8/2/25 Before my recent flight to New Delhi, I had breakfast at the Pacific Hotel in Phnom Penh, where the experience is usually relaxed and subdued. But that day was quite different. As no sooner did I sit down with my plate full of buffet favorites, then suddenly the entire room was flooded with a large Japanese group having to mix into a much smaller Anglo one. Having just come from Siem Reap, where it’s quiet and spacious, this scene suggested to me what might be creating some of the fascist tendencies in America, and much more, now that I really start to think about it. Expansionism in the face of global crowding, was one. Resource plundering of special minerals for increasingly higher consumption of war goods and higher tech lifestyles, was another. While the expulsion of foreign nationals is simply to assuage bigotry—a return to what never really was, ‘a great America’—being a dog whistle to exercise lazy, smug, and arrogant thinking, that naturally gravitates to base...