By Ralph Nader March 6, 2026 When you closely observe the media, it is astonishing to discover how many very newsworthy stories both camps ignore. 1. Impeachment of Trump—every week, Tyrant Trump adds new acts to his “dangerous dictator” rap sheet. He is the most Impeachable president in American history by far. So why isn’t…

The illegal and deeply unpopular US war of aggression against Iran is incurring massive human and financial costs, which will continue to climb for years to come. The Pentagon has already spent billions on weapons used in the assault, and is now preparing to ask for even more money. A new $50 billion request to fund additional munitions is expected to land in Congress before this week ends.

Rather than spending $50 billion to fuel more wanton death and destruction, Congress should be funding human needs. The entire $50 billion package, which will top-up the Pentagon’s already colossal $1 trillion budget, would be enough to help reverse some of the harms of H.R.1, including all of the following:

• Extend the ACA healthcare subsidies for one year to save millions of families from devastating insurance premium increases ($35 billion);
• Restore annual SNAP benefits to 2.4 million people who lost their benefits due to work requirements this month and are now at risk of hunger (about $5.5 billion), and
• Provide Medicaid services to nearly 2 million people who couldn’t otherwise access healthcare this year (about $9.5 billion).

Congress must not permit a dollar more of public money to be spent on this catastrophic war of choice. Our tax dollars should be supporting families at home, not bombing them abroad.

When people from abroad ask me what’s going on with President Donald Trump’s second term, I tell them that he is unlike other US presidents who were strongly influenced by special interests and big money. Instead, he is a charismatic cadaver that big moneyed and special interests have harvested, sometimes complementing each other but other times clashing with a base drive for power at the root of the corpse.

The Trump cadaver appears particularly conflicted in its peace rhetoric and its policies of militarism and war. His longtime campaign speeches of wanting to stop wars, to be the “peace candidate,” and his more recent infantile desire and arm-twisting to receive the Nobel Peace Prize stand in stark contrast to his record as president. During his first term, he amplified Barack Obama’s drone war, dropped a MOAB on Afghanistan in 2017, launched strikes on Syria, and had the top IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani assassinated just after New Year’s in 2020. Minus the assassination, this was well within the norm for the late 20th and early 21st century imperial presidency; suffice to say that first term Trump was not a peace president.

In his second term, Trump became a full-blown authoritarian war hawk while still claiming to be anti-war and an enabler of peace. Before the 2024 election, powerful interests, the military-industrial complex, the Israeli lobby, business interests, and the tech monopolists all made plans to harvest inside Trump should he get elected. This array of special interests realized that they could make use of this blundering cadaver to ensure their ends were met. These special interests were extremely successful.

Project 2025 came into being with the goal of tearing away the social safety net for Americans in its target of the “administrative state.” Trump claimed he had no idea about this project during the campaign, but, once in office, he instituted its policies and hired its authors. This project complemented the extremist right’s anti-immigrant agenda led by Stephen Miller. The results have been ugly: While food stamps have been cut and US citizens and residents from abroad were being gunned down in the streets, the military got half a trillion more dollars annually. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the private paramilitary, received eight times what it has historically at just over $80 billion.

There are no adults in the room to constrain cadaver Trump and his policies of internal and external mass violence, piracy, and war.

Some of the more absurd behavior that we’ve seen over the past year speaks to the forces within the Trump cadaver fighting it out within him. The creation of a Board of Peace for administering Gaza is antithetical to peace and justice. Its main goal is to serve the ultra elite in constructing luxury resorts and likely allow only the most obeisant Gazans to remain as servants to the wealthy. The Trump cadaver endlessly complained about not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize and then overthrew and kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, to essentially loot the country’s oil. Trump deployed ceaseless rhetoric against the neocons but then fulfilling their wet dreams by attacking Iran's nuclear facilities with Israel in 2025 summer. Now, again with Israel, Trump has attacked Iran for no clear reason other than to ensure Israeli regional hegemony and that no country opposes the policies of US empire. In this sense, cadaver Trump has become not just a wannabe dictator of the US, but a wannabe dictator of the world. Clearly, after catering to some anti-war populist campaign rhetoric, the military-industrial complex and pro-Israeli interests took the cadaver by the reins.

As of this writing, there have been 1,230 Iranians killed, including 180 from a girls’ school—a likely war crime. Europe’s most powerful countries, Germany, France, and Great Britain, issued a statement in response to the conflict. Rather than condemning the aggression of an out-of-control empire that no longer chooses to rationalize its mass violence, they condemned the Iranians for responding to the onslaught of Israeli and US attacks. As if Iran should just sit on its knees and get pummeled. It seems as if Trump’s threats of tariffs and taking over Greenland have turned these European leaders into puppets. It calls to mind the “protesters” calling for the shah of Iran to be reinstituted. As if the solution of Iran’s independence and intransigence to the US world order is to have another puppet rule Iran, just like the last one, Reza Pahlavi. It was this last shah who was likely responsible for more deaths of Iranian protesters than recent Iranian government crackdowns.

Today the empire no longer tries to rationalize its wars or pretends to adhere to international law. It is rather an empire gone mad: a strange mix of Viking-era looting and rampage with might-is-right 19th century European colonialism, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio cleverly paid homage to at the Munich Security Conference.

There are no adults in the room to constrain cadaver Trump and his policies of internal and external mass violence, piracy, and war. The leading Democrats in Congress have offered tepid criticism of the latest Iran War only on procedural grounds. That leaves it up to the people, progressives, and burgeoning anti-war sentiment on the right to put an end to these US-generated foreign bloodbaths. And to prevent the continuous rise of inclinations of mass destruction within the Trump cadaver once and for all.

On our recent delegation to Venezuela, one quote echoed again and again — a warning written nearly two centuries ago by Simón Bolívar in 1829:

“The United States appears destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”

For many Venezuelans, that line no longer feels like history. It feels like the present.

The January 3 US military operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores marked a dramatic escalation in a conflict that Venezuelans describe not as sudden but as cumulative—the culmination of decades of pressure, sanctions, and attempts at isolation. “We still haven’t totally processed what happened on January 3,” sanctions expert William Castillo told us. “But it was the culmination of over 25 years of aggression and 11 years of resisting devastating sanctions. A 20-year-old today has lived half his life in a blockaded country.”

Carlos Ron, former deputy foreign minister and now with the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, described the buildup to the invasion as the result of a carefully constructed narrative. “First there was the dangerous rhetoric describing Venezuelans in the United States as criminals,” he said. “Then endless references to the Tren de Aragua gang. Then the boat strikes blowing up alleged smugglers. Then the oil tanker seizures and naval blockade. The pressure wasn’t working, so they escalated to the January 3 invasion and kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the deaths of over 100 people.”

While in the United States the events of January 3 have largely been forgotten, replaced by a devastating war with Iran, in Venezuela the reminders are everywhere. Huge banners draped from apartment buildings demand: “Bring them home.” Weekly protests call for their release.

In the Tiuna neighborhood of Caracas, we met Mileidy Chirinos, who lives in an apartment complex overlooking the site where Maduro was captured. From her rooftop, she told us about that dreadful night, when the sky lit up with explosions so loud her building shook and everyone ran outside screaming.

“Have your children ever woken up terrified to the sound of bombs?” she asked.

We shook our heads.

“Ours have,” she said. “And they are US bombs. Now we understand what Palestinians in Gaza feel every day.”

She told us psychologists now visit weekly to help residents cope with the trauma.

Within days of the US invasion, the National Assembly swore in Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as acting president. President Trump publicly praised Rodríguez for “doing a good job,” emphasizing his strong relationship with her. But from the beginning, she has been negotiating with the United States with a gun to her head. She was told that any refusal to compromise would result not in the kidnapping of her and her team, but death and the continued bombing of Venezuela.

The presence of US power looms large. Nuclear submarines still patrol offshore. Thousands of troops remain positioned nearby. Every statement and decision made by the government is scrutinized. And on February 2, despite Trump’s praise for Delcy Rodríguez, he renewed the 2015 executive order declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.

The visits from the heads of the CIA and Southern Command have undoubtedly been difficult for the government to swallow. Delcy’s revolutionary father was tortured to death in 1976 by a Venezuelan government that worked closely with the CIA. The US Southern Command coordinated the January 3 attack.

But the government is not without leverage.

“The United States thought the state was weak, that it didn’t have popular support, that the military was divided,” said Tania Díaz of the ruling PSUV party. “January 3rd could have triggered looting, military defections, or widespread destabilization. None of that happened.”

The United States has overwhelming military dominance, but it was also aware that millions of Venezuelans signed up to be part of the people’s militia. This militia, along with the army that remained loyal to the government, gave Washington pause about launching a prolonged war and attempting to replace Delcy Rodríguez with opposition leader María Corina Machado.

While Machado enjoys enthusiastic support among Venezuelan exiles in Miami and the Trump administration recognized her movement as the winner of the 2024 election, the picture inside Venezuela is very different. The opposition remains deeply divided and Trump realized there was no viable faction ready to assume power.

Besides, as William Castillo put it bluntly: “Trump does not care about elections or human rights or political prisoners. He cares about three other things: oil, oil, and oil.” To that, we can add gold, where the US just pushed Venezuela to provide direct access to gold exports and investment opportunities in the country’s gold and mineral sector,

Certainly, under the circumstances, the Venezuelan leadership has had little choice but to grant the United States significant influence over its oil exports. But while Trump boasts that this is the fruit of his “spectacular assault,” Maduro had long been open to cooperation with US oil companies.

“Maduro was well aware that Venezuela needed investment in its oil facilities,” Castillo told us, “but the lack of investment is because of US sanctions, not because of Maduro. Venezuela never stopped selling to the US.; it is the US that stopped buying. And it also stopped selling spare parts needed to repair the infrastructure. So the US started the fire that decimated our oil industry and now acts as if it’s the firefighter coming to the rescue.”

In any case, the easing of oil sanctions—the only sanctions that have been partially lifted—is already bringing an infusion of much-needed dollars, and the government has been able to use these funds to support social programs.

But in Venezuela the conflict is not seen as simply about oil. Blanca Eekhout, head of the Simon Bolivar Institute, says US actions represent a brazen return to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine originally warned European powers not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere, but over time it became a justification for repeated US interventions across the region.

“We have gone back 200 years,” she said. “All rules of sovereignty have been violated. But while the Trump administration thinks it can control the hemisphere by force, it can’t.”

The historical contradiction is stark. In 1823, the young United States declared Latin America its sphere of influence. A year earlier, Bolívar envisioned a powerful, sovereign Latin America capable of charting its own destiny. That tension still echoes through the present.

Bolívar’s dream is also being battered by the resurgence of the right across the region. The left in Latin America is far weaker than during the days of Hugo Chávez. Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have been replaced by conservative leaders. Cuba remains under a suffocating US siege. Progressive regional institutions like CELAC and ALBA have faded, and the vision of Latin American unity that once seemed within reach now feels far more fragile.

In Caracas, the situation is tangled, contradictory, and volatile. But amid the uncertainty, one thing felt clear: the Venezuelan left is not collapsing. It is recalibrating.

As Blanca told us before we left:

“They thought we would fall apart. But we are still here.”

And in the background, Bolívar’s warning continues to drift through the air—like a storm that never quite passes.

Power is felt, attributed, invisible, all-important, descriptive, without shape, and so much more. There is personal power, governmental power, and the collective power of the people. Power can be bought, sold, traded, bestowed, even rescinded. It can be good or bad, positive or corrupt. However you might wish to describe power, one thing is clear: How it’s used depends on the society in which we live.

At present, of course, our society is one in which President Donald J. Trump is the quintessential seeker of power, a man who needs power the way most of us need food. And as it happens, he has at his beck and call not just the entire military establishment, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (and so much more). With him in the White House, power is distinctly in fashion.

