In a deeply disturbing and unprecedented move, the U.S. has begun transferring immigrant detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They’re being held without access to their lawyers and families.

President Donald Trump has ordered up to 30,000 “high-priority” migrants to be imprisoned there as part of his larger mass deportation and detention campaign.

Trump claims these migrants are the “worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.” But recent investigations of those detainees have already challenged this narrative. And a large percentage of immigrants arrested in the U.S. have no criminal record.

We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all—and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time our government has invoked “national security” to deny marginalized communities their basic human rights. President George W. Bush created the infamous military prison at Guantánamo during the “War on Terror” to hold what his administration called the “worst of the worst.”

The prison has since become synonymous with indefinite detention—15 people still remain there today, over 20 years later. Notorious for its brutality and lawlessness, Guantánamo should be shut down, not expanded.

Of the 780 Muslim men and boys imprisoned there since January 2002, the vast majority have been held without charge or trial. Most were abducted and sold to the U.S. for bounty and “had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11,” reported the United Nation’s independent expert in 2023, who reiterated the global call to close Guantánamo.

The Bush administration designed the prison to circumvent the Constitution and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, refusing to treat the prisoners as either POWs or civilians. This legal fiction resulted in a range of human rights violations, including torture.

But the Constitution—and international law—still applies wherever the U.S. government operates. All prisoners, including immigrants, are still entitled to humane treatment, legal counsel, and due process.

“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantánamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case challenging Trump’s executive order.

However, the U.S. does have a sordid history of detaining migrants captured elsewhere at the base. As legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn points out, the U.S. has detained Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s.

In the 1990s, thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing persecution following a military coup were captured at sea. The U.S. held them in horrific conditions at Guantánamo so they couldn’t reach U.S. shores to seek asylum—which is a fundamental human right long enshrined under U.S. law.

Shrouded in secrecy, the U.S. continues to capture and detain asylum-seekers fleeing Haiti, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries at Guantánamo. Last fall, the International Refugee Assistance Project reported that refugee families are kept in a dilapidated building with mold and sewage problems, suffer from a lack of medical care, and are “detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world.”

Trump’s order would take these abuses to a horrifying new level.

Currently, the base’s existing immigration detention facility can hold up 120 people. Expanding it to 30,000 will require enormous resources. The “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo already costs an estimated $540 million annually, making it one of the most expensive prisons in the world.

Then there are the moral costs.

The mass deportation and detention of asylum-seekers is not only unlawful but cruel—and not a real immigration solution. Instead, our government should prioritize meaningful immigration reform that recognizes the dignity of all people.

We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all—and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand. “I can attest to the facility’s capacity for cruelty,” warned Mansoor Adayfi, who was subjected to torture and endured nearly 15 years at the prison.

Guantánamo’s legacy of injustice must end.

Here's a bold prediction for the start of the second Trump administration: The next four years will be the best yet for America's clean energy transition.

That may sound surprising, given the significant steps President Donald Trump has already taken to try to reverse American leadership on climate and clean energy. There's much still unknown about the potential impact of Trump's early executive orders, but one truth remains clear: Far from slowing down, we could be entering a period of unprecedented renewable energy progress.

There's already strong momentum behind the clean energy shift, and whether that momentum continues is less dependent on the federal government than you might think. Trump can't change the reality that, for a huge number of clean energy projects, the permitting authority rests not with federal agencies, but with state and local decision-makers.

Now more than ever, speaking up for clean energy in your community is one of the most impactful steps you can take for the planet, your local economy, and the health and safety of future generations.

This means that the main determinant of how much progress clean energy makes over the next four years isn't the Trump administration. It's your neighbors—and you.

Don't be distracted by all the ink that will be spilled in the coming months about Trump's efforts to slow progress on offshore wind and electric vehicles, or to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). For starters, experts agree that a full repeal of the IRA—which made the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history—is unlikely. This landmark law has been an economic boon to red and blue states alike, earning bipartisan support.

The way forward remains open for the vast majority of clean energy projects permitted mostly or entirely at the state and local level. There, local governments, influenced by support across the political spectrum, have become powerful engines of clean energy progress.

Solar and wind are now the cheapest energy options available, even without subsidies. Across the country, these technologies are increasingly boosting local economies, generating revenue for public services, creating well-paying jobs, and delivering health and climate benefits for millions.

Now, our often-overlooked town planning and zoning commissions or county councils hold the key to driving clean energy forward in the coming years. Right now, these spaces are often dominated by small numbers of highly organized opponents—many backed by the same fossil fuel-linked interests that are now shaping Trump's energy policy. Left unchecked, these opponents have become adept at stalling or derailing clean energy progress. As of early 2024, at least 15% of U.S. counties had effectively banned utility-scale wind or solar projects, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans support these technologies.

Here's the opportunity. With so few people in attendance at local hearings, noisy opponents can significantly influence local decision-makers. That also means every person who makes the choice to speak out in favor of clean energy projects can make a big difference.

Take Mesa County, Colorado, where volunteers with the Western Colorado Alliance came together to overturn a moratorium on solar development in spring 2024. The handful of volunteers who took the time to show up to the pivotal public hearing helped ensure that community support for solar growth was on clear display, outweighing the opposition and convincing local officials to lift the county's ban.

This small group of volunteers helped create jobs, improved health, made their grid more reliable, and had a bigger impact for the climate in one step, together, than through years of individual actions. Even one 500-megawatt solar array that gets built as a result will help avoid the carbon emissions of more than 80,000 people switching to electric vehicles.

With a focus on supporting more of these projects in communities nationwide, clean energy will continue to boom in Trump's second term and beyond, creating a more livable climate and stronger economy for all.

So how do you take action where you live? It's easier than you think—here's a guide to getting started. Visit your city, county, or town's website and see what's on the planning docket. Check your local media for news about clean energy. And when you hear about a proposed project, don't just assume it will happen—or that it will fail. Do your research, share what you learn with neighbors, and reach out to organizations like the one I founded, Greenlight America, for help.

Most importantly, follow the project's approval process and, when it's up for a vote, be there or write in to voice your support to local leaders. They say 90% of success in life is showing up. For clean energy permitting, it's more like 100%.

Now more than ever, speaking up for clean energy in your community is one of the most impactful steps you can take for the planet, your local economy, and the health and safety of future generations.

There will be hundreds of opportunities to make this impact across the country in the next four years. Together, project by project and community by community, we can all fight climate change and pollution and bring clean energy and its economic benefits to all of our communities. The power is in our hands.

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Hitler was elected democratically and consolidated his dictatorship after seizing power. Donald Trump just won a fair election. Is he plotting to subvert American democracy?

There are signs that suggest “yes.”

Presidents may only serve two terms, yet Trump repeatedly suggests that he ought to run and win a third term. A “Third Term Project” was announced at CPAC. This past week, Trump called himself “The King” and quoted the French Emperor Napoleon, who argued, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

More materially, Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and two other top military officers. He will be replaced with a MAGA loyalist. History shows that the military is key to a successful coup d’état or revolution. And Trump has a strong reason to want to stay in office: if and when he steps down, he again becomes vulnerable to criminal charges.

