In a recent, high-profile dispute, the president castigated the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for failing to “present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated.” His showdown with its director, Anthea Hartig, followed a contentious House subcommittee hearing at which Republicans openly chastised her for similar reasons. The White House has now directed that the National Park Service install signage outside the building warning visitors of alleged inaccuracies within.

Many of the museum’s current exhibits commemorate the country’s diverse histories in honor of the American semiquincentennial. The president is wrong that these displays pander and divide. Rather, they educate Americans on often overlooked events in our own country.

Take my wheelhouse, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history. It gets the Smithsonian treatment in an exhibit canvassing Filipino American history from the 1910s to the 1970s. In fact, Asian Americans have been here since before the Declaration of Independence—from the crew of a Spanish expedition in 1587 to a mid-1700s settlement in the swamplands near New Orleans. I bet your school textbooks never taught that.

A robust American education requires that we preserve more of these stories: in museums, in the classroom, and in broader popular culture. To our credit, we are beginning to do so. Five years ago, Illinois passed the first state-level mandate to teach AAPI history in classrooms. Since then, local pilot programs and legislation in 23 states have expanded AAPI history in K-12 social-studies curricula. These efforts have accompanied moves in many school districts to teach diverse content, including Black, women’s, and LGBTQ+ histories.

Whatever one’s political leanings, having more information about our shared past allows us to draw more educated conclusions about our present.

Still, 55% of Americans cannot name a single event or policy related to Asian Americans. That means more than lacking familiarity with a racial group. Without knowing the past, and how diverse communities influenced it, we cannot fully understand many of today’s legal institutions and enforcement activities.

For example, immigration enforcement at our Southern border first became a priority during the era of Chinese Exclusion. To skirt detention at Angel Island, new arrivals from China increasingly entered the country via Mexico. Around 1904, mounted federal agents began patrolling the border in response. Over time, their duties expanded from immigration to general law enforcement. In conjunction with the Texas Rangers, they engaged in confrontations, sometimes fatal, with Tejanos and others accused of smuggling illicit goods.

The border, it hardly requires pointing out, haunts national politics still, with mass detention, visas, and the status of sanctuary cities dominating the news cycle. The construction of a physical border wall, meanwhile, threatens to disrupt our relations with Native American tribes and jeopardize our national parks.

Other links between past and present abound. For example, many contemporary labor movements share DNA with those that AAPI workers led. The American History Museum’s exhibit on Filipino Americans explores the decades-long organizing work of Larry Itliong, which culminated in his leadership of the 1965 Delano grape strike alongside Cesar Chavez. The latter is a household name, and the former should be.

Similarly, the movie Sinners brought attention to the role of Chinese American grocers in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow. They played complex roles in their local communities, testing and fortifying racial hierarchies in turn. They sold goods to Black patrons on credit, breaking the dominance of extractive plantation commissaries. But they also brought legal challenges that reinforced the premise of “separate but equal,” such as a suit in which they argued for their children’s admission into white schools while accepting the need for separate Black schools. How Chinese American families lived in and navigated the political climate of the postbellum South sheds light on little-known facets of the region’s economy and institutions.

I learned about all these events as an adult, reading texts on my own (such as Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America). And far from diminishing my patriotism, as the president apparently fears, each of these stories has strengthened my belief in the resilience of all Americans—and in the idea that America itself is a collective project.

Instead of warning Americans away, we should safeguard exhibits, lesson plans, and art that tell diverse histories. They help us understand our country better. Whatever one’s political leanings, having more information about our shared past allows us to draw more educated conclusions about our present. Democracies rely on informed citizens. And the way to build an informed citizenry is to treat diverse histories as a vital part of our national inheritance.

Hey, I’ve been 80 for almost two weeks now. Where’s the Jell-O? Where’s the yeast? Where’s the pitchfork?

And I know by now you’re asking: What the hell is he talking about?

Bear with me. I’m talking about being funny. This is not what I expected to be writing about today, and nothing feels the least bit funny to me about the world I’m living in—or about the stumbling leg pain and imbalance the aging process has bequeathed me, not to mention... huh? What did you say? Oh yeah, I can barely hear.

All of which, you would think, adds up to the need to be deeply serious. And that was the spirit in which I started working on this column. And nothing came of it. I felt far too lost to be serious, that is, to speak with certainty about global politics and the state of the world. What I felt instead was desperation mixed with ego and self-pity. Mostly the latter.

Now during every discussion I’m in, part of me wanders into no man’s land, looking for inappropriate, chuckle-wrenching contributions—cans of spam, political sound bites, anything to stick on the pitchfork of seriousness.

And then I went down to eat, here at my retirement community. At one point, one of the wonderful young servers asked me, “What else can I get you?”

I answered, without a moment’s thought, “How about some peace on Earth?”

And my heart lightened. So did hers. The world relaxed around us. And I thought about a column I wrote 25 years ago. It’s called (for some reason) “Yeast and Jell-O.” I think it’s time to serve it up again:

Yeast and Jell-O

Nothing particularly funny about a pitchfork, unless it’s skewering… oh, a pair of bikini underwear, maybe. A bratwurst?

Indulge me here. This is a joke in progress. What do you think? What object would be most likely to pry a guffaw out of that scowling, granite-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s famous (and famously parodied) painting, “American Gothic”? A roll of toilet paper? How about a pineapple upside down cake?

Well, keep working on it. Something has to make him laugh or he’s done for, this poster boy of dour.

His was the face that came to mind as I began pondering the nature of humor recently, thanks to my niece, who asked me, “How’d you get to be such a funny guy, Uncle Bob?” This is not an answer to her question, but here’s a fun fact: Children laugh 300 times a day, while adults cut loose a spare, grim 15. It’s true; I read it somewhere. Can’t remember where, but it’s gospel to me now. I use it to justify my life. I’m one of those people who can’t stop turning everything into a joke.

Whatever the minimum daily requirement of titters turns out to be—and I’m sure 15 isn’t nearly enough—I help supply it. If laughter is the spiritual equivalent of Fleischmann’s yeast, I’m one of the agents who makes the bread rise.

But all I was trying to do was find my way into the conversation. I was so out of it when I was an adolescent—so clueless about the straight-ahead certainties of that age, so unable to contribute to discussions about cool hair, stick shifts, or the facts of life, much less to swagger about such matters—I spent a lot of time watching other people talk. As I prowled the periphery, free of the conversation’s centrifugal logic, I’d notice stuff the participants missed.

Odd pieces would sometimes fly out of the chatter like foul balls—a word, a phrase, an implication. When I ran to retrieve it, I’d find other subject matter nearby: someone’s crabby grandmother, last week’s homework, a dirty joke. It would have nothing to do with the conversation, but I’d bring it along and divert the others’ attention. They’d look at me with surprise, their own thoughts momentarily shattered. The shattering noise was laughter.

So that was my answer to Carmen’s question: Laughter stopped the action and got a lonely kid some eye contact. Now during every discussion I’m in, part of me wanders into no man’s land, looking for inappropriate, chuckle-wrenching contributions—cans of spam, political sound bites, anything to stick on the pitchfork of seriousness.

To test my thesis, I decided to follow myself around for a few days and keep track of the levity. This is live: My sister is telling me about losing her credit card, then remembering she used it at Kinko’s. She calls the place; amazingly, it’s there. “When you pick it up,” I hear myself say, “Be wary if, when you say ‘Thanks,’ the clerk says, ‘No, thank YOU!’” She laughs. Life goes on.

I’m proofreading a column of news briefs. I read that the No. 1 city in per capita Jell-O consumption is Des Moines, followed by Salt Lake City. This pitches me into a fit of giggles; I have no idea why. Maybe because Jell-O is such an earnest food, laced with shredded carrots, topped with sliced bananas. It’s a staple of church socials and moms everywhere, but it also wiggles. It has no food value. I work in a hushed setting, among copy editors. It’s all I can do not to disrupt their concentration with the news.

I can’t help myself. Life is too full of frowning guys gripping pitchforks.

On Saturday August 22, the world’s ocean surface temperature was the hottest it’s ever been recorded—just a fraction under 70°F. As the ocean continues warming, I and Vicki Nichols Goldstein of the Inland Ocean Coalition interviewed weather and climate scientist Daniel Swain who is affiliated with the University of California’s California Institute for Water Resources and the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research. We spoke with him on our Rising Tide Ocean Podcast. Here is an excerpted version of that conversation:

David Helvarg: Before we get into our rapidly heating ocean and its impacts onshore and off, give us some background.

Daniel Swain: I started out as a weather geek, even as a kid. When I went to UC Davis for an undergraduate degree in atmospheric science, I thought I might become a federal meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But at some point, I realized that some of the really big questions, both intellectually interesting and societally important, were at this weather-climate interface. We can predict the weather really well, but the climate is changing. What does that mean for the weather?

So, I came into climate from the weather side—day-to-day weather changes and operational forecasting. I still get to wear that weather-geek hat pretty regularly, even though today I would call myself a climate scientist. I exist at that boundary between weather and climate, which of course is not very distinct to begin with. It’s all the same fluid atmosphere and the same fluid ocean, just different densities.

If funding becomes dependent on whether a research topic aligns with the political priorities of whoever happens to be president, that fundamentally changes the scientific enterprise. It is difficult to overstate how destructive and dangerous that could be.

I’ve been known to call the ocean, “the atmosphere, but upside down and wet.” That comes from an Earth-system perspective. The atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere (frozen water) aren’t really distinct elements. That becomes more obvious with each passing decade as we try to predict and model these different Earth systems and discover we can’t do it very well unless we connect them. We can’t predict the atmosphere very well unless we connect it to the ocean, and vice versa.

Helvarg: So, let’s start at that large scale. People don’t necessarily think of the ocean as a driver of climate and weather, even though it covers more than 70% of the planet.

Swain: Exactly. We live on a water planet even though we don’t really think of it that way. Fundamentally, that is what Earth is. The fact that more than 70% of the planet is covered by water means that long-term variations in the atmosphere are largely driven by what’s happening in the ocean.

Climate change, as we think about it, is actually, to a first order, ocean warming. The majority of the accumulated heat is going into the oceans. Then it affects the atmosphere as some of that heat comes back out of the ocean and comes back to bite us on land. One way to think about global warming is that it is primarily a tremendous amount of extra energy accumulating in the oceans and then spilling over into the remaining third of the Earth that isn’t ocean covered.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein: We know that about 90% of the excess heat is being stored in the ocean. Why can the ocean absorb so much heat compared to land?

Swain: First, because most of the planet is ocean. If you’re warming the whole sphere, most of that warming is going to involve the ocean simply because that’s most of the planet. But there’s more to it. Water has an enormous specific heat capacity. It can absorb an incredible amount of energy compared to an equivalent mass of soil or rock. It can also absorb that energy over a very deep layer.

On land, we talk about geology over millions of years—mountains building and collapsing, continents colliding and diverging. But over a few decades, that’s not happening to a meaningful degree. The ocean moves much more rapidly. An individual water molecule at the surface can end up in the atmosphere through evaporation or thousands of feet down in the deep ocean within a couple of years. The ocean is therefore very good at transferring energy from the surface to the depths.