Personal Power

Married and with children, my brother, who was a veteran, kept guns in his basement. “To hunt,” he told me when I objected. But he didn’t hunt, not in Nassau County where he lived, not by taking part in a sport that cost money he didn’t have to travel somewhere, get licenses, and who knows what else. Did he keep guns because he felt afraid? Absolutely not, he insisted. Was his neighborhood one with many break-ins? No, he assured me. So, why did he need weapons in his basement? He couldn’t say, except that it was important to him to own them.

Why? I kept asking him. As a soldier, he reminded me, he had been taught that without his gun he was in danger of being killed.

Under the Trump administration, when more is taken away from so many people than given to them, guns offer those who carry them a reprieve from a sense of powerlessness over their daily lives and futures.

Had he been a man of means, that inculcation wouldn’t, I suspect, have been as powerful, but he wasn’t and never did feel empowered. He’s gone now, but his world isn’t. Guns remain as much a staple in the United States as potatoes.

Well-off families keep guns, too, hopefully in locked places and have the money to buy hunting rifles, licenses, and whatever other paraphernalia they need. But in the United States today, all too many guns—sometimes even untraceable “ghost guns”—aren’t locked in boxes, but carried by young people on the streets and even sometimes into schools. The guns on the streets of inner cities, in rural areas, and even in some suburbs are all too often unlicensed stolen ones. And a desire or need to be seen, known, or heard all too often leads to someone shooting others with one of those weapons in a mall, movie theater, or school. Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in this country in 2023. Such shootings occur more often in the United States than in any other nation. Why?

Under the Trump administration, when more is taken away from so many people than given to them, guns offer those who carry them a reprieve from a sense of powerlessness over their daily lives and futures. Many of them are young people alienated by a society that cares little about their well-being. With gun in hand, they experience steadiness, security, and yes, hope (however false it may prove to be).

With a weak social safety net, a gun offers a false sense of personal power and security. Should anyone come too close and aggravate the anger that may be boiling inside, however, that gun could go off. And who wouldn’t be angry? Too many young people in working-class families today are unsure where they might be headed and fear the dead-end jobs that they know lie in their future. The Trump administration, of course, offers such young people little or nothing—and if they weren’t born in the United States, they face the everyday menace of fear, degradation, and deportation. In America today, immigrants have become the scapegoats for such unvarnished racism that it takes one’s breath away. And don’t imagine that this is about so-called borders. Not a chance! Rather, it’s part of Donald Trump’s and his adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to rid the country of as many people of color as they can, with the end result, they hope, being white supremacy.

Though guns should be difficult (if not impossible) to obtain, like drugs, they are, in fact, available around more or less any corner in the most impoverished areas of any state. To stop the acquisition of guns, we would need more than enacted laws. We would also need to strengthen hope and offer a deeper belief in the daily safety of those who don’t for a moment feel taken care of in the most powerful country in the world.

And there’s no hiding from those in need how power is used to procure more and more money for the already wealthy, the Trumpian billionaires of our world.

Why should some, but not most of us, have an equal chance to do more than survive? For too many, their present and future safety becomes their personal problem, while Trump and crew are busily engaged in pursuing military and imperial power to gain yet more wealth for themselves and other billionaires, none of which enhances the power of the American people. And don’t forget that Donald Trump’s blatant racism is a vile infection that spreads daily from the Oval Office.

From Toy Guns to Machine Guns to Tanks

From toy guns to actual machine guns, the United States offers a constant example of how to express power through weaponry. There are the guns of war, the guns of intimidation, and the guns used against countries whose governments we choose to assault. Take Venezuela, where a recent US military sneak attack killed untold numbers of civilians and snatched its president to imprison him in the United States. That, I say, is one hell of a lot of nerve. The Trump administration certainly didn’t do that to make life better for the Venezuelan people, but to steal that country’s oil riches, which Trump plans to use for the benefit of US oil companies.

And with that in mind, let me head into the past for a moment. In 1968, when riots erupted in many communities to protest the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tanks first appeared on the streets of American inner cities—big, bulging, heavy vehicles, much like the ones being used in the Vietnam War that was then still raging.

That moment could, in fact, be seen as the public start of the militarization of this country’s police—the start but far from the end of it, which we see today, 77 years later, in many states like Minnesota. There, masked, gun-carrying (as in the old West) Border Patrol and federalized ICE agents have invaded, terrorizing and killing innocent civilians and pulling people out of their cars to deposit them in deportation camps. Such scenes not only increase the frustration and fear of so many Americans, but also the desire to carry licensed (or unlicensed) guns to protect themselves.

ICE is the most recent incarnation of weaponization in this country, in which the agents themselves have become the weapons.

Such macho terrorizing actions as in Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so many other places in this country, involving the rounding up of immigrants, are all too much like the 1930s Gestapo in Nazi Germany rounding up Jews. The use of such terror is not only sanctioned by the Trump government but also encouraged by racists like Stephen Miller. He is the quintessential representation of where this country is headed, if not stopped and stopped quickly.

In addition to guns, ICE Agents carry other weapons of war: fire suppressers, lasers, accessory mounts, dump pouches, magazine wells—and they use drones. Pepper spray and other debilitating substances are also being used against those who protest the terror.

War is now being waged against Americans on the streets of our country, which is not only antithetical to all our laws but distinctly unconstitutional and, of course, immoral to the nth degree. Such weapons are perfected for one reason: to kill.

Unsurprisingly, ever more money is once again being spent on the Defense Department (now the Department of War), instead of on health, education, science, and so much else. And Donald Trump wants to spend far more. Guns over butter is an old meme, which we simply must not accept.

People Power

In Minnesota, ordinary people organized against the fascistic actions of ICE. Their resistance was not only brave, but an important example of the ways in which the people have chosen the good over the actions and behaviors of a bad government, president, and the Stephen Millers of this world. As demonstrated in Minnesota, we Americans have refused to go quietly into ICE’s nightmare. We wouldn’t stand for such injustice and intuitively began organizing to meet the needs of our neighbors and those who are being treated horribly. Watch groups, food groups, school groups, even singing groups were organized by ordinary citizens, inspired by an innate sense of justice and an innate hatred of injustice.

The struggle of Americans during the siege of Minnesota has indeed had results. The Department of Homeland Security, President Trump, Stephen Miller, and their cohorts have lost some credibility and perhaps some of their ability to frighten people into obedience. It’s more than unfortunate, however, that, in the process, children had to (and will continue to have to) experience the unjust power exhibited by ICE and Trump.

The use of guns will undoubtedly continue to be a staple of Donald Trump’s war of intimidation, clearly focused on developing a society where white supremacy rules. (See Project 2025.) His followers are laying the groundwork for the few to rule the many at the cost of our freedom.

We the people have power, too. There is power in knowledge, power in organizing, and power in resistance, all of which can be used to halt the brutality and lies of this administration.

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote that, if you introduce a gun in Act One, make sure to use it by the end of the play. In other words, unless stopped, what the Trump administration has been doing will only grow more brutal. Its attempt to militarize this country goes beyond the Department of War to other government departments like the Department of Homeland Security. Its plebeian belief that might is the only right (and only its right) is also its way of opening a road leading to an authoritarian government, where voting itself will undoubtedly become endangered.

We’re living through an exceptionally dark time where tyranny, lies, and encroaching fascism at home, and the rapidly accelerating destruction of our planet (again, with a distinct helping hand from President Trump) are happening in tandem. Our elected representatives have shown themselves to be spectacularly ill-prepared in the face of such threats.

But neither the president nor his government owns the people. We the people have power, too. There is power in knowledge, power in organizing, and power in resistance, all of which can be used to halt the brutality and lies of this administration. Moreover, the people have the numbers. If we wish not to be overtaken by an authoritarian government in whose hands so many more will suffer, then it’s important to resist now.

We the people know how to do that. We have done so throughout history. We have rallied and demonstrated. We have called on our neighbors, friends, and families. We have called on our local media. We have called on members of Congress. We have written letters and posted signs and billboards. We have sat in protest, walked in protest, and even gone to jail in protest. And we weren’t to be stopped. We made our voices heard across society. We appeared in thousands of towns and cities across America.

The history of this country has shown not once but many times that people together resisting and fighting for justice (without guns) can win. It was how Social Security was won, how child labor was ended, how the Vietnam War was made ever more difficult to pursue, and that’s just to start down a long list of examples. Recently, on MS Now, TV host and political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell said:

The protesters always win,
And people die,
But protesters always win.

History proves O’Donnell right.

The murderous madman from Mar-a-Lago, who claims himself worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, has unleashed yet another war, this one across the Mideast. President Donald Trump has demonstrated again and again the absence of any consistent foreign policy, except a perfunctory willingness to unleash military might. Since returning to office last year Trump has attacked Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela, and Iran twice, and he has threatened “friendly” takeovers of Denmark (Greenland) and Cuba.

For Trump, foreign policy is dedicated not to peace, but first of all to secure access to mineral and petroleum resources, and second to make the world understand his dealmaking prowess. But even by mercenary standards, he falls short. His efforts to secure “peace” in Africa, the Caucasus, the Mideast, and Ukraine reveal a doddering dictator dedicated only to securing access to strategic resources, not at all a statesman interested in peace. In fact, Trump’s diplomatic efforts reflect a transactional approach to accumulate wealth through minerals, oil, and natural gas for himself and his extended family, and secondarily to US companies.

Trump claims to have ended eight wars. None of his touted agreements have actually ended a war. The so-called “Washington Accords” between Congo and Rwanda in December 2025—in the name of peace—actually aims at a strategic partnership between the US and Congo that gives American companies priority access to the country’s significant reserves of strategic cobalt, copper and lithium. The accords failed to end the fighting.

Trump insists his efforts alone ended the decades-long war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But an August 2025 agreement has not been ratified or implemented, nor was the agreement new, nor American-brokered, but the product of bilateral negotiations between Baku and Yerevan. The agreement instead mentions a Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) connectivity project to be built solely by American companies with railways, communication networks, and pipelines for oil and gas. (It does not help to win peace in the Caucasus that the intellectually impaired Trump insists that Azerbaijan is Albania.)

Trump promised an end to the war in Ukraine on day one of his second term. He obviously has not delivered, and he has no interest in ending the war. Nor does Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump insists that Ukraine give in to Russian territorial demands. In exchange for US access to Ukrainian mineral resources and its nuclear power stations, Trump says he will guarantee the peace that follows. But the Trump “peace” deal requires nothing from Russia in return. To dazzle Trump, Russia cleverly promised the US $12 trillion in economic deals involving fuels and minerals should a treaty be signed. But this is a Kremlin ploy given that the promised amount is six times Russia’s GDP. Putin’s representatives deftly deployed dollar signs to excite Trump’s mineral fantasies.

Granted, Trump supported an Israeli-Palestine ceasefire in September 2025, but it, too reflects his base acquisitive interests. Trump said of the deal, in a fit of self-adulation, “All I've done all my life is deals. The greatest deals just sort of happen… And maybe this is going to be the greatest deal of them all.” In fact, the “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” has not led to peace or demilitarization. It ultimately endorses a US takeover of the Gaza Strip, the expulsion of all Palestinians, and the construction of a Gaza Mideast Riviera, replete with Trump skyscrapers and glass-front condominiums for the wealthy.