Is it 1933 in Germany? Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) talking about the prospects for democracy under Trump on today’s DMZ America Podcast.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 194: Is This 1933? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 194: Is This 1933? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Imagine being forced to leave everything behind, your home, your family, your dreams, because U.S. sanctions have devastated your country’s economy, making day-to-day living increasingly unbearable. You endure a treacherous journey, risking everything for a chance at stability and to help your family back home, only to be met with handcuffs and an indefinite sentence in one of the world’s most infamous prisons.

This is the fate of many migrants, including Venezuelans, fleeing an economic war waged by U.S. policies. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions was to sign an executive order expanding the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay to detain up to 30,000 migrants, labeling them as “criminal illegal aliens.” Following mounting legal challenges and international scrutiny, the U.S. government has now deported 177 Venezuelan migrants who were detained at the naval base.

According to U.S. officials, 126 of them had criminal charges or convictions, and 80 were accused of being part of the Tren de Aragua gang. Fifty-one had no criminal records. Human rights advocates raised concerns about the lack of transparency in the U.S. classification of detainees, especially given the cases where migrants were detained at Guantánamo based on nothing more than their tattoos.

Locking up migrants on stolen land while troops sip Starbucks and grab a Big Mac isn’t security for the “homeland,” it’s a grotesque spectacle of unchecked power and horrific violation of human rights.

Yes, the U.S. government is using tattoos, sometimes nothing more than a name, a date, or even a tribute to a favorite athlete, as justification to label migrants as “gang-affiliated” and ship them off to Guantánamo Bay.

Take Luis Castillo, a 23-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker, who was detained at the border and later sent to Guantánamo simply because he had a Michael Jordan tattoo.

Let that sink in.

A Michael Jordan tattoo. Never mind that millions worldwide have the same logo inked on their skin or that it appears on bumper stickers, billboards, and sneakers everywhere. By this logic, half the country should be under surveillance. But when it comes to migrants, suddenly, a tattoo is a ticket to indefinite imprisonment.

Luis was detained, then abruptly sent to Guantánamo Bay on February 4, cut off from his family and legal representation. His sister, Yajaira Castillo, had been desperately trying to find out where he was, telling reporters, “He’s innocent. He just wanted a chance at life.”

Luis is not alone. Dozens of Venezuelans and other asylum-seekers have been flown to Guantánamo under vague security classifications, with no access to attorneys and no clear path to getting out of Guantanamo.

Why Guantánamo?

For decades, Guantánamo has been a legal black hole where the U.S. government detains people it does not want to acknowledge. It is a place built on stolen land, Cuban territory that the U.S. has occupied since 1903, against the will of the Cuban people and government.

Now, it is being repurposed yet again, this time to imprison desperate migrants, far from public scrutiny and without the legal protections guaranteed on U.S. soil.

A Dystopian Reality

Guantánamo is not just a prison; it’s a bizarre, dystopian military outpost where injustice coexists with American consumer culture. Just miles from where detainees are held indefinitely without trial, there is a McDonald’s, a Subway, a bowling alley, an escape room, and even a mini-golf course. The base has a recreation center, a movie theater, and a marina where troops and personnel can rent jet skis and go fishing! All within walking distance of a detention center infamous for torture.

And if that wasn’t surreal enough, the base also features a Starbucks, the only one on the island of Cuba, alongside a gift shop selling beer koozies, T-shirts, and shot glasses emblazoned with slogans like “Straight Outta GTMO” and “It Don’t GTMO Better Than This,” as if this were a quirky tourist attraction rather than a site dedicated to systemic human rights abuses.

By detaining migrants in Guantánamo, the U.S. government sidesteps legal obligations and publicity to create a system where people can be held indefinitely without due process.

The Cuban people have long demanded the closure of Guantánamo and the return of their land. Still, instead, the U.S. government continues to use it as a dumping ground for those it refuses to recognize as human beings. And in an absurd display of imperial arrogance, the U.S. still sends Cuba a check every year as “rent” for the base, money that the Cuban government refuses to cash, rejecting the illegal occupation.

Guantánamo should have been shut down long ago. Instead, it’s expanding because the U.S. government never misses an opportunity when it comes to cruelty. Locking up migrants on stolen land while troops sip Starbucks and grab a Big Mac isn’t security for the “homeland,” it’s a grotesque spectacle of unchecked power and horrific violation of human rights.

The Bigger Picture

The expansion of Guantánamo Bay as a migrant detention center marks a dangerous escalation in U.S. immigration policy. Instead of addressing the root causes of migration, many driven by U.S. economic and foreign policies, the government is doubling down on militarized enforcement, turning a site infamous for human rights abuses into a holding cell for asylum-seekers.

By detaining migrants in Guantánamo, the U.S. government sidesteps legal obligations and publicity to create a system where people can be held indefinitely without due process.

Guantánamo is more than a prison. It’s a symbol of unchecked power. Today, it holds Venezuelan migrants, but tomorrow, it could hold anyone the government deems inconvenient.

The aging leader wanted to shake up his country, so he launched a second revolution with the help of a cadre of young people. Drunk with power, the leader targeted his enemies, remade his political party, and turned his own government into a self-destructing circus. Anyone with real expertise was sent far away from the political center. Intellectuals of all kinds came under suspicion. And the young people who rose up in support of the aging leader ran roughshod through society.

They might not seem to have a lot in common, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump. The Communist leader, having come to power through a revolutionary war, harbored a visceral hatred for capitalism. The American businessman shirked military service, won the presidency (twice) through democratic elections, and harbors a visceral hatred for communism.

And yet, Trump is currently involved in a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China in the mid-1960s.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

At one level, what Donald Trump and his minions are doing is regime change, as Anne Applebaum has argued. They aren’t reforming U.S. government. They are transforming its operating system, courtesy of Elon Musk and his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Regime change is certainly part of the Trump game plan. He has borrowed this strategy from Viktor Orban, who turned Hungary’s political system based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines. The Orban transformation relied on a compliant legislature that allowed him to concentrate power in the executive. Once a leading liberal, the Hungarian leader knew how to deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society, and controlling a right-wing media.

You’d think that regime change would be enough for Trump. He is a man of unpredictable utterances but rather constrained ambitions. He wants to punish his enemies, reward his friends, stay out of jail, and secure his financial and political legacy. Those around Trump, however, are pushing for something more extreme. They have cast him in the role of the Great Helmsman—Mao’s favorite moniker—who steers American society into turbulent, uncharted waters.

Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.

Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. By “left,” Roberts means anyone who follows the Constitution, acknowledges the importance of international law, and has a moral conscience.

This more revolutionary program owes much to Chairman Mao who, in 1966, decided that Chinese society was so infected with various strains of reformism (capitalism, liberalism, traditionalism) that it, too, needed another revolution. On top of that, Mao unleashed the power of populism—the “masses” in the vernacular of that time and place—to eliminate his political enemies. “It was a power struggle waged… behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” writes Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.

In the 1950s, after the country’s first revolution, Chinese society remained fundamentally conservative. The economy was primarily agrarian and Confucianism was still strong, particularly in the countryside. China was also elitist, with a Communist leader like Zhou Enlai born into the mandarin class and Mao himself coming from wealthy landowning stock. The Communists didn’t just aspire to change China’s governance. They wanted to turn Chinese society into something considerably more urban, industrial, secular, literate, and egalitarian. The change would be violent, if necessary, because Mao believed that “revolution was not a dinner party” (one wonders if Kevin Roberts has a copy of the Little Red Book on his bedside table).