It’s not just that the ocean covers 70+% of the planet and absorbs a lot of the increased warmth at the surface. Through vertical circulation and currents, it transfers some of that heat downward and redistributes it across the planet—longitudinally, latitudinally, and vertically.

The atmosphere overturns very quickly. A cumulus cloud can go from your house up to 20,000 feet in 20 minutes during a thunderstorm. The ocean takes longer, but significant movement can still occur over weeks, months, and years. On land, comparable movement can take millennia to millions of years. That’s why the ocean and atmosphere are tightly coupled. They interact causally, bidirectionally, and continuously.

Helvarg: People also have a hard time grasping how rapidly this change has occurred. Since we began burning fossil fuels just a few centuries ago, we’ve been changing the physical nature of the ocean—its temperature, chemistry, circulation, even its color. What does increasing ocean heat mean in terms of marine heatwaves?

Swain: Marine heatwaves really just mean anomalously warm ocean temperatures. Usually, we’re talking about the surface ocean because that’s what we can observe most readily and where these heatwaves are often most pronounced. We’re seeing them emerge with much greater frequency, intensity, and spatial connectedness, year after year and decade after decade. Unfortunately, I don’t see that stopping.

We’re going to see continued acceleration in marine heatwaves for as long as planetary warming continues. And marine heatwaves can have a lot of staying power because the oceans evolve more slowly than the atmosphere. You get a blob of unusually warm water and, except under unusual circumstances, you can’t just blow it away with a strong wind the way you might end a heatwave over land. A large marine heatwave can take days, weeks, or months to dissipate because there’s so much thermal inertia in the ocean.

Ironically, that persistence is also part of why the ocean helps us predict the atmosphere. The ocean varies more slowly. It has more “memory,” and therefore its variations can exert a persistent influence on the atmosphere. At a fundamental level, as the air warms, the ocean beneath it is going to warm too—although it will warm more in some places than others because of ocean currents, circulation, and atmospheric conditions.

Goldstein: We hear a lot about La Niña and El Niño. What is actually happening during that transition?

Swain: El Niño and La Niña are parts of a broader pattern of natural ocean variability called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.

El Niño is the warm phase. La Niña is the cool phase. Essentially, we’re talking about whether the eastern tropical Pacific, particularly the ocean off Peru and South America, is warmer or cooler than usual. That’s a region where there’s normally a lot of coastal upwelling, with cold water moving vertically upward from the deeper ocean. Despite being in the tropics, this keeps coastal temperatures relatively moderate.

During El Niño, that cold-water upwelling weakens as warm water from the western Pacific literally sloshes eastward, sometimes thousands of miles. The prevailing easterly winds that help drive the upwelling can also weaken or even reverse. When the eastern tropical Pacific warms substantially, that is fundamentally El Niño.

But the reason it matters globally is that ENSO performs something like a thermostat function in the global climate system. During La Niña, heat gets stored below the surface in the tropical Pacific. During El Niño, some of that accumulated heat is released from the ocean into the tropical atmosphere, where it spreads through the rest of the climate system.

Swain: Because El Niño unleashes stored energy from the tropical ocean, it increases the global average temperature. And in a warming world, when you put a big El Niño on top of long-term global warming, you increase the likelihood of new global temperature records. It also accelerates the hydrologic cycle.

The warmer the air, the greater the potential swings between extreme wet and extreme dry. Warmer air can hold more water vapor. It doesn’t necessarily do so everywhere, but it raises the ceiling on how much moisture can be present. That raises the ceiling on extreme precipitation events, but also on extreme drought and wildfire conditions in different places and at different times. Some parts of the world see increased flood risk during El Niño. Other places see increased drought risk. El Niño shifts weather patterns while global warming increases the potential magnitude of whatever those patterns produce.

Helvarg: Here on the West Coast, my experience with El Niño has generally meant more storminess. How strong is that relationship?

Swain: El Niño in general exerts a meaningful but sometimes hard-to-pinpoint influence on California because it’s just one of many relevant factors. But with a very strong El Niño, I think it’s a different story.

This is a message I’ve tried to communicate to people in emergency management and policy. Recent El Niño events haven’t always produced the canonical effects people expected. The 2015-16 El Niño, for example, was one of the strongest ever observed in the tropical Pacific, but we did not see extremely strong impacts in California. Some people took that to mean, “Well, what does El Niño really mean anyway?” My answer is: not much if it’s weak. But if it’s strong or very strong, it should significantly tilt the odds.

It can mean a significantly warmer California nearshore ocean. It can mean temporarily elevated local sea levels, increasing the risk of coastal flooding and marine heatwave impacts. And in winter it can significantly increase the odds of a wetter-than-average California winter, potentially even a very wet winter with increased flood risk.

But if you asked me for one single predictor in the global climate system that could provide three to six months’ advance notice of the potential for a very wet California winter, it would be a very strong El Niño.

Goldstein: What does that mean for mountain snowpack in California and across the West?

Swain: This is where things get tricky because precipitation means different things in a warming world. You can have a winter that isn’t particularly dry and still have very low snowpack because it’s simply too warm. Some places can actually be wetter than average and still have unusually low snowpack. So, a strong El Niño may increase precipitation in California, including the Sierra Nevada, and could bring needed water to parts of the Colorado River Basin.

But more precipitation doesn’t necessarily mean more snow (if it rains). We may see above-average precipitation in some mountainous regions while still seeing below-average snowpack. That can help alleviate drought, but it’s a very different picture from a cold, snowy winter.

Helvarg: Jumping from the Pacific to that other still-significant ocean, the Atlantic: Strong El Niño events are supposed to suppress Atlantic hurricanes. Is that right? And why?

Swain: This is a good example of global warming and El Niño pushing in different directions. El Niño usually decreases Atlantic hurricane activity, mainly because of its effect on vertical wind shear rather than temperature. Tropical cyclones don’t like strong winds at upper levels of the atmosphere because those winds can literally decapitate storms—shear them apart. El Niño tends to increase wind shear in the Atlantic hurricane development region, making it more difficult for hurricanes to form and strengthen.

But there’s a big asterisk. If you have record-warm waters in places like the Gulf of Mexico, and a storm manages to develop during a brief period when wind shear is low, you can still get an extremely strong hurricane. So, a strong El Niño may suppress the overall hurricane season, while exceptionally warm ocean water can supercharge a storm that does manage to develop.

That’s a good example of natural variability—El Niño and the Southern Oscillation—interacting with the decidedly unnatural long-term warming trend to produce outcomes we haven’t seen very often before. It’s also why, despite all our advances in prediction and historical data, science still has a lot to learn.

Goldstein: That brings us to science itself. The Trump administration is changing Office of Management and Budget rules in ways that could make federal research funding reflect presidential priorities. How does that affect climate research and communication?

Swain: This goes far beyond weather, climate, and oceans. It affects any domain requiring expert knowledge to make important decisions—from health to public policy to research funding. There has been a lot of focus on research funding, but it’s important to emphasize that this affects everything.

The degree of alarm in academic and research institutions is significant. Changes that politicize the federal grant system could make us vastly less able to understand how the world works and prepare for future contingencies—whether storms, floods, pandemics, or geopolitical disturbances. It also becomes much harder for people in science to remain nonpartisan and simply focus on their research.

If funding becomes dependent on whether a research topic aligns with the political priorities of whoever happens to be president, that fundamentally changes the scientific enterprise. It is difficult to overstate how destructive and dangerous that could be.

Goldstein: That’s why people have to follow these issues, raise their voices, and try to hold the line.

Helvarg: Democracy doesn’t guarantee that we’ll be good ocean stewards or base public policy on sound science. But without democratic means, it becomes far harder to move forward on existential challenges like climate change and ocean protection.

This summer, over 100 community members gave public comments against Project Taurus, an AI data center proposed by the tech and real estate company, Raeden, near Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. Despite only 15 comments in favor of the project, the city planning commission voted 6-2 to move forward with the project.

As a youth environmental and social justice organizer who sat through hours of the hearing and spent much of my past week encouraging community members to join me, I left the hearing devastated by the commission’s decision. Building a data center at a site already facing a water crisis and next to a National Natural Landmark felt like just one more step toward a society that has lost all care and consideration for communities and nature.

But the next day, as I discussed the hearing with one of my roommates, I found myself trying to convey the energy, hope, empathy, and deep care that had filled the hearing room. I explained my admiration for the dozens of working-class community members who sat for hours in a windowless room just to give a two-minute comment or simply support the other speakers. By the end of the conversation, I realized that despite being upset about the decision, the experience left me with hope and faith in the goodness of humanity.

As America continues to throw billions into war, cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid funding, pull out of climate commitments, and move toward projects and systems that further harm people, we can begin to believe that Americans are not concerned with their neighbors’ well-being. What the hearing taught me, however, is that decisions—like whether to move forward with data center projects—and the current state of our county do not reflect our communities’ desires.

It is critical that decisions like the Colorado Springs Planning Commission’s don’t lead us to lose hope in one another and our collective power.

The committee’s decision is a reflection of money in politics. It is a reflection of desperately needing to change who our elected officials are. Of needing to address corporate consolidation that holds this power in opposition to people’s needs and not accountable to communities. Of needing to distribute power so that real people are better represented, and of needing to better support communities so that they have the time, resources, and energy to ensure their voices are taken into account in issues that affect them and their neighbors.

We are up against a political and economic system with such strong inertia that even if communities understand it isn’t working for them, only strategic coordinated action will bring about change. The more people are overworked, underfed, and under-resourced, the harder it is for them to advocate. They have less time to attend community meetings; to speak out about the meetings themselves being scheduled during the workday; to look into local candidates' positions; to turn out to vote. And they have less money to contribute to grassroots campaigns that refuse money from Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Big Tech.

Though Raeden claims to have people’s best interests in mind, it is structured to secure a profit, not to adhere to communities’ needs. A majority of Americans oppose local data center construction, and only 14% of Americans feel comfortable with a data center built nearby. This aligns with the 85% of public comments that were in opposition to Project Taurus.

Community members spoke about the project's impact on neighborhood health, the environment, wildlife, water, and energy. They explained that the center’s infrasound can’t be blocked by Raeden’s proposed 30-foot sound wall; diesel backup generators pose severe health risks by emitting high levels of toxic particles that cause respiratory issues, worsen asthma, and increase long-term cancer risks; and although Raeden emphasizes its closed-loop cooling system to save water in an environment that is already in a major drought, the treatment chemicals used pose risks to the local environment and health of our water supply while the system as a whole significantly increases energy usage, which the company itself admits will likely be powered by fossil fuels and nuclear plants.

Furthermore, community members emphasized that data centers are not built for community needs. The energy itself powers mass surveillance and military AI programs for companies like Palantir and the world’s largest prisoner tracking company, BI, both of which are headquartered in Colorado.