Not content with the halting pursuit of mineral rights and property deals in Africa, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East, Trump determined to secure petroleum in South America. In January 2026 Trump ordered the bombing of Venezuela to remove its leadership and bring its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to the US for prosecution. Trump celebrated the invasion as an end to the flooding of the US with fentanyl by violent Venezuelan “narco-terrorists.” But this was a typical Trump lie: The drug comes from Mexico and China, and Trump’s real interest was in ownership of Venezuelan oil reserves which at one time were controlled by US companies. Those companies remain skeptical today of any investment to rebuild the industry. And so, president promised that the US is going to "run" Venezuela "until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”

The same pattern of lies, ignorance, and violence came to a head in Iran. If Trump was truly interested in peace, he would not have unilaterally abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (2016) with Iran that had secured its agreement not to build nuclear weapons and permitted onsite inspections of its facilities. Trump withdrew from the accord in 2018 simply because it was an accomplishment of Barrack Obama.

Trump wanted war with Iran, no matter the consequences. As a first step, in June 2025, the US and Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, with Trump pompously—and falsely—proclaiming their obliteration. And even as US and Iranian negotiators were close to a new deal in Oman in this weekend, in which Iran had agreed again to full verification of sites and never to build nuclear weapons, Trump started a second war with Israel’s help. Pursuing regime change against common sense and his advisers’ informed assessments, he ordered missiles to kill Iranian leadership in the gratuitously named mission “Operation Epic Fury.” And now the US is stuck in a Trumpian world of unending violence that is spreading from Iran to Israel to Bahrain to US bases in what many observers are now calling “Operation Epstein Fury”—a war to divert attention from Trump’s pedophile scandal at home.

So confident about this war are the president and his advisers that they sat about, smirking, in his Mar-o-Lago “situation room” to gloat over this most recent war, with maps and photos, likely of military secrets, visible on the wall, not far from the bathroom in which Trump kept stolen classified documents. What’s up next for the decrepit, violent, and ineffective leader? Sending federal troops wearing body armor and armed with chemical weapons and M-4 carbines into US cities to subjugate dangerous blue states?

The Army got 20 years of my father’s life including two tours in Vietnam. In return, it gave him nightmares he never named and cancers connected to his service. He wouldn’t talk about what happened over there—not even when I asked.

He came home and spent decades fighting a war nobody could see. The PTSD was severe and completely untreated. In those years, nobody used the term. They just called men like my father “difficult” or “distant.” My mother raised five daughters alongside him, absorbing the weight of his trauma so we all carried pieces of it with us.

He finally found some peace later in life. Then a prostate cancer diagnosis—a disease appearing on the US Department of Veteran Affair’s official list of conditions presumed to be caused by Agent Orange. He won the fight. Then leukemia reared its ugly head, and, at 66, the war finally finished what it started decades earlier.

My mother and my four sisters endured his suffering as our own for his entire life while the country sending him to war simply moved on.

The question before this country is whether it is willing to do this again—to commit another generation to a war with no defined objectives, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization.

I have spent 25 years as an educator, teaching young people to recognize patterns and think critically about the world around them. I am watching a pattern unfold right now, and I am compelled to speak about it.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a massive military campaign against Iran—Operation Epic Fury. In six days, the conflict has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran—including over 150 schoolgirls killed in a single strike on an elementary school—and six American service members. The defense Secretary declared “America is winning” and said the operation was in its early days, promising more to come.

The scale is staggering. Iran has launched more than 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones in retaliation. Israeli and American strikes have hit residential neighborhoods, hospitals, and a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tehran. The World Health Organization has documented 13 attacks on Iranian health infrastructure. Iran’s internet has been blacked out for over 100 hours, cutting 88 million people off from the outside world.

And the conflict is metastasizing daily. A US submarine sank an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka—the first torpedo fired at an enemy vessel since World War II. NATO forces shot down an Iranian missile heading toward Turkey—the first time in this conflict a missile has threatened a NATO member. Drones struck Azerbaijan. Qatar is evacuating residents near the US Embassy. An Iranian drone strike shut down Qatar’s liquefied natural gas exports, triggering a potential energy crisis from India to Italy. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed.

The same week, American forces began combat operations in Ecuador—the latest step in a hemisphere-wide military expansion including the capture of Venezuela’s president and strikes on alleged drug boats killing over 150 people.

None of it was authorized by Congress.

The parallels to Vietnam are not abstract. They are specific and structural.

Vietnam began with the Gulf of Tonkin incident—an alleged attack later investigation revealed never happened, built on intelligence deliberately distorted. The justification for the Iran campaign has followed a strikingly similar pattern. The administration pointed to nuclear weapons and ballistic missile threats, but US intelligence assessments contradicted those claims, projecting Iran could not develop such capabilities before 2035. The United Nation’s nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran was not days or weeks from having atomic weapons. Within days, the official rationale cycled through nuclear concerns, protest crackdowns, “imminent threats,” and finally open regime change.

Vietnam escalated through incremental steps, each framed as a necessary response to the last. What began with 900 military advisers in 1960 had swelled to more than 500,000 ground troops by 1968. The Iran trajectory mirrors this arc—economic sanctions gave way to Houthi strikes, then a targeted air campaign in 2025, and now a war spanning multiple continents and drawing in NATO for the first time. Senior officials have left the door open to ground forces.

Vietnam had the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—passed with only two dissenting votes—handing the president unchecked authority. Iran has something arguably worse: no authorization at all. The War Powers Resolution, the very law Congress created in 1973 because of Vietnam, was voted down in the Senate on March 4 by a margin of 47 to 53. The eighth time Congress has refused to assert its constitutional war authority since June. The tool exists. The will to use it does not.

And perhaps the most damning parallel: Just 72 hours before the strikes began, Iran’s top diplomat declared a deal to avert war was within grasp. Oman’s foreign minister confirmed Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and accept full international verification. Talks were still happening in Geneva when the first missiles hit. Diplomacy didn’t fail. It was abandoned.

There is one more parallel Americans must reckon with. Iran is not a country poised to collapse under bombardment and accept a government designed in Washington. It is a nation of 88 million people with a civilization stretching back millennia. It survived the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, a US-backed coup in 1953, and an eight-year war with Iraq in which the world armed its enemy. Modern history does not contain a single instance of Western military force successfully transforming a Middle Eastern nation into a stable democracy. Iraq took 20 years and failed. Afghanistan took 20 years and failed. Libya collapsed into chaos. What reason is there to believe Iran will be different?

My father was sent to fight a war lasting two decades, killing 58,000 Americans and over 2 million Vietnamese, achieving nothing it promised. The dying didn’t stop when the war ended—veterans kept falling for decades to Agent Orange cancers and untreated trauma. Their families carried the cost in silence. My family carried it in silence.

The question before this country is whether it is willing to do this again—to commit another generation to a war with no defined objectives, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization. The institutions supposed to prevent this—Congress, the War Powers Resolution, the constitutional separation of powers—have each failed in turn.

My father’s stories are gone. He took them with him. But the political machinery sending him to Vietnam is running again, and it is not too late to shut it down. It requires only the people who swore to uphold the Constitution actually doing so—and the rest of us demanding it.

Current poverty (living below half the median income in a given year) is associated with approximately 183,000 deaths among Americans aged 15+ per year (about 6.5% of total deaths in that age group). Cumulative/long-term poverty (persistent over 10 years) is associated with around 295,000 deaths in the same year (about 10.5% of deaths), making it the fourth-leading contributor to mortality, behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking. This places poverty ahead of factors like obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, suicides, firearms, accidents, stroke, and homicide.

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LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• ICE Queen Kristi Noem is out at Homeland Security. Not because she unleashed thugs on Americans or covered up their murders. Because she blamed Trump for her own self-aggrandizing ad campaign and got caught in her on-the-job affair. Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma will replace her. And what’s this Shield of the Americas thing she’s going to do next?

• 1,300 Iranians have been killed by the U.S. and Israel. The death toll from Israeli attacks on Lebanon rose to at least 123, as a new wave of strikes pounded the Lebanon and Hezbollah warned Israeli residents to evacuate towns within 3 miles of their northern border. Yesterday, Israel threatened residents that they should leave Beirut’s southern suburbs, prompting a huge exodus from a swath of the capital’s densely populated area known as Dahiyeh, home to half a million Lebanese.

• Trump tells Axios he needs to be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader—just as he was in Venezuela. Khameini Jr. is pre-nixed. Freedom, it seems, isn’t very free.

• No money for high-speed rail, new schools, the homeless, or healthcare subsidies—but the U.S. government has $2 billion a day for the Iran War.

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

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Kristi Noem will no longer be the face of the Department of Homeland Security, labeling peaceful citizens defending liberty as “domestic terrorists.” President Donald Trump is now appointing her to a new position of “special envoy in the Western Hemisphere.”

Wherever she goes next, we should remember her DHS debacle wasn’t her first deception rodeo. It turns out that Noem has a long history of twisting the truth to serve the powerful.

In 2017, nearly a decade ago, we caught then-Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) telling a whopper fib about her family’s experience with the estate tax—or what Noem called the “death tax.”

The estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires, has been in place since 1916. In its first half century, it helped put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, discouraging dynastic fortunes that threatened democracy.

It’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.

But for the last 30 years, the estate tax has been under right-wing assault, including a steady drumbeat for its repeal. And one tactic they’ve used is to claim the tax applies to small farmers and other working Americans, rather than the tiny percentage of extremely wealthy estates it actually targets—exclusively multimillionaires and billionaires, the top 0.01%

Noem’s personal political narrative, repeated at town hall meetings during her 2010 campaign for Congress, is a yarn about a rapacious and greedy federal government imposing an estate tax on her struggling family.

In a 2015 speech on the House Floor and in a 2016 op-ed for Fox News, Noem repeated the estate tax story. After her father died, Noem claimed, “We got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy that happened to our family.”

“We could either sell land that had been in our family for generations or we could take out a loan,” Noem said, adding that “it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes.” Noem says the episode was “one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics.”

In December 2017, Noem was appointed by then-House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the joint committee working to reconcile the 2017 Trump tax bill—which at the time included a proposal to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether.

That month, I published a widely circulated op-ed about Noem in USA Today arguing that “her sad family saga doesn’t add up.”

My commentary surfaced several simple facts: The federal estate tax has a 100% exemption for spouses. In other words, if a spouse dies, the estate’s assets go to the surviving spouse without any estate tax. Corinne Arnold, Kristi Noem’s mother, was alive during these years. (In fact, she is still alive now at 78 years and was active in Kristi’s second campaign for South Dakota governor in 2022.)

Estate tax attorney Bob Lord noted at the time: “It’s hard to believe the estate of a farmer who died in 1994 and was survived by his spouse was subject to the tax. It easily could have been deferred. That would have been a no-brainer.”

Moreover, the process of filing a return can be extended for years, especially for operating farms.

The combination of family tragedy and populist outrage makes for a potent partisan story, but veers from the truth. In the years she campaigned as a victim of the estate tax, Noem’s family actually cashed millions in government farm subsidies. Between 1995 and 2024, her family’s Racota Valley Ranch in Hazel, South Dakota deposited $4.9 million in government subsidy checks.

A few days after my USA Today article, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest statewide newspaper, wrote an editorial: “Time for Kristi Noem to Get Her Tax Story Straight.” In her now well-known deflective fashion, Noem fired back that it was “fake news.”

If Noem’s estate tax story is true, she could easily put our doubts to rest. She could explain why her family didn’t use a spousal exemption, share a redacted “bill” from the IRS, or disclose who provided the loan she allegedly received. But she hasn’t.

In the meantime, Noem has helped gut the estate tax, contributing to the growing concentration of wealth that threatens our economy and democracy.

Under the Trump tax bill Noem worked on, the federal estate tax now exempts the first $15 million of wealth for an individual and $30 million for a couple. And as governor of South Dakota, Noem fortified the state’s role as a trust haven, attracting billionaires interested in forming dynasty trusts to hide wealth and use loopholes to avoid federal taxes.