At first, Mao relied on the party and its repressive institutions to effect change. By the mid-1950s, he launched an effort at reform, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, that spiraled out of the party’s control, which generated the backlash of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. That was, in turn, followed by the disastrous economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward. These whiplash changes in policy created considerable anxiety among the Chinese leadership that the party, and the revolution more generally, was losing its hold over the population, which understandably didn’t know where to turn. Mao ultimately decided that only another revolution could break the country’s ties with its past.

The agents of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, teenagers who heeded Mao’s call for transformation by taking the law into their own hands. They attacked capitalist-roaders, “bourgeois” teachers, and ultimately each other. Chinese society descended into such chaos that some people even fled over the border into North Korea, which was seen as a place of relative sanity. That’s how violent, unpredictable, and apocalyptic China was during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted nearly a decade until Mao’s death in 1976.

Trumpists have their counterpart to Mao’s desire for revolutionary transformation: a plan to destroy everything in the federal government except the royal presidency and the Pentagon, and privatize everything in the country that has a tinge of the public to it.

The Trumpian equivalents of the Red Guards are a motley crew. There’s “Big Balls,” 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a DOGE-employed hacker who, among other questionable ventures, administers “an AI-powered Discord bot operating in Russia.” Then there’s 25-year-old Marco Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after the revelation of his racist tweets (but whom Musk has promised to rehire). The parallel with China is not precise, since there are plenty of non-teenagers who are involved in this insurrection, including the middle-aged January 6 rioter Peter Marocco, who is slated to head up USAID. Whatever their age, however, these Trumpists are true believers, enthusiastically feeding democracy into the woodchipper.

Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.

Why Trumpians Take Culture Seriously

The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just a response to some recent fad. They are, as in China, an effort to radically revamp the very culture.

Since the 1960s, the United States has become a more inclusive country, which has necessarily meant that white men have lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment, and entertainment. By the 2000s, the United States still had a long way to go, but in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism books were on the best-seller list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promoting policies, and educational institutions were finally beginning to address structural racism.

Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.

Cultural transformations always move two steps forward and one step backward. In this case, the backlash has been much more intense, with Trump and company eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even before the 14th Amendment that added birthright citizenship to the Constitution in 1868. The Trump administration has tried to impose gender categories that define the trans community out of existence. It is restricting abortion access at home and abroad, fulfilling the candidate’s promise to help women “whether they like it or not.”

In the same way that Mao tried to make everything in China public—business, meals, child-rearing—Trump wants to privatize everything from schools to the post office. He is opening up government to conservative Christians, and religious institutions are poised to claw back as much public power as they can get.

Mao thought that he was pushing with history’s tide. China’s current capitalist trajectory suggests otherwise, even though the regime change implemented by the Communist Party has remained more or less intact. The party remains in charge, but the culture shows few enduring influences of the Cultural Revolution.

With far-right politicians on the rise around the world, Trump and Musk similarly believe that they are on the cutting edge of change. But mass deportations and boosted birthrates among “tradwives” won’t prevent America from losing its white-majority status in about 20 years. DEI is no fad. It is an accurate reflection of demographics. And short of imposing totalitarian control and setting up concentration camps, the MAGA crowd won’t be able to alter this trajectory.

Welcome Back to 2025

This is not the first time I’ve written about the parallels between Trump and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 2022, safely ensconced in the Biden era but plagued by nightmares of the future, I wrote an article entitled “The Terrifying World of 2025” for TomDispatch. It was and is a world of mass deportations, where “Social Security checks and Medicare benefits have been delayed because the federal bureaucracy has shrunk to near invisibility.” Here was my look into the future, which is now our present:

On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the “patriots” of January 6 and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc.

My piece focused on one part of this nightmare scenario—the dispatch of all newly unemployed federal employees, academics, and journalists to take the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. That has yet to take place, but Musk’s acquisition of all federal data could serve as the basis for a MAGA Corps of workers that fill the gaps in the private sector.

The Trump team is currently stress-testing U.S. democracy to see where and how it breaks. Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.

Back in 2022, I was not optimistic in my crystal-ball-gazing:

I know this nightmare won’t end overnight. China’s Cultural Revolution stretched on for nearly a decade and resulted in as many as 2 million dead. Our now-captive media doesn’t report on the growing violence in this country, but we’ve heard rumors about mobs attacking a courageous podcaster in Georgia and vigilantes targeting a lone abortion provider in Texas. Things might get a lot worse before they get better.

Things could indeed get a lot worse. The mass deportations haven’t begun in earnest. The courts have hit pause on a number of Trump’s more egregious moves. The worst of the new Cabinet members—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have yet to make their marks.

But I’d like to believe that Trump and Musk, for all the power they currently deploy, are basically spitting into the wind. But it’s up to us, with every breath we take, to make sure that all that ugly spittle ends up back on the face of MAGA.

After weeks of following the news about the systematic dismantling of the federal government by U.S. President Donald Trump and his appointed and ad hoc acolytes, I have been driven to outrage and the realization of the need for a clarion call to action. However, this week, after listening to an hour-long interview with a leading researcher and journalist who studies the manifestations and damage wrought by plutocrats and authoritarians, for the first time I felt fear.

Not specifically fear of what is happening to our great nation per se, but fear that this well-respected expert repeated several times during the interview that what we are observing is unprecedented in our nation’s history and that they had few if any recommendations on what can be done to wrestle back this beast.

To that end, action is what I put forward in this letter. Steve Bannon coined the now much used phrase “flood the zone,“ for the strategy that the Trump administration is employing with their phalanx of executive orders and invasions of executive agencies and secure databases by individuals without requisite security clearances. While many of these actions are apparently unenforceable and unconstitutional, the intent of the strategy is to overwhelm the opposition with far too much to act upon—akin to encouraging the proverbial cat to chase a laser light.

Unlike the early days of the American union, where citizen soldiers were freezing in the winter woods without boots and bullets, those opposed to the current takeover of our government and democratic institutions have many arrows in their quivers.

I suggest, as a countervailing strategy, that we employ the same technique against them. Truly patriotic Democrats and Republicans must now borrow Steve Bannon’s “flooding of the zone” in a different context. Generate so many lawsuits to in effect flood the Supreme Court docket. As a result, most cases brought against Trump administration actions will be forced to stay within the purview of the lower courts where some semblance of democracy and due process still remains.

While I certainly understand that the Supreme Court has the power to stay the decisions of lower courts and place cases on their docket that are consolidations of multiple lower-court decisions on cases with similarly limited legal questions; nonetheless, the strategy will indeed keep them jumping.

It is also important to note that this barrage of legal actions must be based on solid legal grounds. Any hint at frivolity in any of these lawsuits will rapidly reinforce right-wing outcry against such actions. I am particularly sensitized to this risk after watching a video of federal employee protesters decrying Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. The protesters were challenging Musk’s actions while counterprotesters were asserting that their protests were misguided as they were opposing Musk’s so-called efforts toward “transparency and government efficiency.”

At the outset of the American Revolution, many considered it absurd that a ragtag bunch of colonists could actually weave together a nation while at the same time fighting a war against one of the most powerful nations on Earth. But that is exactly what America succeeded in doing. This was the result of vision, commitment, innovative strategies, and the juxtaposition of global events beyond the scope of the American Revolution that served to distract Britain from their intention to quell this colonial discontent.