Raeden tells the community that it will bring jobs and money to the Springs. However, while Raeden will immediately profit from the development, the long-term economic benefits for the community are much more dubious. Experts have increasingly been raising concerns about the longevity of AI investments, or what they refer to as the “AI bubble.” A recent MIT study found that 95% of AI companies have achieved zero return on investment, despite investments of $30 to $40 billion in the technology. The end of the AI bubble is predicted to be akin to the 2008 financial crisis but with more devastating effects. Similar to 2008, when banks got a $500 billion bailout while 6 million Americans lost their homes, tech companies will likely be protected while communities will suffer the costs. Raeden, for instance, will be protected because it is a real estate company and does not have roots in the community, unlike Colorado Springs residents.

As one community member emphasized, Raeden came into Colorado Springs not for the water or natural resources the city can provide, but to take advantage of the city's human desperation. Northwest Colorado Springs is in need of jobs and local investment.

Raeden came to the Springs expecting to be welcomed by a community too tired and worn out to push back, but the company has been met with a very different reality. Despite the minimal transparency from the city and Raeden, not only are a large majority of community members against data centers, but the community has also been able to spread awareness about the project and mobilize over 100 people to show up to speak out for nature, their neighbors’ health, and the fate of future generations.

I have built my worldview around a belief that if we all come together as regular people with human values, we will have the power to stand up against even the millions of dollars corporations throw at candidates, policy, or, in this case, data centers. The hearing was a realization of this working-class movement of the people that I spend much of my time striving for.

The hard part was supposed to be getting people to come together and to show up. We did that. People spoke eloquently, with knowledge, and heartfelt appeals. And still, they were denied.

Nevertheless, this past week has shown me that people are truly good. Despite billions of dollars put into trying to change individuals' opinions to fit the needs of corporations, people continue to hold onto values of health, well-being, community, mutual aid, and democracy. This is true power that can be harnessed.

It is critical that decisions like the Colorado Springs Planning Commission’s don’t lead us to lose hope in one another and our collective power. Corporations like Raeden would love nothing more than for us to be apathetic and divided. Instead, we must stay true to our demands for humanity. Stay true to these demands as we vote for candidates who prioritize human needs over corporate interests. As we increase our trust in one another, the conversations we have with our neighbors, and our faith in our power. We will continue to show up and prove that people have not given consent for our current systems.

There are now over 300 local bans and moratoriums on data centers across the US, including Denver, Jefferson County, Boulder, Longmont, and Monument, and a majority of Americans support pausing the construction of AI data centers for at least one year.

Colorado Springs proved that communities have not and will not accept a rise in corporate trickle-down projects as a replacement for government programs. We proved that communities will continue to show up for one another and stay grounded in human values. We proved that this fight is far from easy and anything but fair, but we will persist.

Some years back, I was toying with the idea of writing a book-length history of World War II from the perspective of wild and domesticated animals. I bought a number of relevant texts for research, like The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo. Ultimately, the project was more ambitious than what I was capable of, so I set it aside.

Still, I remained interested in the question which, at least partially, inspired my focus on the topic—namely, what would a pro-animal foreign policy, that we could plausibly get politicians to adopt, look like? Recently, I sought to ask various animal activists and thinkers that question. I had hoped to feature a broader range of figures. Nevertheless, I’m very grateful to all of the people who took the time to answer.

pattrice jones is a co-founder of VINE Sanctuary as well as an ecofeminist scholar and writer. VINE Sanctuary is an LGBTQ-led farmed animal refuge working for social and environmental justice as well as animal liberation. Prior to co-founding the sanctuary, jones worked as a tenant organizer and anti-racist educator. Her books include The Oxen at the Intersection and Bird’s-Eye Views: Queer Queries About Activism, Animals, and Identity.

“Countless animals are facing literally existential crises due to climate change, so the easiest animal-friendly foreign policy to promote would be to rejoin and rejuvenate international efforts to cooperatively do everything possible to address the climate emergency,” jones said. “I say ‘easiest’ because many—perhaps the majority—of people in the US already support efforts in that direction. Bonus points for bringing (a) diet and (b) the viewpoints of animals themselves into high-level international conversations about climate solutions.”

She pointed out wars kill animals and destroy their habitats, so a pro-animal foreign policy would necessarily be pro-peace. jones called for an end to giving or selling weapons to all countries and groups, aside from those engaged in legitimate self-defense. She wants to prohibit war unless the conflict was approved by domestic supermajorities and a majority of members of the United Nations.

“A vaccine for bird flu exists but has been blocked by international trade concerns of the poultry industry,” jones continued. “Not only farmed birds but also wild birds by the billions have died and will die. The risk for some wild bird species is, again, existential. The US should broker an international agreement so that this vaccine is available to all, including wild bird rehabbers who could begin to make a difference by vaccinating every bird who comes in for care for any reason. Foreign aid should include funds for the manufacture and distribution of this vaccine at scale.”

Martin Smedjeback is the chairperson of Animal Save Sweden. He campaigns for animal rights and the climate by giving presentations, facilitating workshops, participating in open rescues of animals, blockading oil transports, occasionally spending time in prison, taking photos, and shooting videos. Smedjeback argued the European Union should help accelerate the development of cultivated meat and levy higher taxes on traditional animal products.

“We need significantly more investment in alternative protein research,” he said. “Our environment, health, and animal welfare depend on a new food system where protein no longer originates from animals. We must develop plant-based foods and cultivated meat—produced from animal cells without harming the animal—that compete directly with conventional meat on taste and price. This transition is essential to tackling the climate crisis, reducing the risk of future pandemics, and curbing antibiotic overuse.”

Emilia A. Leese is an author, rewilder, and podcast host exploring the intersections of morality, food, and our relationship with the environment. She wrote Think Like a Vegan: Embracing Ethics in a Plant-Powered World. Leese believes a pro-animal foreign policy would be indistinguishable from a pro-animal domestic policy, and pushed back on the notion nonhuman activists should take into consideration existing political reality.

“We must abandon the mirage of ‘plausible’ reform within a system which is actively hostile against other animals,” she said, “Instead, we must demand radical change and reframe our current property-based utility to co-existence. This can be achieved by ascribing legal personhood to all other animals, such as is given to people and corporate or other legal entities. Or through a non-anthropocentric standard of beingness, like that developed by Professor Maneesha Deckha.”

Barry Kent MacKay is an artist, writer, and conservationist who has worked in different capacities for Born Free USA, the Animal Alliance of Canada, Zoocheck, the Animal Protection Party of Canada, Species Survival Network, the Toronto Humane Society, the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, and others groups.

“History shows that while great reforms may seem fairly spontaneous—the result of a tipping point having been reached—there are incremental steps to get there,” MacKay said, putting forward a number of potential foreign policy goals. “I think the connection between Covid-19 and mustelids opens an opportunity for bans on mink farming, locally, and the import of live mustelids from other countries.”

Merritt Clifton is editor of the Animals 24-7 blog. Previously, he was news editor of the Animals’ Agenda magazine, editor of the Animal People newspaper, and editor of the annual Watchdog Report on Animal Charities. Working as a journalist since 1968, Clifton has reported as a foreign correspondent from approximately 40 different countries.

“The simplest, easiest thing to do would be to enforce [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora] and other relevant international treaties as written,” he said. “There are so many UN-brokered treaties relevant to animal welfare that I can’t even remember them all off the top of my head, also including the [International Whaling Commission] treaty, Treaty of Sea, several on various aspects of zoonotic disease, etc., but the US, though a signatory to practically all of them, has a terrible enforcement record.”

Moritz Stumpe is the executive director of Animal Advocacy Africa, which is trying to stop the spread of factory farming on the continent. He is based in Germany but travels regularly. Stumpe views his organization as a capacity builder and a bridge between the African and international animal protection movements.

He argued the same welfare standards should be applied to imported and domestic products. “This kind of policy should have broad support since it protects domestic farmers,” Stumpe said. “A similar principle applies to equipment that was used for practices that are prohibited in the Global North, like battery cages in Europe, not being exported to the Global South, where battery cages are still permitted.” He added Global North countries shouldn’t finance development projects in the Global South that promote factory farms.

S. Marek Muller is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Texas State University. They are the author of Impersonating Animals: Rhetoric, Ecofeminism, and Animal Rights Law and the forthcoming Soy Boy Beta Cuck: Primal Rhetoric and the Rise of Right-Wing Carnivorism. Their research centers discourses of animal rights and welfare as well as alt-protein biotechnologies.

“Sometimes imperialist tendencies get combined with genuine devotion to animal welfare and protection such that ‘our’ kind of animal relations are considered superior to ‘theirs’ in a way that ends up quite problematic in practice,” Muller said. “Take zoonotic disease in the cases of Ebola and Covid-19 and how, respectively, bushmeat and wet markets became the subjects of international scrutiny and denizens of non-Western countries were villainized as unsanitary, deviant, and cruel to animals.”

Muller noted there wasn’t much introspection in Western countries about industrial agriculture and its ties to zoonotic diseases and animal suffering. They added the far-right has used arguments about animal cruelty to demonize various human populations, for instance, by framing specific forms of religious slaughter as evidence of the inferiority of adherents to that faith.

“I'd say an important element of a pro-animal foreign policy involves the nation-state having humbleness about its own complicity in the animal-industrial complex, noting how being ‘pro’ animal will involve work from all parties in a foreign policy relationship, not a top-down relationship where the ‘civilized’ country ‘teaches’ the other country how to be,” Muller said. “I'm not talking about simplified cultural relativism, but rather an understanding of mutuality and dialogue where individual nations' individual contexts allow for distinct forms of animal protection that may not be a one-size-fits all situation.”

John Patrick is a co-founder of Scotland for Animals, a former member of the Scottish Parliament Cross-Party Animal Welfare Group, and a former Scottish Socialist Party animal-rights spokesman. He thinks foreign cooperation and assistance should be dependent on basic nonhuman welfare reforms with effective deterrents.

“Governments and alliances are able and willing to sanction other nations for a multitude of reasons,” he said. “They are also very keen to intervene at a diplomatic level on behalf of wealth and industry. They can and should apply this same pressure and zeal for failing or refusing to act on [the issue of animal protection].”

A longtime nonhuman activist, who previously founded Animal Outlook and worked at Humane World for Animals, Paul Shapiro is the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. He believes the three most consequential pro-animal foreign policy goals would be to end United States financing for the global expansion of intensive animal agriculture, make the development of alternative proteins a food-security priority, and put enforceable animal-welfare provisions into trade agreements.

“Those would likely help vastly more animals than the symbolically attractive approach of concentrating foreign policy on dog meat, trophy hunting, or a handful of notorious festivals,” Shapiro said. “A pro-animal foreign policy would use American money and market access to change systems.”

Matthew A. King is the president and co-founder of the Christian Animal Rights Association. He has written a growing number of books which address nonhuman ethics from a faith-based perspective. His latest text is Pride Goes Before Destruction: Human Vanity, Animal Agriculture, and the New Covenant Solution.

“A pro-animal foreign policy would mirror the legal framework established domestically by measures like California’s Prop 12 and Massachusetts' Question 3, ensuring that international trade and imports of animal products are permitted only when they meet rigorous, humane welfare standards,” King said. “Additionally, a practical step would be redirecting US Agency for International Development funds away from industrial factory farming models and instead investing in sustainable, plant-based agricultural infrastructure abroad.”