The Trump administration and its allies have blamed immigrants for all manner of social ills—including struggling schools, expensive housing and healthcare, and more. In reality, the blame more often lies with extremely wealthy people who won’t pay their fair share of taxes to support public programs.

So it’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.

These lies—about the estate tax, about immigrants, about protesters—have something in common: They protect the powerful. As lawmakers attempt to hold Noem accountable for the reckless activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and consider her for future jobs—they should keep this early story in mind.

Israel has again escalated its genocide of the Palestinians into an all-out regional war. Although the speed and intensity slowed, it never stopped killing in Gaza or Lebanon, and has now begun massively bombing Iran for the first time since June 2025. Israel’s patron, the United States, has joined in the immoral, unjustifiable slaughter in Iran.

According to Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), after only four days of carpet bombing the densely-populated capital Tehran and throughout the country, Israel and the United States have killed at least 1,097 civilians, including 181 children. At least 5,402 people have been injured. Another 880 reported deaths are under review to determine whether they are civilians. Many more Iranian military personnel have been killed. The opening salvo of this latest illegal war of aggression included the bombing of a girls’ primary school, a massacre that killed at least 175 people, mostly children.

The Israelis have been trying to push the United States to attack Iran for more than 30 years. American politicians of both major political parties have been threatening to attack Iran for decades. Both countries finally created their opportunity to launch the war they dreamed of. The most cruel and violent movements in both countries have taken power and have made clear they will slaughter as many people as possible to further their geopolitical goals: inflicting maximum damage and creating instability to weaken a perceived regional rival.

Despite decades of American violence justified with lies, there are still those who believe the absurd propaganda about liberation and human rights. I have seen Israelis raising the monarchist flag of Iran, as if supporting the son of the deposed dictator will endear themselves to the population of the country. Somehow, there are still naïve Israelis and Americans who genuinely believe their countries are killing schools full of little girls to “save” the women of Iran. To those dupes I say: If you believe that, I can offer you the Brooklyn Bridge at a very reasonable price. The warmed-over “Global War on Terror” rhetoric was laughable in 2001 and even more so today.

Every single living current and former American president, and many of the dead, should be arrested and brought to trial for their war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides.

Some years ago, I attended a live poetry reading in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York near that same bridge. It was part of a Nowruz, Persian New Year, festival. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of the poet or the poem he read aloud, but one line has stuck with me ever since: “After the bombs, before the next.” That is the reality for tens of millions of Iranians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, and on and on. Never knowing when, not if, the United States, Israel, and their allies will start bombing their country again.

In the decade plus since that night, I have met many Iranians, some of whom I count among my dearest friends. At this very moment, I cannot contact them because of the ersatz holy war being waged by Israeli and American religious fanatics and far-right fascists. I do not know if my friends or their families are safe. I hope with every fiber of my being that they are.

In a moment of mass killing and sickening triumphalism, Americans must speak out against this aggression. No caveats, no hedging. Neither Israel nor the United States have a right to attack any country they want. The moment US or Israeli jets—at this point a distinction without a difference—take off to bomb Tehran, Beirut, or anywhere else, those governments are responsible for the consequences of those actions. In the short term: Americans must demand Congress uses the powers it has to reign in the imperial presidency. In the long term, we must agitate and work toward accountability for killing.

I will close by reiterating a call I have made many times before: Every single living current and former American president, and many of the dead, should be arrested and brought to trial for their war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides. To that call I will add Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already a fugitive from an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his crimes in Gaza, and every other living Israeli prime minister. Those efforts are the minimum we should demand, and must be the first step in a long accountability process for my friends, their families, and the 93 million other Iranians now under attack.

“The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday, so when US and Israeli bombs began falling at around 10:00 am on Saturday, classes were under way. At a point between 10:00 am and 10:45 am, a missile directly hit Shajareh Tayyebeh school, in Minab, southern Iran, demolishing its concrete building and killing dozens of seven to 12-year-old girls.” —The Guardian

War is not an abstraction. It’s living hell... or dying hell. When the United States and Israel (President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) started bombing Iran, I felt the collective human soul begin to vibrate once again, and I began screaming to myself: This is not who we are!

Even though it is.

Our “interests” are what matter, right? Individual human lives are far less important—just read the news. And the larger the death toll, the more abstract those lives get. What isn’t abstract, apparently—what really matters—are the nation’s interests, whatever the hell those are. And interests grow increasingly simplistic as a war goes on, ultimately amounting to winning... not losing.

Every new war reopens an enormous question: How do we evolve beyond this?

I must stand up to this lie and its missiles. I must join the millions—billions?—of others around the globe and stare this lie in its face. We are fully human, not half-human or 10% human or whatever, Mr. President. I am connected to all of humanity, all of life. And so are you. When someone is murdered, part of all of us is murdered.

So I refuse to look at this latest war with abstraction or indifference. As I write, the estimated total of Iranian deaths by US and Israeli bombs is over 1,000 (and the number may well have gone up since I began this sentence). A total of 153 cities across Iran have been damaged by the bombing, according to NBC News, and at this point there have been over 1,000 attacks on the country.

And yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “supreme leader,” has been killed. He was a brutal leader. But his murder does not justify all the others, let alone does it justify the possibility of another US “war without end” and the shattering and slaughter of an entire country.

I return to The Guardian words quoted above, which, as far as I’m concerned, get at the true nature of war. They refer to the US-Israeli bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, a coastal city in southeastern Iran on Saturday morning, just as “Operation Epic Fury” began—and just after school started.

The Guardian story continues:

Photographs and verified videos from the site, which the Guardian has not published due to their graphic nature, show children’s bodies lying partly buried under the debris. In one video, a very small child’s severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colorful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.

One distraught man stands in the ruins of the school, waving textbooks and worksheets as rescuers dig by hand through the debris. "These are the schoolbooks of the children who are under these ruins, under this rubble here," he shouts. "You can see the blood of these children on these books. These are civilians, who are not in the military. This was a school and they came to study."

Iranian state media reported that 168 people were killed in the school’s bombing—mostly young girls, but also teachers and staff. And 95 others were injured. And the hellish nature of this story doesn’t necessarily end here. According to research by Al Jazeera, the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school may have been deliberate, not simply an accident, but there’s no definite proof of this. In any case, whether deliberate or “collateral,” the bombing happened. And it was not an abstraction.

When a new war begins, humanity’s cancer continues. As the Cabinet of the Progressive International put it:

These strikes did not begin today. They are an extension of a longer project to redraw the map of West Asia by force. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, Yemen to Iran, each escalation is a stepping stone in a broader project to suffocate regional sovereignty in the service of US and Israeli interests. Each has left behind shattered states, displaced populations, and the wreckage of societies that dared to assert independence.

Imperialist war does not liberate peoples—it subjugates them.

Every new war reopens an enormous question: How do we evolve beyond this? There will always be conflict—not to mention fear, greed, the complexity of getting along—but I know... and so do many others... that we can scrape and crawl and find our way beyond turning conflict into war. We can and we must. Extinction also looms.

The United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28, propelling the entire region into a predictable cataclysm of unprecedented proportions.

This puts paid to the alleged “peacemaking” project of US President Donald Trump, who was supposed to be keeping the country out of international wars rather than actively seeking to expedite the end of the world.

The attacks put an abrupt end to the negotiations underway between the US and Iran—to the delight of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always viewed as anathema anything remotely resembling diplomacy or the pursuit of peace.

‘Trigger Iran to Retaliate’

Three days before the joint strikes, a Politico exclusive (2/25/26) reported that “senior advisers” to Trump “would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country.” As per the report, administration officials were “privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a US strike.”

Nor has much attention been paid to the hundreds of other casualties of the US-Israeli strikes, which is unsurprising given the media’s tendency to humanize Iranians only when they can be portrayed as victims of their own government.

So much for subsequent US-Israeli attempts to cast the assault as “preemptive” in nature. Indeed, there is nothing at all “preemptive” about forcing Iran to retaliate; this is instead what you would call a deliberate provocation.

Unfortunately for the “senior advisers,” Trump and Netanyahu ultimately opted to pull the trigger simultaneously, thus depriving the US administration of its fabricated casus belli.

‘A Clear Explanation of the Strategy’

In the aftermath of the strikes, certain US corporate media outlets unleashed ostensible critiques of the war—having apparently spontaneously forgotten their own fundamental role in paving the warpath by devoting the past several decades to demonizing the Iranian government (or “regime,” as we are required to refer to imperial foes).The New York Times editorial board (2/28/26), for example, immediately penned an intervention titled “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?”—the headline of which was later amended to “Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless.”

This is the same New York Times, of course, that has been known to publish such masterpieces as “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” (3/25/15), a 2015 call to arms by former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Now, after calling out Trump’s “reckless” attack, the Times editorial board proceeds to undertake its own rationalization of war on Iran—provided it is overseen by “a responsible American president” who takes the time to offer “a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon.”

Because Trump could give fuck all about being “responsible,” however, the US newspaper of record assumes the duty of laying out the litany of Iranian transgressions for its readers, such as the killing of “hundreds of US service members in the region”—decisive proof that “Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions.”

Never mind the hundreds of thousands of regional deaths wrought in recent years by the (already nuclear-equipped) US military, including on account of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which the Times and like-minded media did their best to shove down the throats of the American public.

‘Few Recent Parallels’

Following the weekend’s strikes on Iran, many US media were quick to mention the Iranian government’s response to protests that erupted in December against high inflation. The Washington Post (2/28/26), for instance, specified that the “strikes come in the wake of a violent crackdown by Iran’s security forces… on anti-government demonstrations.”

Citing reports of “more than 7,000 people dead,” the Post went on to lament that “the level of violence against protesters has few recent parallels, human rights groups say.”

Not mentioned in such reports is the key role devastating US sanctions on Iran—a form of lethal violence in themselves—played in fomenting the protests in the first place. Ditto for Israel’s own admitted interference; Mossad’s Farsi-language X account urged Iranians to “go out together into the streets. The time has come.” The Jerusalem Post (12/29/25) reported that the intelligence agency continued: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

“Foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed,” Tamir Morag of Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 remarked (Times of Israel, 1/16/26). “Everyone is free to guess who is behind it,” he winked.

But by repeatedly bringing up Iranian state brutality, US corporate media effectively distract from the brutality of the strikes on Iran, which happen to be perpetrated by two states that have zero “parallels” in terms of “levels of violence.” The ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip has officially killed more than 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023, though household surveys indicate the true toll could be substantially higher (Lancet, 2/18/26).

In its own anti-war-but-not-really dispatch, the Times editorial board also took care to reference how Iran “massacred” protesters, as well as the fact that the government “oppresses women”—forever a favorite talking point of the same media outlets that advocated for bombing Afghan women to save them from the Taliban.

Unuseful Victims

It can be safely filed under the “can’t make this shit up” category that among the first casualties of the current war on Iran were the at least 175 people confirmed dead in a missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab.

While the establishment media initially treated this particular atrocity as a brief aside (Washington Post, 12/28/26; Wall Street Journal, 12/28/26)—leaving the job of actual reporting to independent outlets like Middle East Eye (2/28/26) and Drop Site News (2/28/26)—it eventually became unavoidable. As the corpses of young children are of no use to the imperial narrative when they are killed by the US and Israel rather than by Iran, however, the requisite moral condemnation has been in short supply.

Nor has much attention been paid to the hundreds of other casualties of the US-Israeli strikes, which is unsurprising given the media’s tendency to humanize Iranians only when they can be portrayed as victims of their own government. While the death toll made headlines in outlets like Al Jazeera (3/2/26) and Truthout (3/2/26), in major US media like the New York Times (3/2/26) and Washington Post (3/2/26), it was basically a footnote.

Three US troops killed in Iran’s retaliatory strikes, on the other hand, have received considerable airtime, with the Associated Press (3/1/26) noting that these were “the first American casualties in a major offensive that President Donald Trump said could likely lead to more losses in the coming weeks.”

