ones, are the Israeli American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the United States Supreme Court, especially in its Citizens United decision, Citizens United v. FEC; 558 U.S. 310 (2010) and its June 30, 2026 decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, 609 U.S. ____ (2026). Of course, the legacy media focuses primarily on imaginary roles by Russia and China, ignoring the reality of United States interference in foreign elections, most recently, along with Israel, throughout Latin America.
For the most part (in the author’s opinion), the least rational political posture with respect to securing the electoral process has been that adopted by the Democratic Party and its activist base which vehemently oppose action to require picture identification and proof of citizenship to vote. That specifically includes vehement opposition to the SAVE Act which includes concepts that enjoy overwhelming support among the citizenry, opposition to which is likely to cost the Democratic Party a significant number of votes among the independent voter community in upcoming Congressional elections. The SAVE Act is far from perfect and could certainly use a bit of constitutional and pragmatic polish though its premises seem sound. However, a rising swell of Republicans, apparently political descendants of the nineteenth century “American Party”[1], are seeking clearly inappropriate actions designed to minimize the rights and even citizenship status of United States citizens, especially naturalized citizens and Islamic Americans, or indeed any United States citizens opposed to Zionist and Israeli control over United States officials, both elected and appointed. Republican advocates have gone as far as to demand that certain United States citizens be stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the United States for opposing policies such as undeclared wars and support for genocide and ethnic cleansing, or that they at least be imprisoned and deprived of their political rights. The foregoing is even more ludicrous than Democratic Party and Democratic Party activist opposition to limiting the right to vote and receipt of federal benefits, as a right, to United States citizens.
The reality is that the positions of both the Democratic and Republican parties are based on few moral, ethical, legal or constitutional factors but rather, only on how they benefit their ability to dominate government at all levels: federal, state and local. That is something that should disgust all decent citizens regardless of their favored political ideologies but, unfortunately, the communications and entertainment industries in the United States, rather than educate and enlighten, manipulate, obfuscate, confuse and deceive, making functional democracy at best highly improbable, inefficient and dysfunctional, i.e., the ludicrous system we have today led by the ludicrous national leaders proffered by both major political parties for the past half century: i.e., William Jefferson Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Joseph Robinette Biden and Donald J. Trump (with their supporting casts in Congress, the Judiciary and the Bureaucracy, led by their noses by the Military Industrial Complex against which President Dwight David Eisenhower warned as he left office).
It may be that at some level things are changing, ironically, based on dissidents within the Republican Party (such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green, Thomas Massie, Joe Kent and Candace Owens) seeking a real “Make America First” alternative, and on an evolving democratic socialist wing in the Democratic Party led by recently elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. I confess to admiring them all, though I’m not always in full agreement with them. If they could somehow unite and develop a platform based on issues with which they agree, and there are many, many of the worst problems engrained for over a century in United States politics might be minimized. However, that is a posture their respective followers appear to consider anathema and thus, such a scenario is only a bit more probable than Hell freezing over or the United States electorate finally coming to grips with the Declaration of Independence they claim to revere.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
The concept that rejecting the political posture of an individual or political movement or party can constitute “treason” in a pluralistic democracy is oxymoronic.
The allegiance of a citizen in a democracy is to the corporate concept of the “People”, not to any person or political party, and certainly not to any serving government. Perhaps not even to the “State”.
The principal political duty of individuals in a democracy is to maintain their civic responsibilities by informing and educating themselves, exercising their reason and common sense, and sharing their opinions with other citizens without fear of reprisals, calumnies or ridicule.
The foregoing is something almost entirely absent from current discourse in purported Western democracies. Perhaps the “adjective “Western” now changes the nature of the noun modified making it synonymous instead with oligarchical autocracy and dictatorship. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