Katherine Perlo is the author of Kinship and Killing: The Animal in World Religions. She has worked as a typist, typesetter, accompanist, piano teacher, and academic proofreader. Later in life, Perlo earned a doctoral degree in philosophy, choosing the subject in order to promote animal rights. While born in the United States, she lives in Scotland.

“Veganism can be promoted, using standard foreign policy mechanisms, through the perspective of land,” Perlo said. “Agricultural support, through subsidies, import-export policies, and aid, could go to stock-free food production along with human-socially beneficial land projects, as an essential part of land reform and land management.”

Itai Roffman, PhD, an evolutionary anthropologist and conservationist, is a senior lecturer, researcher, and co-executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute Israel. He established the Mali Chimpanzee Cultural Preservation, Rehabilitation and Tribal Heritage League, dedicated to initiation of tribal protected reservations for chimpanzees and other critically endangered species, via community-led ecological restoration.

“Rainforest destruction is a global catastrophe, as they are Earth's lungs,” Roffman said. “Factory farming as cause of zoonotic pathogens and spread of lethal epidemics is also a global concern. It pollutes ground water and rivers. Governments should work together to find technological alternatives to meat from slaughter, such as promoting commercially sound cultured meat from cells."

Marco Maurizi wrote Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism, and Critical Theory. He is particularly interested in attempts to understand nonhuman protection as part of a wider left-wing project, rather than an isolated ethical issue. Maurizi teaches philosophy and history in Italian high schools, while collaborating with the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

“A plausible pro-animal foreign policy,” he said, “could include ending subsidies and other forms of state support for industrial animal agriculture; incorporating strong restrictions on animal exploitation into international trade agreements; opposing the expansion of factory farming through international development and investment programs; strengthening international action against wildlife trafficking and industrial fishing; and redirecting development aid toward plant-based and ecologically sustainable forms of agriculture.”

Spencer Roberts is a science writer, ecologist, musician, and engineer. In his journalistic work, he focuses on the climate crisis, marine life, and animal agriculture. Roberts’ work has been published in Wired, The Intercept, Jacobin, and elsewhere. He pointed out fishing is the largest source of human-caused animal suffering and premature death.

“Ending the subsidization of high seas and distant water fishing would not only save countless billions of animals, but would extend an olive branch in foreign policy, deescalating the ‘arms race‘ of competition for catch and hegemony of the high seas,” Roberts said. “These subsidies could be redirected to countries who endured United States military occupations, many to this day, particularly in the Pacific. Many small island nations derive a majority of their national revenue from licenses to foreign fleets to plunder their waters.”

Low-wage US workers have faced multiple rising threats to their economic and personal security over the past year.

Aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions have terrorized immigrant workers, who are disproportionately represented at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Congress approved the largest cuts in history to public assistance programs that millions of low-wage workers have to rely on to get by. And the Trump administration has attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs designed to expand opportunities for disadvantaged employees.

How have the largest employers of low-wage workers responded to these threats? This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report takes a look by zeroing in on the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.” The country’s most profitable retailers, fast food chains, and hospitality firms dominate the list.

Low-Wage 100 CEOs Have Remained Silent About Threats to Workers

Our key finding: Low-Wage 100 CEOs have raised nary a peep about ICE attacks on their employees or the gutting of our social safety net. And, with few exceptions, they have obediently rolled back DEI programs.

By looking the other way as low-wage workers face surging threats, corporate CEOs have shown even more clearly that we cannot rely on them to voluntarily do the right thing.

How did these corporate leaders choose to deploy their vast political power instead? Passage of the July 2025 budget bill was a top priority. This legislation will throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to pay for more tax cuts for the rich and a massive increase in ICE funding.

Under the bill’s reduced top marginal tax rate, chief executives will be able to take home an even greater share of their fat paychecks. In 2025, average CEO compensation within the Low-Wage 100 hit $17.5 million. By contrast, the group’s average median worker pay sat at just $36,571 and their average CEO-worker pay gap came to 614 to 1.

Low-Wage 100 Firms Won Tax Cuts for the Rich, Paid for With Cuts to Aid Programs Their Employees Rely On

We reviewed public statements about this budget legislation by Low-Wage 100 firms and the corporate lobby groups that represent them. Each statement cheered the law’s tax cuts, which will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. The International Franchise Association even praised the doubling of the estate tax exemption, a tax break that will benefit less than 0.2% of the population.

Not one statement expressed concern about the law’s drastic Medicaid and SNAP cuts. A recent Government Accountability Office report lists the top employers of workers receiving Medicaid and SNAP in a sampling of states where this information is available. Low-Wage 100 firms dominate the lists.

Long-Term Trends of Executive Excess

Given past trends, Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ muted response to the increased threats against their employees is hardly a surprise. The pandemic opened the eyes of many Americans to the essential value of frontline low-wage workers. But even that national crisis did not lead to more equitable sharing of corporate wealth.

Between 2019 and 2025, the Low-Wage 100’s average CEO pay rose 41.4%, double the 20.7% increase in their average median worker pay.

A technical note: we did not adjust these figures for US inflation because median pay figures in corporate SEC filings are based on a company’s global workforce. But many Low-Wage 100 firms have the vast majority of their employees in the United States. In fact, that’s the case for 5 of the 10 Low-Wage 100 corporations with the lowest median pay (Ross Stores, Ulta Beauty, TJX, Yum! Brands, and Dollar Tree).

Buybacks Bonanza

To further enrich their wealthy executives, Low-Wage 100 firms have spent over $718 billion repurchasing their own stock over the past seven years. This formerly illegal financial maneuver artificially boosts the value of a company’s shares and, in the process, pumps up the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80% of corporate CEO compensation.

Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar not spent on worker wages or long-term productive investments. The Lowe’s home improvement store’s $46.8 billion expenditures on buybacks over the past seven years could have covered the cost of a $24,235 bonus for each of their 276,000 employees every year during that period. Median pay at Lowe’s in 2025: $37,371.

Policy Changes to Curb Executive Excess

The Low-Wage 100 represent a business model designed to deliver staggering personal gains for top executives by squeezing their workers. This predominant model is shredding our social fabric and threatening our democracy. We clearly need to build worker power and raise the minimum wage to a living wage. But to solve this problem we also need to curb runaway CEO pay.

Governments at all levels should explore options for leveraging tax policies and procurement and subsidy policies against executive excess. These policy solutions have serious bipartisan potential.

For instance, one survey found that 89% of Democratic and 71% of Republican likely voters support a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEO over 50 or more times what they pay their median employees. A bipartisan provision in the pending Senate defense authorization bill would bar military contractors from engaging in CEO pay-inflating stock buybacks.

Congress should also increase the existing 1% stock buybacks tax, ideally to a level high enough to discourage this activity. But even if companies continued the wasteful practice, hiking this tax would generate additional revenue for combatting inequality. If a 4% buyback levy had been in place between 2023 and 2025, the Low-Wage 100 would have owed approximately $9.3 billion in additional federal taxes.

By looking the other way as low-wage workers face surging threats, corporate CEOs have shown even more clearly that we cannot rely on them to voluntarily do the right thing. Lawmakers must take responsible action to narrow our dangerous economic divides.

As Jewish-Arab American, I feel the responsibility to work to overturn the dominating narratives that divide my people. I can see clearly the manufactured ill will that has fueled ignorance and the murder of ten of thousands of Palestinians and stripping of the survivors’ dignity. Misinformation about Islam and the silencing of Arab voices are shadows on the wall, distracting us from a deeper truth: that we share a common humanity, and that the best of our cultures and faiths calls us toward kindness, forgiveness, and humility, even as public attention so often fixates on separation.

California has seen a sustained campaign by pro-Israel advocacy organizations to reshape how Palestine is taught—or not taught—in public schools through a plethora of bills aimed to censor ethnic studies, and a recent lawsuit where parents at Palo Alto Unified School District sued over a field trip to a mosque is one of the latest manifestations of the policing of public schools. The lawsuit sparked serious debate on the discretion afforded to public educators in developing course content.

Claims made include that students were encouraged to wear hijabs, that other houses of worship were not included in the class plans, and that students were exposed to a speaker they deemed controversial, Zahra Billoo.

Whatever one’s personal views are on these topics, let’s ground back to facts: A field trip to a mosque isn’t illegal. Lawsuits are often made even in cases where the plaintiff is aware the law wasn’t broken, but the lawsuit itself can be used as a tactic of intimidation and to mobilize negative press attention toward the defendants, as is the case here.

This lawsuit is motivated by a desire to intimidate schools away from exposing students to Islam and speakers who represent the opposite of Israeli propaganda.

Starting with the claim regarding hijabs: Is it illegal to encourage a student to wear the proper attire to enter a space of worship that is optional to enter in the first place? I don’t think so.

Next, a main claim was that “the mosque was the only house of worship included in the program, according to the lawsuit,” as Jweekly put it. This one caused me to pause.

Should you be allowed to take students to a house of worship? If so, then where would we be able to draw the line?

There are hundreds of religions out there. Classes would be going to houses of worship everyday in order to meet the proposed standards. Does it have to be all or nothing? Surely students could be allowed to visit one or two houses of worship without visiting them all, as it would be impossible to determine a reasonable legal standard for this.

I think defining the purpose of the class in question is also very important here. If the purpose of the class is to expose students to minorities, which would be characteristic of a class called “Social Justice Pathway,” it is true that Muslims are minorities in this country. Islamophobia is ironically being triggered online in the responses to this incident.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is a legal advocacy organization for Muslims. CAIR supports Muslims whose civil rights are directly targeted. It is appropriate to have a representative of that organization address a class focused on social justice. Muslims are materially being denied access and rights based on their religion and identity in the United States. With the other Abrahamic religions being dominant and widely represented, I would assert that Islam is the least represented of the Abrahamic religions in the US and is deserving of students getting a chance to experience it firsthand.

Recent national polling suggests that Muslim Americans experience religious discrimination at higher rates than any other faith group surveyed, including in consequential areas such as employment, housing, banking, healthcare, travel, education, immigration, and interactions with law enforcement.

Another thing that bothered me (but didn’t shock me) about this lawsuit is that it assumes students shouldn’t be exposed to “controversial” speakers. It is hardly illegal for students to hear controversial speakers in school. In fact, a balanced education relies on freedom of ideas and information rather than censorship. Even if a parent finds some of Billoo's statements deeply objectionable, does that mean high school students cannot hear her speak?

Zahra is a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, and it is convenient for Zionist groups to label her as antisemitic. Articles portraying her as antisemitic rely on the conflation of Judaism and Zionism. Zahra is a supporter of Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, which are composed of Jewish people who refuse to allow Israeli nationalist propaganda to define what it means to be Jewish.

If the plaintiffs are arguing that any discussion of and exposure to Muslims must be accompanied by a discussion of other religious groups—where does that requirement end? Such a rule would be impractical and inappropriate in many educational contexts.

Educators require the agency to make reasonable judgments about which communities and perspectives are relevant to a particular lesson. This lawsuit is motivated by a desire to intimidate schools away from exposing students to Islam and speakers who represent the opposite of Israeli propaganda.

Ultimately, all of this is to say: I reject the premise that protecting Jewish students requires shielding them from Palestinian advocacy or Muslim voices. My Jewishness does not require that.

Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a “domestic terrorist” and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you’re dangerous.

Well, I have bad news for you. You’re living in that country right now.

As he loses power and popularity — and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home — Trump is enlarging his police state.

His regime is having ever more people arrested, imprisoned, and deported without any judge or jury deciding they did anything wrong. It’s using racial profiling in deciding whom to target. It’s making warrantless searches and seizures of people, their cars, and their homes. All of this violates the US Constitution.

Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day.

According to a new analysis by The New York Times, the regime’s surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people, most of whom have not been charged with or convicted of a crime (less than 4 percent had a past violent criminal conviction).

Those being arrested, imprisoned, and potentially deported include some married to US citizens, others who entered the US legally and are pursuing asylum claims, and some who came here with temporary legal status that the Trump regime has decided to revoke.

In other words, they were all here legally.

If you have temporary protected status because you escaped from inhumane conditions in another country, ICE might now summon you to an ICE office and put a monitor around your ankle — even if you have no criminal history and are in full compliance with your immigration status. The Trump regime has unilaterally revoked temporary protected status and claims the ankle monitors are necessary to track people whom it may want to deport at some point.

You’re not even safe if you’re a US citizen born in America. ProPublica has found that more than 170 US citizens have been wrongfully detained by ICE agents in raids and protests over a recent nine-month span. It described cases involving alleged force and multiday detention without access to counsel or communication.

Some estimates put the number of US citizens subjected to ICE as much higher, but there’s no way of knowing because there’s no legal process for filtering out and protecting American citizens, just as there’s no legal process for protecting anyone else who’s here legally. Trump’s police state is extrajudicial, and it’s being done in secret.

You might even be murdered, without a trial finding you guilty of anything. In addition to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota last January, ICE agents have murdered two others just this summer.

One was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, murdered by ICE in Houston on July 7, 2026. Salgado Araujo had lived in the US for decades. ICE agents pursued him in unmarked cars and shot him while he was driving a work crew to a job site. The Department of Homeland Security claims Salgado Araujo tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against an officer, but witnesses dispute this account.

The other was Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, murdered by ICE on July 13, 2026, in Biddeford, Maine. Durán Guerrero was a 25-year-old immigrant from Colombia. Agents pursued him while he was driving to work. The Department of Homeland Security claims its agent feared for public safety as Durán Guerrero tried to drive away, but elected officials and family members dispute this account, noting that Durán Guerrero was not an intended target of the immigration operation.

None of these murders has been fully investigated.

You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America’s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate.

Historians looking back on this shameful period will wonder how this was allowed.

The US military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused of trafficking drugs — bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong US campaign of bombing boats alleged to be smuggling drugs.

Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state.

In June, in two federal courts sentenced nine people who protested outside an immigrant detention facility in Texas to 30 to 100 years in prison, after the regime accused them of being members of Antifa. During the protest, a police officer was shot; he survived.

Those sentences are longer than the harshest sentence handed down to any of the convicted rioters in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021 (all of whom have since received pardons or commutations from Trump).

These cases are the first to incorporate new guidance from the regime that classifies Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” That’s despite the fact that Antifa is a decentralized movement rather than a single organization and that there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing US law.

I want to make three concluding points about all this.

First, Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day. Kristi Noem’s replacement as secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, along with his boss in the White House, Stephen Miller, and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, have more money, manpower, and firepower than ever. They are ramping up all of their extrajudicial arrests, detentions, deportations, and murders.

The only difference between last year and now is they’re no longer announcing what they’re doing with fanfare and braggadocio, because the American public has grown wary of it.

Second, none of us is safe from this because the arrests, installations of ankle bracelets, imprisonments, deportations, and murders are made without any judge, jury, or neutral party deciding that the assumptions on which they’re based are adequate and truthful.

Not even “domestic terrorism” arrests and lengthy prison sentences necessitate judicial inquiry into what exactly is meant by “domestic terrorism” and whether defendants have done anything to justify that appellation.

Finally, this growing menace is cruel, inhumane, and likely unconstitutional. It is causing hundreds of thousands of families in our country extreme mental distress; many people are not leaving their homes for fear of being arrested or worse. It is likely chilling First Amendment rights to speak up and protest against these atrocities.

Historians looking back on this shameful period will wonder how this was allowed. How can one maniacal man in the Oval Office, his fanatical assistant, and two suck-up Cabinet secretaries have been so cruel and oblivious to basic human rights? How can their Republican enablers in Congress have been willing to go along? How can the American public have been so quiet?

Jose Chajon-Raxon, an immigrant from Guatemala, died this August at Delaney Hall, a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey. His death marks more than 50 deaths in ICE custody since President Donald Trump took office last year.

Despite all the controversies, ICE keeps killing people—a sentence that should never feel normal. We should never find ourselves counting the days between deaths or waiting for the next headline. But somehow, we have.

Earlier this year it was Renee Good, then Alex Pretti. This summer it was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Before them were Silviero Villegas Gonzalez and Ruben Ray Martinez. Those are only the names we know—many others will never make national news.

The day I read about Durán Guerrero’s death, I was returning home from work. I glanced at the headline and kept going. That’s what scared me the most. I wasn’t shocked that ICE had killed someone—I expected it.

No matter where you were born, what political party you belong to, or whether you support stricter immigration enforcement, no government should have the power to kill or imprison people with so little accountability.

Only later, when I stopped and read the details, did it hit me: He was shot multiple times. His 3-year-old daughter, wearing Bluey pajamas, was in the car when it happened. According to his family’s attorney, Durán Guerrero was lawfully present in the United States and had a work permit. And he wasn’t even the person ICE was looking for when he was shot.

After shooting Durán Guerrero, officers pulled him from the vehicle and handcuffed him. By then, he may already have been dead.

These are not tragic misunderstandings. These are choices.

Imagine seeing armed people in tactical gear—no body cam, their faces covered—surrounding your car. Most people would be terrified. Most people would try to get away. Durán Guerrero tried to stop, but it did not matter—the agents fired on him anyway.

ICE continues carrying out operations with masked agents in unmarked vehicles, creating confusion and fear before a single word is spoken. Immigration officers have fired on at least 30 people since President Trump returned to office. Eight of those people were killed.

Each time, the government tells us the agents acted in self-defense. Public statements quickly frame the victim as the threat. Witness testimony and video evidence often cast doubt on these accounts, but they still shift the focus away from the loss of human life and toward justifying why it happened.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are still being detained every month.

In June 2026, ICE arrested more than 43,000 people, about 1,400 every day. By July, nearly 68,000 people were being held in immigration detention. The overwhelming majority of those arrested had no criminal convictions.

This includes over 6,000 children. Children who are spending their birthdays behind bars. Children who should be back in school, safe and protected. Many have been detained for 100 days or more—five times longer than the 20-day limit for detaining immigrant children.

They’re being held in facilities like Delaney and others, where human rights groups have warned repeatedly that dangerous conditions are leading to preventable deaths. ICE deaths reached their highest level in decades last year, and this year is on track to be no better.

These numbers matter. Every statistic was someone’s father, daughter, husband, neighbor, friend.

I’m afraid of how easy it has become to read another headline and move on. I know because I caught myself doing exactly that.

No matter where you were born, what political party you belong to, or whether you support stricter immigration enforcement, no government should have the power to kill or imprison people with so little accountability. No family should have to watch a loved one become another name on a growing list.

We cannot allow these deaths to become routine, and we cannot let them disappear into statistics. Every death should force us to ask what kind of country we are becoming. We cannot normalize these killings, and we cannot stop demanding justice and accountability.

We should never get used to counting ICE’s victims.

I was born on July 20, 1944, in the midst of World War II. My father had just returned from Burma where he had been operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos in the China-India-Burma Theater. I, of course, remember nothing about that war—except that my father (on extremely rare occasions) would barely mention what he had gone through but would sometimes take me to World War II movies like The Caine Mutiny and Merrill’s Marauders at local movie theaters.

In a country that has never stopped fighting wars, however, that’s certainly the last one that any American could truly be proud of, the global defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

In fact, we’re talking about a country that, between 2001 and 2024, spent an estimated $21 trillion on its military, which, it turns out, was equal to the military spending of the next 18—yes, 18!—countries combined (if you can even believe it). And in those years, of course, like the 55 preceding ones, the United States managed to never—no, never —actually win a significant war (or, in truth, even come close). In short, President Donald Trump’s present disastrous war with Iran is anything but out of the ordinary when it comes to American military power destroying all too much, but sooner or later finding itself in a remarkably dead-end situation (with an emphasis on dead, of course).

Just imagine for a moment that you had been asked in 2001 to invest $21 trillion taxpayer dollars in a military that would fight wars across the planet without a success in sight after World War II (other than perhaps the invasion of the helpless Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983). It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the Korean War of 1950, the nightmarish Vietnam War that engulfed the 1960s and early 1970s, the Afghan and Iraq wars of this country’s calamitous War on Terror early in this century, or more recently Donald Trump’s wars, which have proven to be one disaster after another, from Somalia to Iran at this very moment.

At the very least, the Iranians should consider renaming the Strait of Hormuz, the Crooked of Donald Trump.

And that should be considered strange indeed. I doubt there’s another example in history of a great imperial power that, for a significant part of its rise (and potential fall) simply couldn’t win a war.

It certainly gives that old song “War (What Is It Good For?)” with the response “absolutely nothing” new meaning. Of course, if you happen to be Donald Trump and you’re the president who simply can’t win a war (which certainly leaves you in good company among American presidents of the last 80 years or so), then the least you can do, when it comes to Iran, is declare that the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global oil and even more natural gas used to pass and which was closed down by the Iranians in response to his warring acts (distinctly harming the global economy), is now actually US property, or, to be specific, a potential “territory of the United States.” (Phew, that was exhausting!)

And hard as it might be to believe, he really did say that recently. How logical, right? After all, it’s only perhaps 6,500 miles or so from Washington, DC. So, what could possibly make more sense?

Of course, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded that, whatever Trump might think, the Strait “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech.” He added, “This strait will only be opened and closed under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade.”

Defeat Donald Trump? In what world could that possibly happen? How delusional could the Iranians be about our distinctly delusional president?

Oh, but in case you think that’s just so much enemy blather, the fact is that, in the ongoing war with Iran, the US has already lost about one-quarter of its crucial Reaper Drones, valued at $30 to $50 million each (or more than $1.3 billion worth of them), mainly around—yes, of course!—the Strait of Hormuz. And many of them have been taken down by Iranian drones valued at $20,000 to $50,000 each.

And while losing so many of its drones, the Trump administration has also been losing other things as well, including its previous insistence that a complete Iranian surrender was the order of the day. No longer, it seems. Now, all that it appears Donald Trump wants (whatever he’s said) is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the free flow of oil and natural gas globally. In other words, what he now yearns for is essentially a return to the very situation that existed six months ago just before he launched his disastrous war.

Or as Vice President JD Vance put it recently, all the Trump administration now wants is to ensure “that the Gulf countries continue to send oil and gas to the world economy so that we have energy price stability,” and, of course, to ensure as well that the Iranians won’t ever have a nuclear weapon. No matter that, as far as anyone knows, they are not faintly close to having, no less possibly even trying to develop such a weapon.