And as the entire region rapidly goes up in flames, it seems those senior US advisers may have gotten their casus belli, after all.

Cynicism, illusions, and imperialist ambitions are accompanying the bombs raining down on Iran in this war between gangster states. Public feuding between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had seemingly brought relations between their two countries to an all-time low over Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. But the differences between them were grossly exaggerated by liberal media. This second and far more intense bombing of Iran, which followed the attacks of June 2025, was planned well in advance. The United States and its regional proxy, Israel, share a common desire to assert the latter’s hegemony over the Middle East.

Why did the bombing of Iran happen now? Yes: Trump wished to deflect attention from the Epstein files, the fascist tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the “affordability crisis,” a host of diplomatic setbacks, and a sinking approval rating that stands at 43%; indeed, Netanyahu’s numbers have fallen to 30%. Both leaders need a win. Attacking the retrograde Iranian regime should appeal to independent voters and Trump’s base. It should do the same for Netanyahu, who will only gain support from the orthodox religious-settlement parties on which his coalition rests. And the risk seemed worth taking: Iran looked weak in light of lingering effects from the June 2025 bombings, the collapse of its national currency, and the massive early 2026 protests that swept the country. All of this made Iran appear weak—just how weak it is remains to be seen.

Geopolitics and crude realism are driving events: Trump and Netanyahu both assume that the strong can act as they wish and that the weak will suffer what they must. Only Iran has been left standing among Israel’s regional rivals: Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco have either tacitly or formally recognized the “Zionist entity.” Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are doing brisk business with it. Syria has been torn apart by the civil war that culminated in the fall of its murderous president, Bashar al-Assad. Iraq is still plagued by the legacy of internal strife following the American invasion of 2001. Lebanon is a mess. As for Palestine, it is plagued by ever-expanding Israeli settlements, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and a crisis of sovereignty. It was not now or never when it came to attacking Israel’s most dangerous enemy, but now seemed a particularly opportune time.

Neither American nor Israeli foreign policy is unique. At different points in history, all “great powers”—England, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia—pursued policies that simultaneously strengthened their regional hegemony, expanded their “living space,” secured their spheres of influence, and used horrific tactics to achieve their aims. The justifications remain roughly the same: the national interest is being served; its security requires proactive measures; the victims will benefit from defeat; and, of course, imperialism is realizing the nation’s “destiny.”

Opportunities exist for progressive forces to act decisively. However, most Democrats remain fixed on formal rather than substantive criticisms.

Not some biblically ordained mission of the Jewish people regarding the conquest of Judea and Samaria, not the non-existent Jewish world conspiracy described in the fabricated “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” not American fears of a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapon, and not the desire to spread democracy, inspired the war. Far better reasons can be found. There are material and psycho-political gains that the United States and Israel would gain with respect to oil (prices), real estate, annexation projects, inflation of group narcissism, and the celebration of an unpopular president for conquering a hated enemy seem too obvious to require further elaboration.

Iran is the most vocal enemy of the United States. Defeating it would nicely complement attempts to reaffirm the United States’ regional hegemony over Latin America and the Caribbean called for by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and new versions of what was once known as its “manifest destiny.” National security is the lame justification for attacking “narco-terrorist” states, but also for acquiring Greenland, and the desire for more living space, which has led to demands that Canada become the 51st state. The United States is intent on asserting itself as the independent world hegemon that is accountable only to itself. This helps explain its growing separation from Europe and NATO, its withdrawal from international treaties and organizations, and its abandonment of the multilateral approach to crisis situations.

Justifications for the bombing of Iran have shifted from the need to defend the protesters to being “proactive” in the face of an “imminent threat” to the dangers attendant on the regime building a nuclear weapon and its unwillingness to "make a
deal.” But the bombing didn’t take place until the protesters were slaughtered, the CIA itself denied that an attack on the United States was imminent, and President Barack Obama had already sealed a complicated deal with Iran that prevented it from developing a nuclear device for military purposes. Insisting that he could get a better deal, however, President Trump tore up the existing agreement on May 8, 2018.

Of course, that attempt failed. Monitoring Iran became impossible as new opportunities emerged to rekindle its suspended nuclear enterprise. Given American-Israeli views and prejudices about Iran, it mattered little that Iran just recently claimed (as it had while negotiating with Obama) that it was only interested in developing nuclear energy for domestic purposes. Following the bombing of Iran in June 2025 by the United States and Israel, their leaders insisted that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed. But this was a lie: Its nuclear facilities survived. Trump and Netanyahu are now trying to turn the falsehood into truth.

There should be no misunderstanding: Iran’s theocracy is corrupt, self-righteous, dictatorial, and incompetent in its administration of economic affairs. The country was experiencing a downward economic spiral, and near collapse, when its government cracked down on protesters; its criminal inhumane actions resulted in 10,000 deaths and 50,000 arrests. However, these courageous revolts in the name of democracy are intertwined with the cynical reality that we are experiencing now. The cunning of history is in effect as Trump calls upon Iranians to overthrow their regime now, because they will “never get a better chance,” and thereby heightens the prospect for further reprisals and perhaps even civil war.

What will happen once the regime falls is apparently of secondary concern just as it was before the American invasion of Iraq. Belief that the Iraqi people would celebrate the arrival of American troops was naïve at best and though opposition to its leader, Saddam Hussein, was widespread, internal divisions existed between various tribal-religious militias often with very different political aims. It was the same following the fall of Bashir al-Assad in Syria and any number of uprisings in Africa. Arguably the greatest of all political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, warned that to topple a sovereign without having another ready to step in is a recipe for chaos; it is a lesson that the United States has yet to learn.

The stakes have only grown with the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Khamenei and various important officers of the noxious Revolutionary Guard. Unsurprisingly, the announcement of Khamenei’s death was not only greeted by joyful celebrations, but by outbreaks of public mourning. Iran is divided, and the consequences appear ominous. Some members of the Supreme Council, which will choose Khamenei’s successor, have popularly based military followings. Clashing ambitions and other contentious concerns could lead them to turn against one another or, as a religious combine, against a democratic opposition whose leadership and goals remain unclear.

Meanwhile, the war is expanding as Israel sends troops into Lebanon in order to eliminate Hezbollah and Iran strikes the Gulf States and the US embassy in Riyad, Saudi Arabia. There is hardly a state in the region that that has not been subject to missile hits or worse, and President Trump has said that he might employ ground troops, which can only mean invasion. Nor should Iran count on its neighbors for support. Iran is Shiite and Sunni Muslims in other Middle East countries are unlikely to engage in a show of solidarity; indeed, the Arab League has been notably cautious in its response to the crisis. There is also little likelihood that criticisms and condemnations will translate into serious consequences for the aggressors. The regional balance of power is secure, and the religious zealots and xenophobic settlers, whose parties are keeping Netanyahu afloat, are surely happy.

Meanwhile, Iran and its citizenry are already paying an inordinate price for this Western escapade, suffering over 1,000 dead in the first few days of the conflict and devastating attacks on the infrastructure. It is likely to get worse. American and Israeli aims remain unclear; “mission creep” is taking place as the goal shifts from forcing Iran to the negotiating table to assuring “zero” capacity for Iran to build a bomb to regime change to regional reordering. But, then, there is time to decide. The president who once constantly complained about American involvement in foreign wars has stated that citizens should prepare for a long conflict. Hopefully not too long, of course, since Americans tend to celebrate foreign wars when they start, but quickly become impatient when the body bags start coming home—and they will.

Opportunities exist for progressive forces to act decisively. However, most Democrats remain fixed on formal rather than substantive criticisms. They are primarily engaged in legalistic attacks on President Trump for not consulting Congress before declaring war, acting unilaterally, and ignoring the Constitution. That is insufficient. Judgments must be made should Trump’s attack on the Iranian theocracy prove successful—and regarding the new circumstances that this might create. The Democratic Party has not offered its own version of what policies will serve the national interest when it comes to the Middle East. It has not explicitly condemned American imperialism, and it has not punished Israel for its outrageous behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. of Israel. In short, the party has not presented even the rough outlines of an alternative foreign policy. Unless Democrats rise to the occasion, their prospects for changing America’s standing in the world and recapturing its promise are bleak as the midterm elections approach in 2026.

The Trump administration has joined Israel in launching large-scale attacks across Iran. The strikes mark the beginning of “major combat operations,” according to President Donald Trump, and in response Tehran has reportedly launched retaliatory attacks in Middle Eastern countries that host US military bases.

With hundreds of Iranians already killed and the war threatening to spiral out of control, here are five things Americans need to know.

1: Trump says he’s trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But it’s the United States and its allies that are the greatest nuclear threat.

The United States, not Iran, is the country setting the worst example in promoting nuclear weapons in the world today.

It was Trump who pulled out of the US-Iran nuclear deal during his first term—even though the United Nations certified that Iran was in compliance—and resumed harsh sanctions, deployed more troops to the region, and even assassinated an Iranian general.

How could Iran—or any country—now take the US seriously at the negotiating table after Trump blew up the Iran nuclear deal?

Trump’s hostility despite Iran’s earlier compliance only bolsters the claim of Iranian leaders who believe the country needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against aggression.

Meanwhile, Trump just let the last existing nuclear agreement between the US and Russia, the two countries with the most warheads, expire. Trump is also giving unconditional backing to Israel—the only country in the Middle East that actually has nuclear weapons—and is now supporting the launch of a nuclear program in Saudi Arabia.

2: Trump is contributing to the suffering of ordinary Iranians, not rescuing them.

The Iranian government recently carried out a brutal crackdown on protesters and critics. Trump has claimed that the US is “coming to the rescue” of Iranians who’ve challenged their government.

But in reality, his actions have put countless Iranians in harm’s way. Hundreds of civilians have already been killed in the strikes so far—including 165 in an appalling strike on a girl’s school.

Even before the latest violence, US sanctions had devastated Iran’s population—especially women, children, the sick, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable people—leading to countless preventable deaths.

3: The United States is an unreliable negotiator.

How could Iran—or any country—now take the US seriously at the negotiating table after Trump blew up the Iran nuclear deal?

Attacking Iran is not popular, and Trump definitely does not have a mandate to do it.

Moreover, US demands keep changing. In recent negotiations, the US kept moving the goal posts, going from the demand that Iran not develop nuclear weapons to saying that the country’s civilian nuclear program, its treatment of dissidents, its relationship with regional allies, and its ballistic missile arsenal would all be on the negotiating table.

As Trump put it bizarrely on Fox News, the deal he wants should have “no nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that, all the different things that you want.”

4: The United States has been threatening Iran, not the other way around.

Even before the war, US military bases across the region surrounded Iran with troops and weapons. But there are no Iranian troops or military assets anywhere near the United States.

There is also no question that the most aggressive Middle Eastern power at the moment is Washington’s ally Israel—which continues its genocide in Gaza and attacked six other countries in the last year alone—all enabled through military assistance, arms transfers, and political protection by the United States.

5: Trump’s war with Iran—and his aggressive foreign policy generally—are unpopular with Americans.

The majority of Americans—61%—disapprove of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy in general. And in a recent Reuters poll, just one-quarter said they approved of Trump’s decision to strike Iran—and that was before the announcement that US servicemembers had been killed.

Attacking Iran is not popular, and Trump definitely does not have a mandate to do it. Whatever criticisms one may have of Iran’s government, they do not justify this illegal war.

President Donald Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also the latest assault on our way of life. Trump and his enablers count on us to endure their ever escalating egregious abuses of power that imperil our democracy, potentially fatally. We must prove them wrong. We can and must overcome these clear and present threats to our lives, liberty, and way of life.