However, unlike the early days of the American union, where citizen soldiers were freezing in the winter woods without boots and bullets, those opposed to the current takeover of our government and democratic institutions have many arrows in their quivers. We have legal scholars, state attorneys general, engaged NGOs, skilled lawyers who can crank out 200 page legal briefs overnight, the majority of the American public who have some understanding of civics and the critical importance of the American experiment, and many powerful corporations who understand that their business interests lie in producing products and services that not only create profitability, but also benefit people and the natural world. This capacity, effectively marshaled, without qualification cannot be stopped.

On Inauguration Day, I was flying home from India, where I had attended Gandhi 3.0, a retreat that brought together 40 people from around the world to explore how Gandhian principles can be meaningful in today's world. I returned to the U.S. just as my country was erupting in turmoil.

My emotions were all over the place. Having just experienced the most heart-expanding nine days of my life, where I witnessed the most extraordinary acts of generosity and heard some of the wisest of voices, I felt strangely grounded with a deep sense of love for, well, everyone. But I was also aghast, frightened for so many, and startled by those who were delighted by the sledgehammer upheavals, the head-spinning international proclamations, and the unconstitutional decrees.

I certainly understand the desire to upend “the system”—something I’ve been trying to do with multiple unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane systems my entire adult life—but what was unfolding was inchoate, cruel, and chaotic destruction rather than carefully considered interventions that would reduce waste and corruption.

What could Gandhi teach me and us?

Like Gandhi, ask yourself how you can tend your time carefully knowing that ineffective—and potentially destructive—efforts will waste your precious energy and could also backfire.

Studying Gandhi helps me put my country into perspective. Gandhi spent decades endeavoring to free his country from British rule using only nonviolent methods. He worked to end the evil of untouchability embedded in India’s caste system. He led a movement toward Indian self-reliance. And all along the way he made inner work—the cultivation of love and wisdom; inquiry, introspection, and integrity; and meditation—foundational to everything he did.

Gandhi once said:

I hold myself incapable of hating any being on Earth. By a long course of prayerful discipline, I have ceased for over 40 years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless, I make it in all humility. But I can and do hate evil wherever it exists. I hate the systems of government that the British people have set up in India. I hate the ruthless exploitation of India even as I hate from the bottom of my heart the hideous system of untouchability for which millions of Hindus have made themselves responsible. But I do not hate the domineering Englishmen as I refuse to hate the domineering Hindus. I seek to reform them in all the loving ways that are open to me. My noncooperation has its roots not in hatred, but in love.

I posted this quote shortly after my return to the U.S., and a friend commented: “Waiting for your solution? Do we just be still without any action to what is happening in this country?”

Gandhi would hardly want us to keep still. After all, he worked tirelessly. He also worked strategically, wisely, and forcefully, with force embedded in his guiding principle of satyagraha, often translated as “nonviolent resistance.” But satyagraha means so much more than this. The word combines satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning insistence, firmness, and adherence. In other words, Gandhi’s force for change was an unshakeable commitment to opposing injustice with truth. And truth for Gandhi meant never doing evil to combat evil; never using violence to oppose violence; and never succumbing to hate to resist hate. It meant no less than living, acting, and teaching with an abiding core of love.

Gandhi is famous for responding to a reporter’s question about his message by jotting down, “My life is my message.” Those five words aren’t just one man’s story. They represent a universal truth. Each of our lives is our message. The question thus becomes: Am I modeling the message I most want to convey?

None of us is or will be Gandhi. Nor will we have the megaphone to the world that he came to have through the power of his character, his resolve, and his at the time unique nonviolent approach to resistance. If you or I declared, as Gandhi did on several occasions, that we were fasting until and unless violence among our citizenry ended, we would surely die of starvation, and that violence would persist after we were gone. But that doesn’t mean that Gandhian principles have nothing to teach us today. They absolutely do.

Here are Gandhian teachings I am taking to heart right now:

1. Avoid rash acts and angry outbursts; these will not bring about any positive change.
2. Learn from the changemakers who have brought about greater peace and justice and built more compassionate, sustainable systems against all odds.
3. Embrace satyagraha, recognizing that this requires cultivating the inner resolve to continually pursue justice through nonviolent, loving means.
4. Work toward systemic change, understanding that this takes profound dedication, deep thinking, careful strategizing, and patience.
5. Do the inner work as tirelessly as the outer work to achieve all of the above.

If you were hoping for more specific strategies to address your current concerns, this may be a disappointing list, but let’s not forget that most people across the political spectrum care about others and want a future where their fellow citizens can thrive. Rather than consider those with different political views one’s enemies, we can perceive them as fellow participants and even potential friends with whom we can communicate, and maybe collaborate, as we identify better ways forward upon which we can agree.

Gandhi devoted years to readying himself and his followers for nonviolent resistance. He spent nearly two decades in preparation for the Salt March that led to India’s independence. Just ponder that as you consider the role you will play in achieving your vision for a sustainable, peaceful, just world.

Please don’t interpret this as meaning that we should only cultivate inner strength and love, or that we should do nothing now other than plan and strategize for an indefinite future. Rather, like Gandhi, ask yourself how you can tend your time carefully knowing that ineffective—and potentially destructive—efforts will waste your precious energy and could also backfire.

Whatever injustices, cruelties, and evils you seek to end, Gandhi’s life and message are worth studying and emulating. He demonstrated that satyagraha is not only a profound strategy; it is fueled by the most powerful of human capacities: love. Given that Gandhi was perhaps the greatest changemaker in history, it’s worth deeply considering his approach as a model for today’s world. And lest we think we somehow need to dispense with our anger to follow in Gandhi’s footsteps, he also said this:

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

Good followers of U.S. President Donald Trump have to believe an increasingly large collection of ridiculous lies. First and foremost, they have to believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Then they have the corollary, that January 6 was an inside job pulled off for some reason by the FBI. Of course, they have to believe global warming isn’t happening and apparently now that that Ukraine started its war with Russia.

However, this week Elon Musk and Donald Trump added another big lie to the list: There are tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security. As with all Trump lies it is hard to know what the guy really believes and what is being thrown out to advance a larger goal, but this lie definitely ranks alongside the others for both its craziness and potential importance.

It seems the origins of the Social Security zombie story is Elon Musk’s misunderstanding of a Social Security file on the ages of people getting Social Security. He immediately began tweeting to his hundreds of millions of followers that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security. This line was quickly picked up by various right-wing influencers as yet another example of government incompetence and corruption.

It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.

Then Donald Trump made the claim about millions of dead people getting Social Security himself. And under MAGA rules, once the “king” makes a pronouncement, everyone has to say it’s true no matter how utterly absurd it might be. This means all good Republicans have to insist that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security, or at least millions.

This claim is absurd on its face. Social Security actually keeps very good track of who is getting benefits, as numerous audits over the years have found. Yes, Social Security is in fact regularly audited by its inspector general and also the Government Accountability Office. It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.

And the system does have problems, most of which are widely known to those familiar with the program. The two most obvious ones are the country’s method of tracking deaths and the age of the Social Security computer system.

The first problem is that there is no national death registry. We could compile this nationally, but this has been a big states’ rights issue, with many people, mostly Republicans, complaining that a national system of registering deaths would be a dangerous step toward totalitarianism. Therefore, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has to rely on getting data on deaths from states.