On the other hand, the Iranians are now threatening to continue the state of war with the US until the end of Trump’s second term in office in 2028 (and his approval ratings are, of course, already plunging to new lows). As a senior adviser to the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard put it: “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost... We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security.”

And let’s not forget that, lest you think Donald Trump has learned anything from all of this, he has only recently been threatening to “bomb the shit out of” long-time American ally Oman, if it “gets in the way” of his Iranian plans—and what, I ask you, could possibly go wrong with that? (I can’t even imagine.)

Of course, we’re talking about the rule (or do I mean reign—or perhaps I actually mean rain, or even thunderstorms or tornados?) of Donald Trump, a president for whom, according to a recent poll, only 29% of potential voters in the coming midterm elections approve of how he’s handling the situation with Iran.

And yet, sad to say, what’s new? Not much, it seems. After all, Trump, who may indeed be unique in so many ways, is proving anything but unique as president of the greatest power on planet Earth (in certain ways, perhaps the greatest in history) when it comes to making war all too miserably, even disastrously. In fact, give him a certain amount of credit. After all, despite what anyone, including him, might have learned from American history since 1945, he decided to go to war with Iran anyway in 2026. It evidently mattered not at all to him that the most obvious and self-evident fact about American war making since 1945 is that defeat (or minimally nothing faintly approaching victory) would essentially be guaranteed. And yet, he still managed to launch another disastrous all-American war on this distinctly embattled planet of ours.

At the very least, the Iranians should consider renaming the Strait of Hormuz, the Crooked of Donald Trump, and let me just hope that I’ll never have to take one of my grandchildren to a movie about his disastrous war.

I paint with a brush held between my teeth or my toes. I was born without arms in 1968 about 100 kilometers from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in eastern Kazakhstan. My parents’ generation watched mushroom clouds rise over the steppe without being told what the explosions could do to their bodies or their children.

For four decades, the Soviet Union conducted more than 450 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. The fallout left cancers, disabilities, trauma, and contaminated land. Today, when leaders discuss nuclear weapons in the language of “deterrence” and “strategic balance,” I think of families paying for decisions in which they had no voice. The bomb is not an abstraction to me. Its history is written on my body.

August 29 carries two memories. On that date in 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device at Semipalatinsk. On the same date in 1991, Kazakhstan closed the test site. At Kazakhstan’s initiative, the United Nations later proclaimed August 29 the International Day against Nuclear Tests. It is not simply a day of commemoration. It is a warning from the past about choices being made now.

In 2026, that warning is urgent. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that the world began this year with 12,187 nuclear warheads. All nine nuclear-armed states continued strengthening their arsenals last year, while up to 2,200 warheads remained on high operational alert. In February, New START, the last treaty limiting the strategic arsenals of the United States and Russia, expired without a successor. In May, the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended without consensus for the third consecutive time.

I paint the future I want to see: clean land, an unthreatened sky, and children born without the burden my generation inherited.

The world is not merely failing to disarm. It is learning to rely on the bomb again. There is growing rhetoric that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of peace and security. In moments of heightened tension, some states and strategic thinkers argue that only nuclear capability can prevent coercion, deter conflict, or preserve sovereignty. This logic of “nuclear reassurance” is being normalized not only in official doctrine but in public debate, where deterrence is recast as stability and restraint is portrayed as risk. Yet this framing erodes the very foundation of non-proliferation. It suggests that safety flows from the possession of the most destructive weapons ever created, rather than from law, diplomacy, and mutual restraint.

A non-proliferation system cannot endure if abstinence is portrayed as vulnerability while possession is equated with safety and status. The NPT rests on a bargain: Non-nuclear states agree not to acquire nuclear weapons, while nuclear-weapon states undertake to pursue disarmament. Both sides must keep their word. Rules cannot bind the weak and excuse the powerful.

Kazakhstan chose another logic. When we became independent, 1,410 Soviet strategic nuclear warheads remained on our territory, giving us what was then the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. We could have treated them as a shortcut to status or a shield against an uncertain future. Instead, a society that knew the price of radiation demanded a different kind of security. We closed Semipalatinsk, relinquished the weapons, and joined the NPT as a non-nuclear state. That choice did not erase the damage, but it showed that renunciation can be an act of sovereignty and strength.

Kazakhstan has tried to turn that experience into institutions. We helped establish the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, joined the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and host the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Low Enriched Uranium Bank.

Our message is not “no” to nuclear science. Peaceful nuclear energy, subject to rigorous safeguards, can serve human development. It is “no” to weapons whose effects no border, hospital, or government can control.

The immediate path is clear. The nine remaining states whose ratification is required must bring the test-ban treaty into force. The United States and Russia must negotiate new verifiable limits, and all nuclear-armed states must join the work of reduction. Iran and the United States must restore full IAEA access through an enforceable agreement. More countries should join the prohibition treaty, while nuclear-armed states should engage with it even before they are ready to accede. Nations must also fund healthcare, victim assistance, and environmental repair. Disarmament cannot speak only about the future while abandoning those living with the past.

Some will call a world without nuclear weapons naive. I have learned what is truly naive: believing that thousands of warheads can remain ready for use indefinitely without error, miscalculation, rage, or technical failure. Deterrence requires every leader to remain rational, every warning system to be accurate, and every crisis to stay controlled—forever. Humanity has never met such a standard.

An artist begins with a blank canvas and believes another reality can be created. I paint the future I want to see: clean land, an unthreatened sky, and children born without the burden my generation inherited.

I want to be among the last people whose bodies carry the legacy of the nuclear age. Whether I am depends on decisions that are still within our reach. Kazakhstan turned away from the bomb. The world can do so too.

The video is not long, just 16 minutes and 25 seconds. But in that short time it provides a remarkable capsule of the Trump administration's ongoing crusade against its critics. In one chilling moment after another, it captures the mentality of that campaign; its content, tone, and style; and its complete disregard for factual accuracy.

The video, taped on July 16, records the words of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, addressing a multinational audience assembled at the State Department for the opening session of meeting convened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under the title "Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism." In his welcoming address, Rubio defined the meeting's focus: "far-left political terrorism" that he declared has been a "blind spot" in US counterterrorism doctrine, but would now be directly in the government's sights.

Following Rubio to the podium, Miller delivered various—and sometimes unsettling—amplifications on that theme. After an opening passage declaring that under President Trump's leadership, "We have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government," Miller went on to proclaim that "for the first time in American history," all US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working together "to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country." Then, in one of many questionable passages, he went on with an implied suggestion that the authorities should reject suspected terrorists' claims of their legal rights. Miller put it this way:

One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist, who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.

That doesn't quite say explicitly that a person accused of left-wing terror does not have the same rights that other criminal defendants have in US courts—but it is hard to read Miller's words in any other way. (The following speaker, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, sounded a very different tone, declaring that "in the fight against domestic terrorism, we must respect the constitutional rights, freedom of speech, association, and assembly of all Americans... the Treasury will act based on suspected unlawful conduct by these terror organizations, not because of their beliefs or ideologies." I have no way to know whether those words were in Bessent's prepared text or if he was directly responding to Miller's statement, but in either case they may have brought some relief to listeners who value the rule of law.)

At another point in his speech, Miller falsely told his listeners that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have experienced an "8,000% increase in violent assaults," adding that "these are not one-off episodes. This is repeat, systemic, organized, funded insurrection, an armed resistance against the federal government." Miller's figure is contradicted by the Homeland Security department's own public statements. In January, the department reported that threats to ICE personnel, not actual assaults, had risen by 8,000% in the previous year, while violent attacks had gone up by "more than 1,300%"—less than one-sixth of Miller's alleged increase. That lower figure may have been overstated too, as indicated by a Los Angeles Times investigation of court records in LA and four other cities (San Diego; Portland, Oregon; Chicago; and Washington, DC). More than a third of the cases they reviewed ended in dismissals or acquittals, the Times reporters found, and a majority of the alleged assaults had not caused any injury to the federal agents involved.

A few minutes later, Miller raised a quite different and somewhat peculiar issue: "When you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism... If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating—why is there not one normal-looking person among them?" Miller did not explain exactly what he finds odd in the protesters' appearance—and unlike most of his talking points, that one seems to be uniquely his, not one commonly heard from others in the Trump orbit.

In another questionable passage, Miller claimed that the phenomenon of "jury nullification" has regularly enabled leftist terrorists to escape conviction for their crimes. He explained the term this way: "This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime but the juror, because they’re ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not sentence them to the crime which was obviously committed," adding, "We’ve seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who’ve committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who’ve been brought to court, where clear evidence has been presented against them, that the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons."

Miller gave no examples and cited no facts to support the implication that persuading jurors to acquit guilty defendants has been a deliberate tactic employed by leftist organizations. In past statements, he has explicitly cited at least one specific case: the acquittal last December of a Los Angeles tow-truck driver who was arrested after moving an ICE vehicle while the officers were arresting a suspected illegal immigrant. The defendant, Bobby Nunez, was charged with stealing federal government property, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. At his trial, his lawyers argued that the ICE agents' SUV was blocking a driveway, that Nunez towed it only one block away, and that it was out of the agents' possession for just 13 minutes.

Without having heard their deliberations, we have no way to know how the jurors reasoned in reaching their not-guilty verdict, if that decision stemmed principally from opposition to ICE operations and Trump's immigration policies, or if they based their conclusion on other grounds, perhaps that the charged offense was disproportionately severe and the possible penalty unfairly harsh. Stephen Miller wasn't in the jury room either, but he showed no visible uncertainty when he denounced the verdict as "another example of blatant jury nullification in a blue city." From there he went off in another direction: "The justice system depends on a jury of peers with a shared system of interests and values. Mass migration tribalizes the entire legal system"—a comment that it's hard to see as anything but an argument that people with the wrong ethnic identity are not legitimate participants in America's justice system.

Incidentally, nothing in any of the news stories I read about that trial gave any indication that Nunez was connected with any "left-wing organization." Nor did photographs of him show anything obviously "not normal" or "deformed" in his appearance (unless those words apply to anyone who doesn't look like a non-Hispanic white man).

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Forget about Ancient Sparta, Attila the Hun, Hernán Cortés, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, and all of the conquerors that terrified the world with colonial aspirations and a psychopathic lust for blood. None of these ever imagined a $1.5 trillion military budget. President Donald Trump requested that grotesque figure, but don’t give him the kudos—our “fois gras” military machine is a US tradition that predates us all.

The US war machine has scaled Orwellian heights to achieve a virtual blank check to spend on death. For we, stateside, have built a culture entirely at the service of warfare, with myths, stories, and platitudes hardwired into the brains of 349 million people extolling war, not as a necessity, but as ritual, as cleansing, as meditation, and as redemption. We are bombing schools and hospitals to secure the rapture, for the war industry in the apocalyptic end times has been tasked with the creation of biblical events. A recent Huffpost piece by Brandi Buchman quotes US soldiers’ allegations of lunatic fringe Evangelical propaganda from haranguing superiors:

They (US soldiers) are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon.