Our Constitution cannot defend or protect itself. Not when Trump and his administration keep violating their oath to defend and protect it. It’s up to us to do that. We the People must not fail to meet this crisis. We must not let these abuses of power go unchecked. The Congress and the American people must hold Trump and all those complicit in the Trump administration accountable for their escalating attacks on the rule of law.

These intertwined crises require us to act! We must pressure all members of Congress, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, to uphold their oath of office to defend and protect our Constitution. Contact your representative and both of your senators now. Call the US Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121, and ask the operator to connect you directly to the office of your senators and representative.

Ask to speak to the chief of staff or another staffer. Leave a message if they’re not available. Be firm but calm. Identify yourself as their constituent, and tell them:

Trump and his administration have repeatedly broken the law and arrogantly refuse to abide by the limits on the power clearly laid out in the Constitution. The Constitution offers one and only one remedy: impeachment, followed by removal from office. I demand that [official’s name] take immediate action to impeach and remove Trump and all complicit Administration officials.

We must do much more than that, however. Contacting Congress is necessary but not sufficient. While the House may vote to impeach Trump for a third time, the Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict and remove Trump and complicit officials. This is highly unlikely, at least for now. We have to change the arithmetic through concerted, decisive action.

Several Republicans must put our republic above partisanship. For that to happen, we must relentlessly demand action. Every American who cares about our constitutional democratic republic must pressure their senators and representative by phone, email, social media, and in‑person visits.

We must demand that Congress impeach Trump again, but this time also vote to remove Trump and all complicit administration officials from power. We must do this, even though we have little confidence that enough Senate Republicans will act honorably. We must make them do so, or else replace them with people who will. That means getting active in the primary elections, already underway.

Support independent media like Common Dreams. Volunteer with Progressive Democrats of America to help lead on the effort to replace feckless politicians with strong leaders.

To increase pressure on the current Congress, organizations and individuals across the country must initiate and maintain ongoing nonviolent protests and civil disobedience.

Act now! Contact everyone who will listen. Work with decision-makers and members of any organization you know and persuade them to join the struggle.

Start or join boycotts targeting Trump-friendly corporations. Delay purchase of any non‑essential goods and services. Organize walk outs, sick outs, and other intentional non-participation. Urge everyone you know to do the same.

We need mass participation by individuals amplified by unions, as well as civic, religious, labor, social, and other organizations. We the People must stand up now in concerted, courageous, continuous opposition to oppression and tyranny. Nothing less will ensure the survival of our constitutional republic.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss the US/Israeli War Against Iran:

• The U.S. bombing of the Iranian elementary school that killed 165 people, many of them schoolgirls, included more targets near the school than has been initially reported. Satellite images suggest that the school was hit as part of an airstrike on a neighboring military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information. Satellite images show that the school and clinic buildings were both once part of the base. The school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2024. Did the U.S. ignore signs of scores of girls going to class?

• Did the U.S. commit a war crime by torpedoing an uninvolved Iranian frigate, IRIS Dena, returning from a diplomatic visit to India, in the Indian Ocean, and failing to rescue its crew—something Nazi U-boat commanders did during World War II until the Laconia incident?

• Europe is transferring assets from Ukraine to the Mideast as rising oil prices benefit Russia’s economy. Are the U.S. and Israel indirectly defeating Ukraine?

• Likely 2028 presidential contender Gavin Newsom, criticized Israel, suggesting that the U.S. should reconsider its military support for the country, which he compared to an apartheid state.

Also:

•  The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed attorney general Pam Bondi, to testify about the Epstein files. The 24 to 19 vote was a rebuke to the Trump administration.

The post School’s Out | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On International Working Women’s Day in 2025, Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, read a poem she wrote highlighting the historic role played by Latin American women in the fight against imperialism:

We’re not flowers the wind can pluck,
we’re roots of rebel and loyal land,
we’re grandmothers, mothers, daughters, granddaughters;
we are woman.
Our blood pulses with the Manuelas,
Luisas, Josefas, Juanas, Cecilias,
Apacuanas, Bartolinas, Eulalias,
Martas, Anas Marías, Barbaritas
and so many others who legacy inspires,
commits, and strengthens us
to continue walking and traveling our path.
And in our hands and chests
a light is on that nobody will ever turn off:
love, peace and liberty.
—Cilia Flores, International Working Women’s Day 2025

One year later, she languishes in a cell in New York City, having been dragged out of her room and kidnapped by US forces on the January 3 attack on Venezuela. The first images after her abduction showed her face bruised. We later learned she had broken ribs, 23 stitches in her forehead, and deteriorating health inside US custody.

Flores is no ordinary first lady. She first rose to prominence in 1992 as a defense lawyer for a group of Venezuelan military officers who rose up against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, which had massacred thousands of people in the Caracazo of 1989–nationwide riots following the imposition of neoliberal austerity measures. Key among those officers was Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.

In 1993, Cilia founded the Bolivarian Circle of Human Rights and aligned herself with Chávez’s revolutionary movement. In 2000, having helped Chávez win consecutive presidential elections, she was elected to the legislature. By 2006, she became the president of the National Assembly, the first woman in Venezuela’s history to occupy the post. Flores held important positions in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and became the country’s solicitor general in 2012, a post she left to run Nicolás Maduro’s presidential campaign after President Chávez’s passing.

Cilia married Nicolás, her longtime partner, following the election. Feeling that the title of “first lady” could not capture her importance to the Bolivarian Revolution, her husband dubbed her the primera combatiente, or first combatant.

After working behind the scenes as a key adviser to President Maduro, she ran for election to the National Assembly and won in 2015, 2020, and 2025.

Today, she faces charges of conspiracy to import cocaine, along with possession of machine guns and destructive devices. The charges are absurd.

In the early 1990s, back when Venezuela was a key ally of the United States, over 50% of the world’s cocaine was trafficked through the country. By 2025, as Venezuela was considered an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, that number was down to 5%. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric of Venezuela flooding the US with cocaine, and his constant conflation of cocaine with fentanyl (which is neither trafficked through nor produced in Venezuela), has no basis in reality.

Now that the Trump administration controls Venezuela’s oil trade, the rhetoric on drugs has flipped. Following a visit to Venezuela, the head of US Southern Command touted a new counternarcotics cooperation agreement. Was the abduction of Nicolás and Cilia sufficient to end whatever alleged narcotics operation the Venezuelan government was accused of running? It’s more likely that such operations never existed in the first place. The allegations of drug trafficking served not only to discredit the Venezuelan government and its leaders but also paved the way for the January 3 attack.

Cilia Flores is one of the most prominent political prisoners in the world, yet most women’s rights organizations have not said a word in her defense. She is a sitting member of Venezuela’s National Assembly and played an instrumental role in the movement that greatly expanded democratic, economic, and social rights in the country.

Cilia stands with Palestine. In a November 2023 conference in Turkey, she said: “We are witnessing a genocide… We see the victims in Gaza. We see the death of children, women, the elderly, and civilians. We see civilian victims coming out of their destroyed homes, but unable to leave the city because they are in an open-air prison.”

Cilia brought feminism to the Bolivarian Revolution. On International Working Women’s Day in 2023, she helped launch a social mission aimed at protecting women from the worst of the economic war. At the time, she said: “Venezuelan women have shown they are the vanguard. Women make up more than half the population, but we are also mothers of the other half, so we form a whole. And in this war that Venezuela has endured, we achieved victory and are standing firm thanks to the participation of Venezuelan women, who did not just stay home taking care of children, building their families, but also took to the streets to defend the nation. Our women are patriots... and in the next scenario, whatever it may be, we will be victorious because women will be at the forefront of any battle."

Little did she know that the next scenario would be a prison cell in the United States. Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.

Recalling her beautiful poem above, today our blood pulses with Cilia.

On February 22, 2026, Mexican special forces in Tapalpa, Jalisco, authorized by left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum and acting on intelligence from the US military, killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, Nom de Guerre “El Mencho,” the 59-year-old leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the most-wanted man in Mexico.

Within hours, the cartel put up roadblocks, arson attacks, and running gun battles across a dozen states, ravaging Tapalpa and other cities. By the time the violence subsided, over 70 people were dead, including 25 Mexican National Guard troops. The entire country is holding its breath as it prepares to enter a new phase of its decades-long Drug War.

Does decapitating a cartel end the Drug War?

The operation was also the culmination of a strategy that Claudia Sheinbaum's predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had promised to abandon, namely, the militarized war on drugs that since 2006 has left between 350,000 and 400,000 Mexicans dead and more than 130,000 disappeared. Instead, while making some initial welcome gestures, he militarized the Southern Border, created the National Guard, and continued the War on Drugs.

Removing El Mencho may weaken CJNG in the short term. But it could also ignite the next phase of Mexico’s drug war, one that extends far beyond the country’s borders and deeper into the Western Hemisphere.

The Mexican drug war has never been Mexico's responsibility alone. It is the product of an insatiable American thirst for drugs that has only intensified with the opioid crisis, as fentanyl has flooded US streets, claiming tens of thousands of lives annually, with support from Big Pharma. The United States remains the world’s largest consumer market for narcotics; American demand generates billions of dollars annually for trafficking organizations.

Mexican cartels such as the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel now supply fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin to a US market whose demand keeps increasing, according to new reporting.

American guns are also at the center of this crisis. There are exactly two legal gun stores in all of Mexico, operating under strict military supervision. Across the border, in the four US border states, there are more than 9,000 legal gun sale points.

An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 guns are trafficked from the United States into Mexico each year. Roughly 70% originate north of the border. These include .50-caliber rifles capable of piercing armored vehicles and downing helicopters; many of them were from the American military. A new raid on a CNJG ammo depot revealed that 47% of the ammunition came directly from one US Army plant in Kansas City. That very same ammo was used to kill 13 police officers in Michoacán in 2019.

The CJNG now dominates 23 out of Mexico’s 32 states, with operations stretching from the Pacific Coast all the way to the Northern border. The cartel's estimated worth exceeds $20 billion, drawn not only from drugs but from a diversified portfolio of extortion, petroleum theft, human trafficking, and kidnapping.

It has used extreme force and military-level tactical planning against its rivals, including the state itself. In 2015, it shot down a Mexican military helicopter in Jalisco. It has assassinated mayors, attacked police convoys with improvised armored vehicles, and used drones and explosives against state security forces.

Internally, polls suggest support for the operation is between 80 and 90%. After years of feeling helpless before cartel violence, many Mexicans welcome any action that produces “results.” With this, we see the rise of “penal populism” across Latin America, where electorates increasingly embrace tough-on-crime approaches, even when those approaches destroy democracy and human rights.

The high popularity of El Salvador's right-wing dictator Nayib Bukele, whose approval ratings have hovered around 90%, testifies to the political appeal of iron-fist tactics, regardless of their clear governance costs. Bukele's mass incarceration model, where tens of thousands have been jailed without due process in inhumane conditions where torture is common, has become a model that politicians across the region now invoke, including in Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Peru.

That comes despite his success being predicated on secret deals with gangs, not on a War on Drugs—most countries that have tried his militarized tactics have suffered increases in the violent crime and homicide rates, at the same time as their economies have become increasingly unequal and democratic societies have cratered.

Externally, President Donald Trump has made clear his view that “cartels are runnning Mexico” and that Sheinbaum and other Latin American leaders should go to war with them, otherwise he will do it for them. His administration has designated Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and considered military intervention in Mexico. A US intervention would be disastrous for both Mexico and Sheinbaum, so the El Mencho operation is the price they settled on.

To add insult to injury, this summer, Mexico will host numerous World Cup matches, including four in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state. The Sheinbaum government is trying to give the allure of tightening security ahead of the games.