The other problem is that SSA is relying on an antiquated computer system that is using a computer language from the sixties. Musk and the DOGE boys may well want to ridicule SSA for using a computer system that is 50 or even 60 years old, but an analysis of the problem would again require looking in the mirror.

It would cost billions of dollars to put in place a new system, while maintaining the operation of the current system and ensuring that the privacy of workers’ earnings and benefit records are not compromised. Cost-conscious Republicans in Congress, along with many Democrats, have not wanted to fork over the money. If Elon Musk and the DOGE boys can arrange for the funding for modernizing the system, they would be widely applauded by supporters of Social Security, but that doesn’t seem the direction they are taking.

In fact, SSA has been pretty ingenuous in working around these obstacles to ensure that the overwhelming majority of its payments are accurate. And when overpayments are made, such as when benefits go to a dead person for a couple of months after death, they often are able to get the money back.

Mr. Arithmetic Exposes the Lie

Anyhow, when it comes to the claim that the zombie hordes are getting Social Security, a quick visit with Mr. Arithmetic should put this nonsense to rest. Social Security gives us very good data (it’s even available to Elon Musk and the DOGE boys) on payments to beneficiaries by age.

We can add this up and calculate the total amount of payments that SSA can identify. That came to $1,227 billion at the end of 2024. We can also go to the Social Security Trustees Report and find out the total amount the program paid out in retiree benefits last year. Interestingly, that also came out to $1,227 billion. So where is the money that is going to the millions of Musk-Trump Social Security beneficiary zombies?

Okay, but maybe these are fake numbers that the geniuses at SSA have put together to trick real tax-paying Americans. But which numbers would be fake?

It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong.

We know the total amount Social Security pays out in benefits each year. There are dozens of records kept on this that are regularly published. Even Elon Musk and the “super-high IQ” DOGE boys can find this out.

Furthermore, if we want to venture into the Twilight Zone and imagine that there are actually hundreds of billions of dollars secretly being paid out to the Musk-Trump zombies every year, we wouldn’t have to worry about this money contributing to the deficit. If the zombie payments are never recorded anywhere, they can’t be a factor in the official deficit that we all know and love.

Maybe the SSA tricksters did it on the other side. They are hugely exaggerating what we are paying as benefits to real working people. All those numbers on people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are hugely inflated so that they have extra money to pay to the Musk-Trump zombies.

While that would be a very clever trick by the SSA fraudsters, it would also be pretty hard to pull off. We do have very good data on births. We know how many people were born in 1940, 1950, 1960, and every other year. We also know roughly how many of these people are dying. Anyone interested could examine whether, for example, the number of 90-year-olds SSA says are getting benefits makes sense.

The same applies on the benefit side. Social Security has a very well-defined benefit formula, which is readily available to anyone who wants to look. We have good data from a wide variety of sources on the wages people earned during their working years, so we can know roughly what they should be getting in Social Security benefits. We also have data from both public and private sources on what Social Security beneficiaries are actually getting from the program.

If the SSA bureaucrats are able to find ways to exaggerate their proper payments to living people, to hide hundreds of billions of dollars being paid out to dead people each year, they are way more clever than anyone gives them credit for. I’m not sure that fits the story that Elon Musk and the DOGE boys want to tell.

Is There Method to the Madness?

It is always dangerous to try to get into the head of someone who is not making any sense, but it is worth asking if there can be any purpose served by Musk-Trump spewing nonsense about tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security benefits. This could just be another absurd Trump power play where he forces his MAGA followers to accept an absurd lie just to show he can. He did this when he released a huge volume of water in California, ostensibly to help contain the Los Angeles fires, even though the areas getting the water were nowhere near LA.

There is another more pernicious possibility. Musk-Trump may want to foster the belief that there are large numbers of dead people getting Social Security benefit so that they can justify a purge of the rolls. The purge will not be directed at the dead people who are not there, but at their political opponents. This is obviously completely illegal, but if Trump gets decide the law, as he insists, it’s all fine.

It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong. I guess we will eventually find out his intentions with this idiocy. We have to hope that it’s just Trump’s dementia.

By Ralph Nader February 21, 2025 Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with…

If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing—not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.

Here’s a partial summary—10 reasons for modest optimism.

1. Boycotts Are Taking Hold

Americans are changing shopping habits in a backlash against corporations that have shifted their public policies to align with Trump.

Millions are pledging to halt discretionary spending for 24 hours on February 28 in protest against major retailers—chiefly Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy—for scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in response to President Donald Trump.

Four out of 10 Americans have already shifted their spending over the last few months to be more consistent with their moral views, according to the Harris poll. (Far more Democrats—50%—are changing their spending habits compared with Republicans—41%.)

We will prevail because we are relearning the basic truth—that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

Calls to boycott Tesla apparently are having an effect. After a disappointing 2024, Tesla sales declined further in January. In California, a key market for Tesla, nearly 12% fewer Teslas were registered in January 2025 than in January 2024. An analysis by Electrek points to even more trouble for Tesla in Europe, where Tesla sales have dropped in every market.

X users are shifting over to Bluesky at a rapid rate, even as Musk adds more advertisers to his ongoing lawsuit against those that have justifiably boycotted X after he turned it into a cesspool of lies and hate (this week, he added Lego, Nestle, Tyson Foods, and Shell).

2. International Resistance Is Rising

Canada has helped lead the way: A grassroots boycott of American products and tourism is underway there. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has in effect become a “wartime prime minister” as he stands up to Trump’s bullying.

Jean Chrétien, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003, is urging Canada to join with leaders in Denmark, Panama, and Mexico, as well as with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to fight back against Trump’s threats.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum is standing up to Trump. She has defended not just Mexico but also the sovereignty of Latin American countries Trump has threatened and insulted.

In the wake of JD Vance’s offensive speech at the Munich security conference last week, European democracies are standing together—condemning his speech and making it clear they will support Ukraine and never capitulate to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as Trump has done.

3. Independent and Alternative Media Are Growing

Trump and Elon Musk’s “shock and awe” strategy was premised on their control of all major information outlets—not just Fox News and its right-wing imitators but the mainstream corporate media as well.

It hasn’t worked. The New York Times has done sharp and accurate reporting on what’s happening. Even the non-editorial side of The Wall Street Journal has shown some gumption.

The biggest news, though, is the increasing role now being played by independent and alternative media. Subscriptions have surged at Democracy Now, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this and other Substacks.

As a result, although Trump and Musk continue to flood the zone with lies, Americans aren’t as readily falling for their scams.

4. Musk’s Popularity Is Plunging

Elon Musk is underwater in public opinion, according to polls published Wednesday.

Surveys by Quinnipiac University and Pew Research Center—coming just after Trump and Musk were interviewed together by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, with Trump calling Musk a “great guy” who “really cares for the country”—show a growing majority of Americans holding an unfavorable view of Musk.

In Pew’s findings, 54% report disliking Musk compared to 42% with a positive view; 36% report a very unfavorable view of Musk. Quinnipiac’s results show 55% believe Musk has too big a role in the government.

5. Musk’s Doge Is Losing Credibility

On Monday, DOGE listed government contracts it has canceled, claiming that they amount to some $16 billion in savings—itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.

Almost half were attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—but that contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.