Thus, war in the Middle East has morphed from the sterile narrative of fighting for freedom and democracy, to the more spectacular notion that US military force has been mobilized to serve Christian prophecy. A military budget cannot achieve the pinnacle of a trillion dollars without a highly evolved story telling industry to prime the population to either enthusiastically back each aggressive nationalistic paroxysm of violence, or to (at the very least) passively capitulate. Think of the advent of apocalyptic biblical warfare as a means of addictive escalation—the nation has gone from coffee and cigarettes to cocaine and crystal meth.

No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

The war propaganda machine in the US is a ceaseless, multifaceted contraption that includes legacy media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. A nation does not eviscerate tens of millions of “enemy” civilians without first laying a meticulous foundation of brainwashing. I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at “The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an “Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved. Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses? Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:

The story books say they were all cut low.
But the truth of it is that this just ain’t so,
The spirits will live and their legends grow,
so long as we remember the Alamo.

The film ends with the inscription: “March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.”

Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):

It’s not that the Spanish-built presidio should be demolished or stashed away in some remote museum. The story of the Alamo should be widely studied—but it should be the real history, the one that intersects with and embodies the nation’s history of enforcing a racial order through violence, and the campaigns of white supremacy and slavery that accompanied America’s expansion. The Alamo’s history and myth belong to a war that was inspired, in part, by the drive for slavery, and by a belief in the superiority of whites and their divine right to conquer lands. The Alamo is where the campaign of southern slavery and Native American genocide migrated west and expressed itself in the demonization of Mexicans. It came to symbolize belonging, or, more accurately, defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather than being remembered for its historical context, the Alamo represents a litmus test for entry into participation and membership in civic society: Accept the dominant myth, or be marginalized.

The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of “manifest destiny”—the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history. But for me it is personal—Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my “smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this “toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.

Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way. American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered, “Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.

Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength. A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 64% of respondents felt that it was important for the US to have the most powerful military on Earth. While the US military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest spending nations, Gallup polling seldom shows more than a third of people complaining that spending is too high.

The public is little more than a shadow of the media culture. In 2014 William A. Galston lamented about President Barack Obama’s minor military funding cuts in a piece posted on The Brookings Institute (a centrist, Democratic Party-adjacent think tank) website. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent proposal to cut military spending by a token 10% fell 88-11 in a Senate vote in which both parties reflexively succumbed to orthodox US jingoism. War is not a partisan issue. We all come together to praise and feed the military. US political performance art might be seen as a slavish competition to grovel before the war industry.

There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. The US defeat at the hands of Iran is unprecedented—while the US hasn’t won a significant war in 80 years, we have never suffered a defeat with comparable financial consequences. The Iran war, according to Reuters, has a disapproval rating of a staggering 63% of the electorate. The economic fallout from the bungled attack on Iran threatens to escalate to the point of financial collapse in future months. We all live within walking distance of a filling station offering $6 diesel—and that runaway price will almost certainly expand and double, threatening to strangle the US commercial transport system. Mass hunger looms.

We also have American Israel Public Affairs Committee approval ratings at an all-time low and Trump’s approval ratings at catastrophic and utter decline—ostensibly due to his war in Iran. There may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.

War once had such an esteemed role in human progress that even the peaceful transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not wholly dismiss its virtues:

The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it.

Emerson believed that war would become obsolete, but I doubt that anyone from the mid 19th century could have imagined that war would one day be the cornerstone of societal and biological collapse. No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

War elevates the need for oil and oil demands war. The oil industry, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and mass media have all been structurally conjoined at the intersection of war. War is where capitalist profits interface with mass psychology.

But the gig is up. Public opinion has shifted as Trump and his goons have driven the war machine off of a cliff.

Climate sustainability abides no compromise with war. We are on the cusp of extinction, and war is the primary driver. The US, under Trump, has taken war out of the closet and decoupled it from its patriotic slogans and jingoistic habits. It’s all about the oil, stupid. War has followed the magnet of fossil fuels unerringly to the Middle East. And to compound the predicament, war is environmentally filthy, annually burning more fossil fuels in aggregate than most nations. The US military coughs as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as the nation of Portugal. War is also the gauge of our fossil fuel addiction, for US leaders have spent decades murdering millions to procure it.

We all have our psychological histories, our childhood encounters with Disney’s Alamo, with the domino theory, with Saddam Hussein’s invisible weapons of mass destruction. We have reverentially gawked at our father’s and grandfather’s WWII uniforms hanging in the attic, but we all need to thank Trump for creating history’s most transparent war machine. The US military needs to be gutted, cut out like a metastasizing lesion. The patient heaves at death’s door. Do we merely watch?

If you’ve paid any attention to the news lately, you’re aware of massive forest fires raging in Western North America and Europe this summer. It appears as if the world is on fire.

In an important sense, the world is burning, in two related ways. In the United States, as of this writing, there are 661 active wildfires covering 4.7 million acres, largely concentrated in the western states. British Columbia is currently experiencing 180 active wildfires, nearly half of which are burning out of control. So far this summer, fires in the US and Canada have burned 25% more land than the 10-year average, according to national wildfire centers.

This summer, Europe experienced two unprecedented wildfires in France and Spain, and fires have also raged in Greece and other nations. Fires are also raging in Indonesia and Australia.

If you’ve managed to see video of wildfires, you know that the living things in these forests are being burned alive. Tens of thousands of people are evacuated from their homes, which are often totally destroyed. The courageous firefighters, too, can suffer from profound health issues, even death, for their efforts. Fires also spew carbon and toxic pollution into the atmosphere.

We happen to live in the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options.

But the world is also burning up from unprecedented heatwaves over the past several years. You’ve probably heard of temperatures well over 100°F in the southeastern and southwestern United States. Northern parts of the country have also experienced unprecedented heatwaves, with a heat index over 100.

In a recently published New York Times article titled “Bigger and Hotter Fires are Erasing America’s Great Forests,” wildfires from Oregon to New Mexico “sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate.” Researchers contend that the shift to hotter fires reflects a permanent ecosystem shift with profound consequences for people, wildlife, and the planet.

The hotter fires leave a wasteland of spike shrubs rather than new tree seedlings. As trees disappear, spring snows melt faster leaving water shortages in their wake. The increasingly arid climate dries the soil and pulls moisture from the plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. Since forests absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as the Times put it, ‘The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.”

In sum, rising global temperatures and wildfires are interdependent. As hotter forest fires increase, greenhouse gases increase, heating the planet, producing extreme weather events like droughts, which themselves increase the spread of wildfires.

Several years of record heatwaves around the world are but one product of global climate change—along with melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels, warming oceans, severe droughts, and more extreme storm weather: torrential rains and floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like. People the world over are bearing the impact of global warming, albeit some far more than others.

However, we happen to live in the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options. Climate change is a profound political issue that calls on us to act together to realign our politics and our economy.

How we do that is the challenge.

Despite President Donald Trump’s continual harangue that climate change is a hoax, only 15% of Americans believed climate change is not happening, according to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication poll. A full 69% believed it is happening, and 60% or more believed it is causing droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat. And that was before this summer.

Yet an article written by film director Adam McKay (Don't Look Up) in the August 6 edition of Current Affairs focuses on “The Gargantuan Lie that is Collapsing the World’s Climate.” In McKay’s words, the lie is “told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large nonprofits and eventually… by ourselves, to ourselves.”

He sums up that lie as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.” We don’t.

The climate has already temporarily passed the 1.5°C target of the Paris Accords. With the likelihood that this year’s El Niño will push next year’s average warming to 1.7°C, it will likely cause agricultural failure and food shortages, leaving us staring at the catastrophic 2°C increase we are currently hurtling toward.

As Robert Hunziker wrote of McKay’s article, climate change is an “existential threat to all forms of life sooner rather than later, meaning current lifetimes.”

We are clearly facing many crises—horrific wars, unaffordable healthcare, income and wealth inequality, inflation, fascist-like repression, and targeting of vulnerable peoples. How can we cope with the impending doom suggested by the well-established scientific data on climate change, especially when elected officials virtually ignore the climate crisis and mass media treat critical events as isolated crises?

We may feel tempted to block or ignore messages like these, and powerful corporate interests are perpetually encouraging us to do exactly that. We may despair and grieve for our planet, and we can try to “do what we can” as individuals. But we must act politically as well, or we—and especially our children and grandchildren—are doomed. We must demand action from public officials; we can oppose data centers and boycott corporations that profit from climate damaging activities; we can join with others around the world, but we must act. Individually and collectively. We need to talk to each other.

More than any other crisis, our shared global climate has the potential to unite us on the path toward political and economic transformation.

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s mysterious trip to Moscow this week was preceded by fresh U.S. intelligence indicating that the Kremlin sees the US as weakened by the Iran war, offering Russia an opportunity to escalate action against American interests and allies in Europe. The CIA chief warned Russia against ramping up its war against Ukraine, arguing that such a move would backfire.

• Parents say that because of the $17 billion Meta settlement, they have been robbed of seeing evidence of Meta’s awareness of harm due to its products.

• The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is blaming the location of a temporary Ellipse site for an incident in early August when President Trump’s Marine One helicopter came within a mile of a passenger jet. The agency flagged twice that the helicopter attempted to contact controllers to give the typical three-minute liftoff warning to clear the airspace at 2:31 p.m. Aug. 4. The first attempt was not received by National Airport’s air traffic control tower while the second was “broken and completely unreadable.” When this failed, the helicopter attempted to relay the three-minute warning “through the helicopter facility at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, which was also unsuccessful.”

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The debate over capitalism vs. socialism often looks like a battle of cartoon caricatures: Monopoly Man versus the Marx Monster.

Across the planet there are countless flavors of capitalism and socialism, unique mashups of free markets and government policies. Into this muddle wade the right-wing ideologues who fear the red “socialist” demon hiding in every corner.

If Fox News existed in the 1950s, they would’ve labeled Republican President Dwight Eisenhower a socialist for taxing the wealthy and making broad public investments to expand homeownership, enable debt-free higher education, and build infrastructure and technology that expanded the modern middle class.

Yet, what do these labelers call modern-day China, a country that mints hundreds of billionaires a year and dominates global markets with private production? Is it socialist or capitalist?

All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with 7 in 10 experiencing economic insecurity.

Meanwhile, social democracies, like Canada and the northern European countries, have progressive tax systems and strong social safety nets. Sweden, with its generous welfare state, has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the United States.

These countries also have higher rates of social mobility than the United States—meaning it’s easier for lower-income people to escape poverty and become stable. The American Dream, apparently, has moved offshore.

These welfare states, with their higher taxes on the wealthy, exist comfortably alongside healthy market economies. However, in the United States, whenever a politician proposes that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes so we make public investments in opportunities for everyone else, they are labeled socialist or even communist.

These criticisms conflate a set of policy proposals, most of them quite popular, with an economic system where the government owns the means of production. However, this well-trod attack doesn’t seem to be working anymore, especially for younger generations.

Younger voters see the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power that distort the economy and block opportunity for the non-rich. They witness how large corporations have captured Congress and blocked popular reforms to defend consumers and counter monopolies.