She has modeled aspects of her approach on Brazil. Before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro launched aggressive “pacification” campaigns in favelas, military occupations that temporarily suppressed violence but failed to address its roots while killing high rates of civilians and eroding civil liberties. The War on Drugs has not stopped there, either. We have to wait and see if Mexico follows this tragic pattern.

Across Latin America, the right has successfully framed security as a question of toughness versus weakness, where, as Bukele would put it, “All the gangs know is violence,” and thus must be met with violence. This framing leaves progressive governments perpetually on the defensive, forced to prove their bravado by adopting policies that at the very least, in theory, fly in the face of leftist principles.

The left's consistent (and successful) approach, emphasizing socioeconomic development, public health interventions, drug decriminalization, negotiation, and targeted intelligence rather than mass militarization, has struggled to gain traction in a climate driven by right-wing narratives and fearmongering.

The fundamental problem is that leftist programs take years to bear actual results, while voters demand immediate security. The right, meanwhile, offers quick and strong-handed solutions that reassure voters. It is harder to kill monsters with microloan programs and harm reduction clinics than with tanks and M-16s.

When Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched his war on drugs in 2006, he targeted the Gulf Cartel and its armed wing, Los Zetas. The kingpin strategy eliminates cartel leaders, but each decapitation meant groups splintered, and each splintering produced more violence, creating an endless loop of violence until neoliberal President Enrique Peña Nieto was able to sign pacts with certain gangs before resuming the military approach.

During this period, the number of major cartels grew from about half a dozen to more than 200, operating across the country and the entire world. The homicide rate tripled, while many border cities have homicide rates well over 100 per 100,000. Now, hundreds of thousands are dead as a direct result.

Mexico finds itself once again at this crossroads, where it must choose wisely. El Mencho’s bras droit, “El Tuli,” was killed in a clash with security forces hours after. But, the pattern suggests that new leaders will emerge, and the violence will continue. Cartels are resilient, and can adapt to new leadership, new business structures, and market forces very reactively. Taking out one leader, or even the drug trade, won’t put them out of business.

Left-wing governments have struggled to respond without appearing weak. Some voices, particularly those outside of direct political power like academics, human rights advocates, and a few leftist intellectuals, have pointed out the dangers of returning to kingpin strategies, the inevitability of retaliation, and the way military operations invariably claim civilian lives.

So far, however, the Sheinbaum coalition and the left in Mexico have, for the most part, supported the operation, praying that embracing these shows of force can help the left reclaim dominance over the security debate. But, ceding ground to the right on security might risk alienating the rest of the left; shifting the Overton window to the right; and making politics, rather than policy solutions, determine the direction of Mexico’s Drug War.

Sheinbaum’s operation thus creates a profound paradox.

On one hand, demonstrating the ability to confront organized crime may help counter the narrative that progressive governments are soft on violence. On the other, history suggests that decapitation strategies rarely defeat cartels.

Removing El Mencho may weaken CJNG in the short term. But it could also ignite the next phase of Mexico’s drug war, one that extends far beyond the country’s borders and deeper into the Western Hemisphere.

Can you win the politics of security without reproducing the failures of the war on drugs? It may buy Sheinbaum and the left time to continue expanding the welfare state, strengthening institutions, and foolproof Mexican democracy, but it may also open the door for further weaponization of security to destroy that very progress later on.

The better alternative may be to instead embrace a true leftist, principled defense of nonviolent solutions, or, to theoretically and politically justify a security progressivism. Such will be the test of the Latin American left in the wake of rising right-wing populism on the back of security fears.

What follows is the foreword to a new collection of unpublished writings by Daniel Ellsberg, titled "Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope" (Bloomsbury: March 2026), written by his eldest son, Robert Ellsberg.

The introduction of the book, now available, is written by Michael Ellsberg, Daniel's youngest son, who co-edited the collection along with Jan Thomas.

My chosen epitaph: “He helped to end the Vietnam War, and he struggled to prevent nuclear weapons from being exploded ever again.” —Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023)

My father was a complicated man. On the one hand, he had an acute appreciation for beauty in all its forms: music, poetry, the sound of the ocean, the colors of the sunset visible from his dining room in Kensington. After his death I found a closet piled high with packets of photographs—almost all of them closeup shots of flowers. He kept a frequently updated anthology consisting of photocopies of his favorite poems, many of which he had memorized and remained capable of reciting even in his last months.

All of this was in contrast with his long-standing preoccupation with the darkest moments of history, and the potential for greater tragedies to come. The bookshelves that surrounded his downstairs office were sorted according to labels such as Torture; Bombing Civilians; Nuclear First Strike; Terrorism; Lies; Genocide; and finally, Catastrophe. As he noted in one of his last interviews in the New York Times, he spent so much of his life thinking about these things not because he found them fascinating, but because he wished to make them literally unthinkable. In his efforts to alert the world to the danger of nuclear annihilation, he engaged in action (including almost a hundred acts of civil disobedience), gave countless speeches and interviews, and wrote an extraordinary memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Yet by the end of his life, acknowledging the lack of progress in achieving his goals, he expressed regret that he hadn’t done more.

All the while, it could be said that a major part of his life was spent thinking—trying to understand and unravel the mysteries of the human condition and to devise ways of thinking that might turn the tide of history. He could sit for hours, occasionally scribbling his almost illegible notes onto a yellow pad, otherwise staring into his own private abyss.

Many of his central concerns are reflected in the writings compiled in this volume. They show that he was not just concerned with the political or strategic aspects of war and nuclear planning—problems that could be fixed with a change in leadership or better policies. These threats to human survival were rooted in certain deep-seated problems with humanity itself. Some of these pertained to human nature in general: our willingness, almost unique in the animal world, to kill members of our own species. Then there was the tendency to derive our identity from our membership in a group, which set limits on our capacity for empathy with outsiders, those considered the “others.”

We are a very flawed species, dangerously so. We are dangerous to ourselves in the short and long run and we are the enemy that threatens the long-run survival of most other species. Seeing humanity’s flaws, depression sets in. I am ashamed of my species, and I am sad for us and other species.

But other problems were more specific to the nature of rational, bureaucratized organizations in which individuals were encouraged to subordinate individual ethics (“which deal largely with obligations toward and concerns for others than oneself”) to the ethics of the organization, defined in terms of obedience to authority, or loyalty to the boss or the “team.” This tendency was compounded by the compartmentalization that made it easier for bureaucrats to deny their sense of personal responsibility for the outcome or consequences of official policy.

In the years following the end of his trial in 1973 for his part in copying and revealing the Pentagon Papers, he engaged in a wide-ranging study of these problems. He considered the example of Nazi Germany, examining the various forms of complicity, whether on the part of the masses, on the part of soldiers and officers who executed immoral policies, or on the part of officials. Among these was Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who alone among the Nuremberg defendants pleaded guilty, even for things in which he had not been directly involved.

As Speer explained: “For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences—from the very beginning.” This view resonated with my father’s experience of what he called the “moral stupidity” shared by many organization men, motivated by the desire not only to keep one’s job but “to keep one’s status, one’s self-image (as a good person, as tough/manly, autonomous, obedient, loyal), and the good opinion of teammates, bosses, sponsors, constituents, and allies.”

In a lecture in May 1971 titled “The Responsibility of Officials in a Criminal War,” he had copied a quote from Speer in which he found a damning indictment of his own early culpability with regard to Vietnam War policy:

If I was isolated, I determined the degree of my own isolation. If I was ignorant, I ensured my own ignorance. If I did not see, it was because I did not want to see. . . . It is surprisingly easy to blind your moral eyes. I was like a man following a trail of bloodstained footprints through the snow without realizing someone has been injured.

My father spent many years reflecting on the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose controversial experiments at Yale were recounted in his book Obedience to Authority. Milgram had devised an experiment in which unsuspecting subjects were assigned the role of conducting a test of memory. This test involved the testers’ obligation to punish wrong answers by applying shocks of increasing voltage to a supposed “learner” (actually an actor in a separate room). The subjects were instructed by the “scientist” to continue with the test, even when, disturbed by the “learners’” protests and cries of pain, they wondered whether they should continue. They were told that it was necessary to complete the test and assured that while the shocks were “painful,” they caused no “permanent tissue damage.” Non-answers were to be treated as false answers, and many subjects continued to apply the shocks even when the “learner” fell silent. The disturbing revelation of the experiment was how compliant the subjects were in obeying authority, even when doing so caused them personal stress (the reason that such an experiment was later deemed unethical).

The mechanisms of this obedience, and what lessons it might offer about how to break the spell and induce disobedience or dissent, was for my father a topic of deep interest and importance. In his copy of Obedience to Authority, he heavily underlined one of the permutations in the experiment in which the “subject” was exposed to the example of a fellow “subject” (in fact, another actor) who said, “This is crazy! I refuse to continue.” Milgram learned that in cases where subjects were exposed to an example of conscientious disobedience, they were able to awaken from their hypnotic captivity to authority.

What would save us, he believed, might require some wholesale evolution of human consciousness. Did we have time to achieve this?

He examined lessons from anthropology, history, and psychology. He studied the example of dissidents and those who acted on the basis of conscience, who took responsibility to act even at great personal risk. To understand these dynamics, he believed, was not just a matter of intellectual interest. The answers could make all the difference in ensuring a future for humanity.

And as his notes make clear, these reflections on averting catastrophe had deep personal roots. He noted, “When I was fifteen, I experienced a catastrophe.” The story of “the Accident” that took the life of his mother and younger sister is described in detail in the opening section of this book. There he confined himself to recounting the story from various angles, without reflecting on the ways it may have affected his life—his own sense of survivor’s guilt, his capacity for risk taking, even his vocation as a whistleblower. But the ease, in his notes, with which he intersperses reflections on this story with his more wide-ranging reflections on authority, obedience, culpability in the face of disaster, and the responsibility to raise an alarm (“to tell truths that might save lives”) shows that the connections were a matter of conscious reflection.

Over and over, he continued to deconstruct the events and their meaning. Was his father to blame for falling asleep at the wheel? Was his mother to blame for forcing him to keep an appointment she had made to attend a birthday party for her brother in Denver? Was he in part to blame on account of his impending decision to abandon his assigned destiny as a concert pianist?

He could draw the parallel between his own fear of losing a mother’s love and the organizational or group conscience that made it unthinkable for so many officials to become whistleblowers: to be seen by their colleagues as disloyal, apostates, violators of trust, unworthy of being considered an insider. This parallel led him constantly to reflect on his own example. What had allowed him, in particular, to break free? To defect? To cease the desire to be the president’s man? To raise the alarm that someone you trusted, a figure of authority, might be asleep at the wheel?

Many of the flaws in humanity have been evident throughout history, from biblical narratives of holy war to the Iliad to the mad destructiveness of World War I and the many examples of genocide, of which the Holocaust stood out not just by its scale but by the application of mechanized, industrial methods of execution. And yet with the splitting of the atom, humanity had entered a fantastically more perilous stage of history—conceivably the Final Solution to the human problem. Flawed humanity had suddenly become equipped with the technology and scientific knowledge to threaten its own survival.

Einstein observed, in a famous sentence, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” To this my father notes: “What change was Einstein calling for? We need to use our human capacity for change on our own propensities—specifically, our readiness to gamble with catastrophe. We need to change what it means to be human.”

The extensive reflection on “what it means to be human” is one of the more surprising themes among these selected thoughts, or pensées, to borrow the title of Blaise Pascal’s famous work. The allusion to Pascal is not casual. The seventeenth-century French scientist and Christian apologist left his most important work in the form of aphoristic notes and fragments for a grand project of Christian apologetics. This project began with his own characterization of the human condition: “Boredom, inconstancy, anxiety.”