In addition, Musk and Trump say tens of millions of “dead people” may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments from the government. The table Musk shared on social media over the weekend showed about 20 million people in the Social Security Administration’s database over the age of 100 and with no known death.

But as the agency’s inspector general found in 2023, “almost none” of them were receiving payments; most had died before the advent of electronic records.

These kinds of rudimentary errors are destroying DOGE’s credibility and causing even more to question allowing Musk’s muskrats unfettered access to personal data on Americans.

6. The Federal Courts Are Hitting Back

So far, at least 74 lawsuits have been filed by state attorneys general, nonprofits, and unions against the Trump regime. And at least 17 judges—including several appointed by Republicans—already have issued orders blocking or temporarily halting actions by the Trump regime.

The blocking orders include Trump initiatives to restrict birthright citizenship, suspend or cut off domestic and foreign U.S. spending, shrink the federal workforce, oust independent agency heads, and roll back legal protections and medical care for transgender adults and youths.

In other cases, the Trump regime has agreed to a pause to give judges time to rule, another way that legal fights are forcing a slowdown.

7. Demonstrations Are on the Rise

We haven’t seen anything like the January 2017 Women’s March, the day after Trump 1.0 began, but over the past weeks, demonstrations have been increasing across the country. Last Monday, on Presidents Day, demonstrators descended upon state capitol buildings.

In Washington, D.C., thousands gathered at the Capitol Reflecting Pool, chanting “Where is Congress?” and urging members of Congress to “Do your job!” despite nearly 40°F temperatures and 20-mile-per-hour wind gusts.

The nationwide protests are part of the 50501 Movement, which stands for “50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement.” One of its leaders, Potus Black, urged the crowd of protesters in Washington to stand united in order to “uphold the Constitution.”

To oppose tyranny is to stand behind democracy and remind our elected officials that we, the people, are who they’re elected to serve, not themselves. The events over the past month have been built to exhaust us, to break our wills. But we are the American people. We will not break.

I expect that in the coming weeks and months protests will grow larger and louder—and by summer perhaps a “Summer of Democracy” will sweep the nation.

Acts of civil disobedience are also on the rise, as are resignations in protest against the regime. This week, former NFL punter Chris Kluwe was hauled out of a Huntington Beach City Council meeting after speaking out against Trump during public comments against plans to include a MAGA reference in the design of a library plaque.

As cheers erupted from the audience, Kluwe told the council, in words that should be repeated across the land:

MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.

When he was done speaking, Kluwe said he would “engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.”

8. Stock and Bond Markets Are Trembling

Trump has not lowered prices; in fact, inflation is rising under his control.

Trump’s wild talk of 25% tariffs is spooking the market. Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which measures the performance of 30 large-cap U.S. stocks, dropped by more than 1.40%.

Treasury bonds also dropped after a report showed more U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week than economists expected—an indication the pace of layoffs could be worsening.

Transcripts of the last Fed meeting showed that officials discussed how Trump's proposed tariffs and mass deportations of migrants, as well as strong consumer spending, could push inflation higher this year.

Economic storm clouds like these should be troubling for everyone but especially for a regime that measures its success by stock and bond markets.

9. Trump Is Overreaching—Pretending to Be “King” and Abandoning Ukraine for Putin

Trump’s threats of annexation, conquest, and “unleashing hell” have been exposed as farcical bluffs—and his displays this week of being “king” and siding with Putin have unleashed a new level of public ridicule.

On Wednesday, following his attempt to kill a new congestion pricing program for Manhattan, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House shared the quote accompanied by a computer-generated image of Trump grinning on a fake Time magazine cover while donning a golden crown.

Negative reaction was swift and overwhelming. Social media has exploded with derision. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.” Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, said, “My oath is to the Constitution of our state and our nation. We don’t have kings in America, and I won’t bend the knee to one.”

The reaction to Trump’s abandoning Ukraine and siding with Putin has been more devastating, putting congressional Republicans on the defensive. Prominent Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and John Kennedy of Louisiana criticized Putin. Bill Kristol, a former official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, noted that “Nato and the U.S. commitment to Europe has kept the European peace for 80 years. It’s foolish and reckless to put that at risk. And for what? To get along with Putin?”

10. The Trump-Vance-Musk “Shock and Awe” Plan Is Faltering

In all these ways and for all of these reasons, the regime’s efforts to overwhelm us are failing.

Make no mistake: Trump, Vance, and Musk continue to be an indiscriminate wrecking ball that has already caused major destruction and will continue to weaken and isolate America. But their takeover has been slowed.

Their plan was based on doing so much, so fast that the rest of us would give in to negativity and despair. They want a dictatorship built on hopelessness and fear.

That may have been the case initially, but we can take courage from the green shoots of rebellion now appearing across America and the world.

As several of you have pointed out, successful resistance movements maintain hope and a positive vision of the future, no matter how dark the present.

More than 55 years ago, I participated in the resistance to the Vietnam War—a resistance that ultimately ended the war and caused a once powerful president to resign. That resistance gave us courage we didn’t even know we had. It changed American culture, inspiring songs such as “The Times They Are A Changing,” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

No one person led that anti-war movement. It was an amalgam of groups and leaders spanning more than six years of mobilization and organization, at all levels of society.

The civil rights movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required over 18 years of organizing, demonstrating, and mobilizing.

The current coup is less than five weeks old, and resistance has only begun. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime will fail. Even so, the Democracy Movement now emerging will require at least a decade, if not a generation, to rebuild and strengthen what has been destroyed, and to fix the raging inequalities, injustices, and corruption that led so many to vote for Trump for a second time.

Those of you who want the leaders of the Democratic Party to step up and be heard are right, of course. But political parties do not lead. The anti-war movement and the Civil Rights Movement didn’t depend on the Democratic Party for their successes. They depended on a mass mobilization of all of us who accepted the responsibilities of being American.

We will prevail because we are relearning the basic truth—that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

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Moral injury, or the deep distress that can emerge when you feel that your values have been violated, either by yourself or someone else, is about to be added to the American Psychiatric Association’s D.S.M.-5, psychiatry’s classification of mental health conditions, to include the notion that moral problems could contribute to a mental health condition..

The resulting feelings of powerlessness, guilt and shame can lead to mental health problems like anxiety, depression and even suicidal behavior.

On today’s episode of “The TMI Show,” Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss Moral Injury. What is it? Is it a real mental phenomenon? Can you avoid it? What can you do if you suffer from it?

The post TMI Show Ep 83: Are You Suffering from “Moral Injury”? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 83: Are You Suffering from “Moral Injury”? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As the mass murder that took the lives of 10 innocent people in Sweden disappears from the international news map, there remains a debt to the dead that will likely go unpaid.

The majority of those who died were immigrants to Sweden, and the debt is simple: telling their stories and placing their lives in a context that pushes back against the common stereotypes about immigrants and refugees in Sweden, and across Europe.

Details are now beginning to emerge about the victims in Örebro. Of the 10 who died in Örebro, seven were women and three were men. Eight were born outside the country. But there is so much more. There are details that speak to the mundane, everyday lives of immigrants and refugees—stories that are largely ignored by the media in favor of more sensational topics such as crime, terrorism, and failed integration. Topics that do not reflect the overwhelming majority of people who have immigrated to Sweden and Europe. People who have often fled violence and persecution in search of a quiet, ordinary, and anonymous life.