They watch with alarm as billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up healthcare facilities and squeeze consumers in every corner of the economy. They see how both major political parties have been captured by the billionaire donor class and failed to address stagnant wages and rising basic costs.

All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with 7 in 10 experiencing economic insecurity. These folks still hope hard work could lead to a decent life—to own a home, take a vacation, pass opportunities to their children, and retire before they die. They feel the constant stress of knowing they’re one job loss, illness, disability, or divorce away from living in their car.

Without a strong party representing working people’s concerns, political realignments are happening in both parties. A new generation of progressives and a handful of self-described democratic socialists argue the economy should work for everyone, not just the billionaire class.

They believe new technologies—such as AI—should serve everyone, not just billionaire tech bros and their global conglomerates. They believe the government has an important role in expanding healthcare, blocking oligarchy, and breaking up big corporations.

They advocate for expanding affordable housing to aid people struggling to find decent housing in a hyper-speculative market. Instead of subsidizing private developers, they advocate for housing owned by nonprofit organizations, resident cooperatives, and—egads!—government entities, like housing authorities.

These progressives believe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and end tax breaks to the Jeffrey Epstein class. They support investments to help us transition to sustainable energy, lower energy costs, and reduce climate disruption.

The right-wing pundits—and some so-called moderates, too—are hoping that when they trot out the “socialist” bugaboo, your mind will freeze and you’ll start frothing at the mouth. They’re afraid that you will ask why the current system isn’t working and wonder if there are alternatives. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

When someone brandishes the word “socialism” like it’s a stink bomb, take a courageous look at the actual ideas—higher taxes on the rich? Medicare for All? A raise for working people?—being proposed. There might be more common sense than you thought.

The Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America share a problem. As organizations largely run by and involved with college-educated voters, they are physically and psychically removed from working people without four-year degrees. Both the Democrats and DSA claim they are speaking for the working class, but they are not, at present, political organizations of the working class.

The Democrats have tried to avoid their working-class problem by embracing suburban Republicans and independents who have been repulsed by the GOP’s extremism. The Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street and Hollywood big money—and NAFTA—has pushed working people out of the coalition.

For DSA, on the other hand, the easiest way to address the problem is to define it away. DSA uses a broad definition of the working class that includes underpaid college-educated graduate students, unemployed and underemployed college graduates, and a host of other college-educated workers who suffer from insecure jobs and the high cost of living. While these educated workers are sometimes financially akin to the working class, the majority of working people—nearly 60 percent—do not have four-year college degrees.

And that’s the way the 2024 vote went. Trump had a 14-point advantage among voters without college degrees, while Harris carried college graduates, 56 percent to 43 percent. If DSA and the Democrats remain organizations largely of the highly educated, they will lose.

Racial Silos?

Looking at voters as racial groups is another way to avoid dealing with the working-class issues the Democrats and DSA face.

The Democrats have historically done well with Black and Hispanic voters, and the working class is increasingly multiracial. The idea is that if we stop viewing the working class as dominated by white workers, people of color will lead to stronger vote totals for the Democrats.

Alas, ethnicity is no longer a sure sign of voting Democratic because working-class Black and Hispanic voters have been leaving the party. Twenty percent of Black voters without four-year degrees and 48 percent of Hispanic voters without four-year degrees supported Trump in 2024.

White voters without four-year college degrees made up 42 percent of the 2024 electorate nationally. In seven states where Democrats have largely abandoned the political field—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho—they constituted a majority of voters, ranging from 51 percent in Kansas to 58 percent in Montana and Idaho.

No significant progressive political movement can succeed without attracting large numbers of working-class voters of all colors. (Please see my latest book for the development of this argument.)

The Fox News Strategy?

Perhaps a good way to reach the working class is through conservative media. Some in DSA believe that their base can be extended by appearing on Fox News and making their case.

According to Pew Research, the median age of Fox viewers is 55, and most are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been making Fox News appearances lately that have drawn attention, but it’s not at all clear that Fox News reaches deeply into younger working-class communities, especially those independents who are open to progressive economic populism. A good case could be made that progressives are wasting their time on conservative media, though El-Sayed’s performance this November could change my mind.

Electoral Canvassing?

DSA has done a remarkable job of fielding large numbers of door knockers during its political campaigns. The one-on-one conversations that take place are key to getting out the vote and sharing information about progressive policies such as taxing billionaires and Medicare for All. When thousands of DSA activists hit the streets during an election, public education certainly takes place.

But where and with whom?

Most DSA canvassing to date takes place in blue districts. And within those districts, it’s not clear whether working-class areas have been targeted. Often in political campaigns, the goal of canvassing is to find those voters most likely to support your candidate and make sure they vote. Harvesting the most likely supporters usually means targeting the areas where they live. Since DSA candidates thrive among college-educated voters, there is likely to be a tendency to concentrate canvassing in gentrified and upper-middle-class areas. Working-class urban areas will also be reached, but the balance is likely to tilt toward where the most likely supporters live.

More importantly, to date, most of the canvassing has taken place in urban areas and in and around college towns. Maybe I’m missing something, but reaching deeply into red working-class communities has not yet become a significant part of DSA’s ground game.

Long-Term Engagement with Working-Class Union People?

Unless and until DSA—and the Democrats, for that matter—set up precinct-level organizations in working-class neighborhoods, electioneering will be episodic and superficial. Door-to-door conversations are worthwhile, but they are no substitute for continual engagement within local organizations.

In my opinion, the best way to reach the working class is to engage with people through their labor organizations. The labor movement is much smaller than it was a generation ago, but there are still thousands of union meetings taking place each month, ranging from small local union gatherings to larger regional and national conferences. Political activists need to show up and listen to what union members care about.

It takes work, often hard work, to get in the door. That’s something the Labor Institute, which I cofounded, had to do a half century ago when we started our work. To get educational opportunities, we reached out to countless labor leaders and activists, gradually gaining their trust and finding venues to show our wares.

It takes lots of time and lots of trust-building, but the conversations that emerge through ongoing educational engagement taught us as much as we taught others, greatly enriching what we were able to offer. DSA would broaden its support and deepen its connections with working people if it engaged with large numbers of blue-collar and service workers in trade unions.

If DSA wants to be of and not just for the working class, broadly defined, it will have to get in the labor door. It will need to learn how to have a dialogue with working-class groups who might be progressive populists but are also likely to have concerns about socialism and whether DSA really can advance the cause of non-college-educated working people.

DSA, more than the Democrats, has the troops and the energy to do that work. The jury is out, however, on whether it can deploy that passion, and commitment to engage with working people who don’t already agree with them.

If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus.

The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.

While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.

Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba.

The Nakba did not simply "happen," but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities, and expelling their inhabitants.

The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank.

Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and land confiscation.

The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence—a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established.

While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.

The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.

Now, back to Qusra.

Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town.

They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them, and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside.

The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists, and journalists.

What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: Settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.

And the siege continued. As I write these words, the siege of the Qusra homes has concluded its second week.

Qusra is not incidental to this strategy. Israel has already confiscated its land for the settlement of Migdalim, while nearby outposts including Esh Kodesh have long been associated with attacks and attempts to seize Palestinian agricultural land.

Control of such areas is essential to the larger project of connecting settlement blocs, fragmenting Palestinian territory, and transforming Palestinian communities into isolated enclaves.

A few years ago, the Israeli government behaved as though its plan to formally annex large swathes of the West Bank had been placed on hold. Yet, since October 7, annexation has moved from aspiration to obsession—in both words and action.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir oversaw the mass distribution of weapons after October 7, arming thousands of civilian security-squad members with rifles amid an already heavily armed settler population.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has systematically worked to transfer powers over the West Bank from military administration to Israeli civilian authorities—one of the clearest institutional mechanisms of annexation.

And now another piece is falling into place: Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered preparations to transfer law-enforcement responsibility over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police, another critical legal step toward annexation.

The picture is becoming complete: settler militias, government funding, weapons, the army, police, civilian bureaucracies, courts, and political decisions originating at the highest levels of the Israeli state.

Seen in this wider context, Qusra becomes a microcosm—and potentially a testing ground—for the mechanisms through which larger-scale annexation can be implemented. These realities echo the past. The Nakba did not simply "happen," but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

Some governments are warning of accelerating annexation; others sanction individual settlers, as though targeting a few extremists could reverse a blueprint implemented by an entire state apparatus.

Palestinians in the West Bank are fully aware of the challenge awaiting them. Urging the Palestinian Authority, which maintains security coordination with Israel, to suddenly devise a "strategy" is painfully redundant.

But for the rest of us who understand the horrors of the Nakba—and the reverberations of that catastrophe from Deir Yassin to the genocide in Gaza—recognition is no longer enough.

The price of silence is already being paid by every Gazan living among the ruins of the strip and every Palestinian in the West Bank confronting the violence of settlers and their military partners.

It needs to end now, before Qusra becomes the blueprint for what comes next: today, Qusra; tomorrow, the whole of the West Bank.

Multibillionaire Mark Cuban is one of the many incredibly wealthy men who have warned that ideas like the wealth tax currently on the ballot in the state of California would be a disastrous idea. Talk about self-interested!

The post Objectively Speaking, the Wealth Tax Sucks appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Dolly Parton, actress, entrepreneur, and singer extraordinaire, passed away at the age of 80 on August 25, 2026. She rose from poverty in Appalachia to global fame and a loyal following.

Tributes have been pouring in and rightly so. I admired Parton not so much for singing, like millions did globally, but for something else: her literacy promotion. Let me explain.

Parton donated some 200 million books in her lifetime. Think about that. Reading is a key process to self-discovery in an increasingly confused and confusing world.

As a youth growing up in a vanilla neighborhood attending an integrated middle school, reading Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, was an eye-opener. Brown’s autobiography of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s was unlike anything else that I had read.

Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important.

My parents had union jobs, and the schools I attended had libraries. My fortune in life is increasingly rare in America now, where 1,000 billionaires rent politicians to get government contracts and favorable laws and policies to accumulate more wealth, as ordinary people struggle to pay for food, fuel, and rent—the affordability crisis.

Later as a young adult, I learned that my father was in Harlem during an uprising against police brutality and economic marginality, of March 19-20, 1935, a history that deepened my appreciation for Brown’s work. Harlem “was where the action was,” my father shared with me. I began to grasp a bigger picture of personal and national history, encompassing Brown's autobiography.

Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important in the current post-truth moment of online disinformation about domestic and foreign affairs, of, by, and for the benefit of billionaires and corporations, a symptom of the overall rot in US economics and politics.

Further, in a nation built with the stolen labor of enslaved Africans that in part relied upon depriving them of learning to read, Parton’s gift of 200 million books to poor and working people is, I argue, a revolutionary act. That she hailed from a community of poor whites long susceptible to the ideology of anti-blackness, a centuries-long ruling class divide-and-conquer strategy, speaks volumes of her revolutionary devotion to humanity.

Parton appeared to be electorally independent of the two-party duopoly, a great thing. Meanwhile, she publicly endorsed the movements of African Americans (Black Lives Matter) and LGBT folks for full recognition of their human rights. In a racist and warrior nation such as the US, where buying a gun is easier than receiving healthcare, her support of the maligned and oppressed via the promotion of reading books should be emulated.