Yet for my father, the question of what it means to be human was not oriented, as it was for Pascal, toward the prospect of individual salvation, but toward the survival of all humans and other earthly creatures. What would save us, he believed, might require some wholesale evolution of human consciousness. Did we have time to achieve this? We were like the crew of the Titanic, steaming forward at full speed in fields of ice, racing toward a rendezvous with disaster. Was it already too late? Or was there still time for a mutiny?

The exposure to people who represented a different philosophy of life—based on the power of truth, the priority of life, compassion for others, and willingness to endure sacrifice and suffering in the service of what is right—brought him to a completely new understanding of his life and its purpose.

Reflecting on his own experience, he pondered the factors that had prompted his own awakening to a sense of loyalty and responsibility to something higher than obedience to executive authority—or to a community larger than the organization, the administration, the brotherhood of insiders. What were the steps that tracked this journey?

My father began his career in the late 1950s as a defense analyst for the RAND Corporation, granted access to the most highly classified secrets of our nuclear war planning. His concern was never about fighting a nuclear war, but about preventing it—especially by means of deterrence and an effective system of command and control. He believed this work to be of the highest importance; he was trying to save the world. Yet what he came to recognize was that these plans were characterized, on the one hand, by a fantastic degree of murderousness, far exceeding anything ever imagined, and on the other, at the same time, by an incredible degree of make-believe and fantasy. Together, these two qualities represented a kind of madness, depicted accurately in the film Dr. Strangelove. It was a madness, he later realized, not inconsistent with extreme intelligence and rational capability.

An important turning point came in 1961 when he was presented by the Pentagon with a graph indicating the estimated casualties that would result from executing the existing plan for general nuclear war. This plan called for destroying every city in Russia and China with a population over a hundred thousand. The predicted loss of life from blast and radiation (the latter covering large portions of adjacent allied countries) was six hundred million. (In light of later calculations about the risk of nuclear winter, he realized that even this estimate was a vast understatement.) Of the piece of paper that contained this estimate, he said that it “depicted evil beyond any human project ever.”

That the word “evil” came to his mind was perhaps evidence enough that he was not suited for this line of work. And yet it meant that the execution of evil plans did not require, as many people would suppose, monsters, highly aberrant or “clinically disturbed” people—“people not like us,” as he put it. It could be carried out by intelligent, ordinary family men like his colleagues at RAND, who were neither better nor worse than anyone else. It spoke to Hannah Arendt’s reference to the “banality of evil,” or as he would say, “the banality of evildoing and most evildoers.” From that point, he had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of this plan. He continued to maintain his security clearances and insider status, believing he could best achieve his purpose from within.

His two years in Vietnam (1965–67) as part of an interagency task force to study and offer advice on the war launched the evolution of his own consciousness. The first stage was his exposure to the human reality of the war. The people of Vietnam, he would say, “came to be as real to me as my own hands.” He returned from Vietnam committed to helping our country extricate itself from this futile and mistaken policy.

But then came the experience of reading the Pentagon Papers, a secret history going back to America’s support for the French effort following World War II to recapture its colonies in Indochina. His new understanding of this history changed his entire perspective. Everything the United States had done in Vietnam was an extension of that initial effort by the French—to impose, by force, a regime of our liking on the people of Vietnam.

“Is this right?”—not “Is this mistaken or futile?”—became his predominant question. It was a question he had never heard from his colleagues. Nor was it documented in the Pentagon Papers, in which moral and ethical questions were never raised. “The only questions asked were: Will this work? Is it expedient? Is it worth the risk? Will we get away with it?”

To have continued this war, year after year, for reasons of state, against the wishes of the people we were supposedly defending, was not a mistake but a crime—a crime that had to be resisted. But how? That question was answered in August 1969 when he attended a gathering of war resisters in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he encountered people who operated from a completely different set of values. Many of them were inspired by the principles of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of them was a young man named Randy Kehler, who mentioned in his speech that he would soon be going to prison for refusing to cooperate with the draft. It is impossible to overstate the impact of this encounter on my father. After fleeing the conference room and sobbing for a long time, he asked himself, “What could I do to end this war if I were willing to go to prison?” That question, like the Accident, divided his life in two—a before, and an after.

The exposure to people who represented a different philosophy of life—based on the power of truth, the priority of life, compassion for others, and willingness to endure sacrifice and suffering in the service of what is right—brought him to a completely new understanding of his life and its purpose. And though he continued until his death to deal in political considerations, weighing strategy and tactics that might reduce the risk of nuclear war, his underlying preoccupations centered on moral, and, for want of a better word, “spiritual,” considerations.

He realized that the fate of the earth, threatened by nuclear weapons, made it urgent that we recover our capacity to think in these terms:

What is missing . . . in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims . . . its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil. (The Doomsday Machine, 348)

He was aware that to speak this way entailed the risk of being dismissed as a fanatic, an extremist, lacking in “objectivity.” And yet, if we are truly to step back from the brink of catastrophe, we must confront the true moral dimension of our problem. By what right—for what reasons of national security or “defense”—could one person or one country presume to gamble with the fate of the world?

He did find himself pondering his vocation, often referring to the mythical seer Cassandra (“a crier in the wilderness”), who was blessed by the gods with the power of seeing the future, yet cursed in that nobody would believe her. In releasing the Pentagon Papers, he had believed that he was perhaps “Cassandra with documents”—that is, armed with the receipts that would justify his warnings that past patterns of lies and escalation were being repeated by the Nixon administration. But his documents, which ended with the Johnson administration, couldn’t prove it. They justified people’s opposition to the war, but most people believed that Nixon was committed to getting the United States out of Vietnam. Seventeen months after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon was reelected in a landslide.

Daniel Ellsberg. (Photo: Courtesy of Robert Ellsberg)

Like Cassandra, my father characterized himself as a “‘doomsayer’ (not to be believed, to be thought mad, extreme).” This characterization applied even more to his warnings about nuclear doomsday. But “as for me,” he added, “I want to change the future—not only foresee and warn.” To do that, he sought to “protest, reveal, risk for others, seek understanding, prevent danger, evaluate risks, avert evil, and teach by word and example.”

Perhaps, he said, the right word for this role was “prophet.” Most people think of prophets as those who are able to foresee the future. Yet the biblical prophets were not fortune-tellers. They were so attuned to the underlying spiritual and moral pathologies of their time that they could soundly anticipate the disaster that was sure to follow. They too wanted to “change the future.” Through their warning they hoped to effect moral and spiritual conversion. They hoped that the people might “choose life,” opt for justice, and restore right relations rather than drift blindly toward destruction.

In words that might have been uttered by Jeremiah, my father noted:

I am living in a society that is preparing a catastrophe.
I taste ashes in the wind.

Unlike the biblical prophets, he did not believe in a personal God. His parents were ardent converts to Christian Science, a faith he himself had been quick to abandon. This rejection extended to an aversion to organized religion in general. Yet at times he seemed to tap into a deeper spiritual spring:

I am seeking wisdom, enlightenment. I am studying, meditating, seeking teachers, looking for explanations and examples of human societies.

And elsewhere:

Can we divest mysticism from its ties to mainstream religion, especially religious beliefs and doctrines? I don’t believe in a God that listens to us, responds to us or protects us (as in war). One can, however, for calm and reassurance, profitably consult with and attune to spiritual energies such as Love, Beauty, Consciousness, and Unity.

The word “conversion” (which in its root means turning around, going in a different direction) appears a number of times, sometimes in personal terms:

What happened to me? I was at the height of my—and RAND’s—influence and prestige. I had the equivalent of a religious conversion: I was “Born Again.”

But in confronting the dangers of our time, he also suggested that what was needed was not just new policies or a revision of our war plans, but a social conversion in the form of moral “evolution.” He did not despair of this possibility. One time, while participating in a protest, he found himself grouped with a cohort of “people of faith.” One of them asked him, “Are you a person of faith?” “No,” he answered, but I am a person of hope.”

I thought of that line during his last months, as I was writing the introduction to a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of a book I had written on saints, prophets, and witnesses for our time. In my introduction I credited his example with leading me to my own calling, remembering and sharing the stories of those throughout history who offered a heroic example of faith, hope, and love in action.

I cited his identity as a person of hope, and noted that in that spirit he had dedicated his life to preserving the planet from the perils of nuclear war. His hope was not an expectation that all would turn out well, but a form of action. I quoted him: “I choose to act as if we had a choice to change the world for the better and avoid catastrophe.”

At the time, he was dying of pancreatic cancer, and I knew he wouldn’t live to see my words in print. But I did have the opportunity to read my introduction aloud to him. He listened intently. I had hoped he would be pleased to hear how his example had played such a role in my own vocation. But he wasn’t. He frowned and said, “I don’t want you to say that.” Was he disturbed by a reminder of my Catholic faith, which he tended to regard as a form of personal rebellion? Or was he made uncomfortable by the implication that he was some kind of saint?

In that light, it was interesting to me, in reading this collection of his notes, to find a surprising reference to my book, and a “lesson” he evidently drew from it:

The lesson of Robert’s book, All Saints, is that these people’s life stories, their examples of sanctity, are healthy to contemplate now, in the late 20th century. These were whole lives of change, not just moments or isolated acts.

Many of the saints were not perfect; they were not irreproachable in all aspects, all the time, all their lives. Doesn’t that make their lives all the more exemplary and inspiring for us?

That was my dad. He knew that he was not irreproachable “in all aspects, all the time,” all his life. But the survival of the world could not wait for irreproachable people. It would require many people of compassion and hope who could recognize the dangers facing our planet and were prepared, as Camus put it, “to speak out clearly and pay up personally.” It would require a kind of awakening to the moral and ethical dimensions of our crisis.

He had hope that such awakening could occur. This hope was not the same as naïve optimism. He reckoned realistically on the low odds. But low odds were not zero odds. He retained hope that catastrophe could be avoided. The basis for that hope came in part from the example of certain historical “miracles.” Among these miracles, he noted the fall of the Berlin Wall without a shot being fired and the peaceful collapse of apartheid in South Africa—both seemingly impossible, until they happened. It was that sense of hope in the face of seemingly hopeless odds that kept him going.

I fear there’s not enough time and it’s too late to achieve enough change in enough people. But I’m not going to give up.

If we go down, we’ll go down fighting, helping each other.

His own experience had shown that you should never discount the potential for unexpected consequences. He hoped his release of the Pentagon Papers might help end the war. And so it did—though not in a way he could have foreseen. The Nixon administration, in its obsession to silence him, was not satisfied with indicting him on charges carrying a penalty of 115 years in prison; it set up the illegal “Plumbers” unit to commit a range of crimes against him. When these same Plumbers were later arrested at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon resorted to paying them hush money and committing obstruction of justice to prevent them from revealing their crimes against my father. When this conspiracy was uncovered, not only did it result in the dismissal of the case against him, but ultimately it also forced Nixon’s resignation. That, in turn, effectively ended the war.

You could never know. Nor could you underestimate the power of an act of conscience or truth telling. Randy Kehler, when giving his speech at the conference of the War Resisters International, could not have imagined the impact his words would have on one person sitting in the audience.

As my father liked to say, “Courage is contagious.” We can’t know what we will accomplish, and we might not ever know the results of our actions. Yet in light of what was at stake, the chance of making a difference justified the risk, and at the end of the day, he believed, that was a good way to use your life.

He knew that he was not alone. In one of his last interviews, he said that many people don’t really think or care much about the suffering of people far away, the “others,” those not of their tribe. But there were those who do: the resisters, the peacemakers, the truth tellers. “Those,” he said, “are my tribe.”

What was his counsel for them? Perhaps it is in the last line of these notes:

What can we expect?

Prepare to step into the moment when sudden surprise opportunities for change arise . . .

Knock on doors, many doors, not knowing which may open.

Be ready to drive through.

What was his hope for them? As he wrote in a final letter to his friends and fellow peacemakers: “My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.”