To not recognize their everyday lives or to refuse to acknowledge their efforts to integrate into their new societies is to subject them to a second form of violence: the symbolic murder of their humanity.

Let’s be honest. The decision to present immigrants and refugees in one way rather than another is both deliberate and conscious. And let’s not deny the cruel irony that immigrants, routinely smeared as “lazy,” “violent,” and “incapable of integrating,” were murdered by an "ethnic Swede" who himself lived an unintegrated life as a “loner.”

Immigrants like Bassam, a father of two who came to Sweden from Syria. He worked making bread and preparing food, and on days when he had Swedish language classes, he would start work at 4:00 or 5:00 am, attend his language class, then return to work and stay late.

Immigrants like Salim, a refugee from Syria who had become a Swedish citizen and was studying to become a healthcare worker. He was engaged and had just bought a house. His last act, as he lay dying after being shot, was to call his mother and ask her to take care of his fiancée.

Immigrants like Elsa, who arrived in Sweden in 2015 from Eritrea and was also studying to become an assistant nurse. She was already employed at a nursing home and worked as a contact person for disabled residents in the municipality. She wanted to have two jobs to earn enough money for her husband to get a residence permit. They had four children.

These were victims of an act of violence that ended their physical presence in this world. To not recognize their everyday lives or to refuse to acknowledge their efforts to integrate into their new societies is to subject them to a second form of violence: the symbolic murder of their humanity. We are regularly told that immigrants to Europe from “other” parts of the world do not share our “values.” Yet, in the case of the mass murder in Sweden, we see victims who worked—often with multiple jobs—to integrate and create a better life. In short, they shattered the stereotype of the isolated, lazy immigrant unwilling to engage with Swedish society.

In the days (and now weeks) after the mass murder in Örebro, media in Sweden have been telling the stories of some of these immigrants and their families. About their lives and their losses. This is important progress in Sweden… while media outside of the country have overwhelmingly ignored the dead. But it also raises the question: Should it really take being killed in a mass murder to have your story told?

There are parts of the world that receive media coverage in Europe and the U.S. almost exclusively when there is war, famine, or natural disasters. This links these regions with crisis in the minds of news consumers, and it is a connection that is hard to break. The very idea that people in these regions have everyday concerns, worries, and joys like we do at home is very rarely addressed. Similarly, in domestic media, there are segments of society that are covered primarily when something negative or terrible happens. This creates a similar mental map for news consumers, overshadowing all other perspectives.

In journalism and media research, the concept of “framing” suggests that how an issue or group is presented (rhetorically or visually) in news affects how that issue or group is perceived and understood. But what is not shown is also part of “framing.” What is omitted in the presentation and analysis of society is also an editorial decision.

This should also be seen as part of the debt owed to many of those killed in Örebro. To recognize the power of media to shape not only what people think about but also how they think about it, and to present the everyday lives of those who come to Sweden and Europe not only when linked to tragedy and violence.

Imagine a world without effective nonprofit advocacy. When a corporation exploits a local community, no one speaks up or resists. Everyone is too afraid of the weaponized legal system, too vulnerable to liability. The ultra-wealthy take whatever they want and leave others to pick up the pieces. Opposition and resistance have been extinguished.

Those are the risks of a lawsuit against Greenpeace, now going to trial in North Dakota after a seven-year legal battle. Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million for tort damages, including defamation. Energy Transfer’s previous attempt to sue Greenpeace under federal anti-racketeering laws was blocked by the courts. But the state charges have been upheld, with a trial beginning on February 24, and free-speech advocates are raising alarms about the dangerous precedent that would follow a loss for Greenpeace, or even from the trial proceeding at all.

I recently spoke with Scott W. Badenoch, Jr., a visiting attorney at the Environmental Law Institute. He’s part of a team of distinguished international legal scholars, including Steven Donziger and Jeanne Mirer, who have launched a Trial Monitoring Committee to ensure the case against Greenpeace proceeds fairly and transparently.

While the Trial Monitors and some activists will be on the ground in North Dakota, we need to make noise online and in the media, ensuring that as many people as possible know what’s at stake.

As Badenoch described it, the court is trying to maintain “as much of a black box as you could possibly create in the U.S. court system.” Judge James Gion recently denied a motion to allow live streaming of the trial proceedings.

Instead, Badenoch said the case should be dismissed immediately. The allegations attempt to hold Greenpeace responsible for the actions of activists and volunteers unaffiliated with the group. Legal advocates and climate organizers have called it an unconstitutional SLAPP suit, intended to burden Greenpeace with costly legal fees, shut them down, and restrict the free speech of nonprofits more broadly. “There is absolutely no justification for this trial happening in this court, at this time, with this judge,” Badenoch said. “Just none.”

In a press release from the Trial Monitoring Committee, Steven Donziger pointed to recent trends, writing that “this appears to be part of a broader strategy by the fossil fuel industry to weaponize the courts against activists and weaken organizations like Greenpeace in retaliation for their advocacy.”

While the trial itself presents dangers, the recent actions of Energy Transfer have also brought accusations of jury-tampering. In October, residents of rural Morton County, North Dakota, where the trial will be set, received what appeared to be a legitimate newspaper. However, it contained almost exclusively critical attacks on Greenpeace and the pipeline protests, while praising Energy Transfer. The “newspaper” was actually a political mailer from a company called Metric Media, with links to electioneering and fossil fuel companies, as reported in the North Dakota News Cooperative. Even more concerning, financial records link the CEO of Energy Transfer, Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren, to the creation of the fake newspaper. It looks a like blatant attempt to taint the jury pool. Despite this, Judge Gion refused to allow Greenpeace to investigate the origins of the biased mailer.

The crucial role of the Trial Monitoring Committee is to bring attention to these abuses of due process. “We are going to monitor this case one way or the other,” Badenoch told me. “But the more that [Judge Gion] withholds transparency and access from us, the more obvious it is that something is going on that they don’t want people to see.”

Meanwhile, the stakes of the case extend far beyond Greenpeace. If Energy Transfer is successful, Badenoch said, the precedent would be cataclysmic for nonprofit advocacy. An organization could be held liable for any actions by any activists, however tenuously affiliated. “Literally every social justice, climate justice, civil rights, human rights organization across the country—and maybe the planet—is at risk of legal murder in a courtroom, where an organization is put to death by a SLAPP suit.”

As members of the public, that means we all have a responsibility to advocate for transparency, fairness, and ideally dismissal of Energy Transfer’s lawsuit. While the Trial Monitors and some activists will be on the ground in North Dakota, we need to make noise online and in the media, ensuring that as many people as possible know what’s at stake. Badenoch was emphatic about this: “The number one thing is to bring attention to the case. Don’t let Greenpeace die with a whimper.”

In a time of chaos and distraction, it’s all too easy to let cases like this one go unnoticed. But the risks are simply too dire to ignore. “It’s absolutely terrifying for advocacy in this country and beyond. The risks are really hard to overstate,” Badenoch told me. “If Greenpeace is allowed to die in this field in North Dakota, then every single nonprofit is next in line.”

We are in the midst the gravest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. In less than one month, the new administration has shredded the United States’ heretofore sacrosanct system of checks and balances—through the brazen expansion of executive power, the de facto disregard of Congress whenever expedient, the intimidation of adversaries including the press, and a brash confidence that President Donald Trump cannot be contained by the courts.

Fortunately, there is one weapon available to us, one that is large enough to combat a crisis of this scale, one that we as citizens can wield to contain, defeat, and roll back this fascist counterrevolution–the Democratic Party.

Not the Democratic Party as it is—so far, the response to the crisis by Democratic leadership in Congress has been anemic, an utter failure.

After four and half decades of neoliberalism’s marginalization of popular political participation, the American majority has effectively been hypnotized into accepting its own oppression.

Rather, the Democratic Party as it must be, and will be, when we do the only thing available to us to save our democracy, freedom, and constitutional republic: Enter en masse into the Democratic Party and transform it into an institution of, by, and for the people.

For better or for worse, we live in a two-party political system.

Since 1946 there have been over 17,000 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. How many have been won by a third-party candidate? Zero.

In the U.S. Senate, there have been two third party candidates elected: William F Buckley’s brother, James L Buckley, in 1970 on the New York Conservative line (usually a fusion Party); and Joe Lieberman, founding member of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party.

Final score over the past 78 years: Connecticut for Lieberman 1 Green Party 0.

The record is just as bad statewide and in localities. There have literally been millions of elections since WWII. The number of third-party victories is infinitesimal, less than one-tenth of 1%.

Third Partyism in the United States is, at best, an utter waste of time and energy; at worst (and this is usually the case), left-wing third parties facilitate the rise of the right—both by siphoning votes away from Democrats, and, more significantly, by drawing well-intentioned progressives away from participating in politics that actually make a difference.

This is unequivocally true for a very simple reason: The rules and regulations that govern our society are still, to this day, determined by our elected officials, who are either Democrats or Republicans.

Indeed. Until Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions do considerably more damage to our democratic republic by changing the rules of our elections, this will remain the case. There are scheduled midterm elections in 2026—and it remains likely that they will be as competitive as recent U.S. elections. (The Trump administration is intent on whittling away voter protections, but anything like the wholesale transformation of competitive voting as in Hungary or Russia appears a bridge too far in just two years.)

As such, the Democratic Party remains our only hope to preserve our freedom and our civil, human, and political rights. The Republican Party is wholly captured by the authoritarian, anti-constitutional MAGA movement.

And, to reiterate, there are only two parties that matter in the American political system, in which elected officials establish the laws that govern our society.

So, either you enter the Democratic Party to reform it, or you are complicit in the rise of fascism.

If that sounds too straightforward or confrontational, I ask you to take a breath and seriously consider what’s transpiring in the country. I don’t mean to be condescending, and I certainly don’t intend to scold anyone (if anyone deserves that, it’s myself for not writing this sooner). But I’ve done my due diligence in writing this essay. I’ve challenged dozens upon dozens of people to negate the logic of my argument. No one who has tried has even come close—and 90% have conceded the point without even making a counterargument.

At this hour, the Democratic Party is the only instrument at our disposal that can deliver the results we need.

The time has come for us to take off our blinders, understand the lay of the land so we can engage our foes, defeat them, and then proceed to build a stronger democratic society.

This strategy has worked before, in the 1930s and 40s, to claw our society back from the brink of fascism. FDR’s transformed Democratic Party, defined by the mass entry of workers in coordination with the labor movement, then proceeded to build the most prosperous middle class in human history, and by the mid-1960s codified the demands of the civil rights movement.

This is the third essay in a four-part series outlining why progressive “mass entryism” into the Democratic Party is necessary at this hour of history in order to salvage American democracy, freedom, and our Constitutional Republic.

The first two installments addressed the main causes behind the rise of Donald Trump: widespread dissatisfaction with the economy and the political establishment. The first article made the case that only a progressive-Bernie Sanders-FDR-inspired set of policies can deliver the shared economic prosperity that Americans crave and thus vanquish Trump’s hollow populism. The second shows that, once again, only progressives will fulfill the wishes of the people by establishing a true “small d” democratic revival that ends the reign of plutocratic money and insures equal political agency for every citizen.

In this essay, the most polemical in the series, I make the case that all progressives, with no exceptions, must get over any qualms they have about entering the Democratic Party. They either do this or accept that they are failing to stand up for what they claim to believe. History will not treat them kindly if they fail to act accordingly.

The fourth and final installment will outline a two-step fail-proof strategy for transforming the Democratic Party in a progressive direction. Together we can build the party into a force that can save American democracy and deliver the fully inclusive, prosperous middle-class society that the vast majority of Americans want.

In the title of this article, the words “to transform” are just as important as those about joining the Democratic Party. Heretofore, and since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the mainstream of the Democratic Party has supported neoliberal policies. This must end, and end now, for the simple reason that neoliberalism begat Trumpism—and will always continue to do so.

Here’s why. If a society is organized, as it is under neoliberalism, so that all the surplus wealth flows into the coffers of an ever increasingly rich small minority (aka the idle investor class)—it simply follows that this group of people will use their unrivaled wealth and power to end any capacity the general population may have to influence how society allocates its resources. Four and a half-decades after former President Ronald Reagan and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launched the neoliberal revolution, and 30-odd years since Clinton and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair joined their team—this is exactly what Trump, Musk, and Project 2025 are doing.

It follows that mass entryism into the Democratic Party is not enough; we also must reform it along the lines that were outlined in the first two articles in this series. To sit idly by, allowing the Democratic Party to remain in its current state, is as good as handing Trump the keys to the kingdom.

While mass entryism may be necessary, it won’t be easy. At this hour of history, people’s resistance to becoming actively involved in Democratic Party politics is profound. On the one hand, party leadership has (with rare exceptions) obstructed efforts by progressives to gain a toehold, wearing down its grassroots wing. More significant for the general population has been the slow realization and then tacit acceptance of a central tenet of the neoliberal order—that money and capital have an iron grip on all meaningful political decision-making.

However, neoliberal ideologues, in their heyday, did not actively seek to dismantle the apparatus of elections. Rather, promotion of “democracy” was central to their world view—even as they declared themselves the winners in advance (witness Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative” and Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”). The actual destruction of liberal democracy has been left to neoliberalism’s heirs—Trump and the emergent international alliance of authoritarians (the “reactionary international,” aka 21st century fascism).

Nonetheless, after four and half decades of neoliberalism’s marginalization of popular political participation, the American majority has effectively been hypnotized into accepting its own oppression.

As mentioned before, no one I spoke to could negate the structural reality that the Democratic Party is literally the only institutionally empowered channel in American society capable of beating back Trumpism. However, the very same people acknowledged that they hadn’t even considered mass entryism into the Democratic Party as the appropriate and viable solution to the current crisis.

When asked why, a common response was for people to look at me with a blank stare, then blink their eyes or look away as if seeing the sun for the first time after being in a cave for days. However, this was not a “seen-the-light moment,” only a momentary break in the hypnosis. Invariably, what I would hear next became a familiar litany of reasons why Democratic mass entryism just won’t happen.

Most prominent among these were:

• The Democratic establishment will never cede power.
• Too many people are making too much money through the Democratic Party, and they will block any attempt to shut down their gravy train.
• Capital will never allow one of the two parties to be taken over by the people.
• Progressives will resist being shepherded into a centrist party.
• The Democrats are a war party. Gaza.
• The Democratic “brand,” and the progressive brand, have been made toxic by effective right-wing propaganda.
• Resistance activism is adequate (The Resistance is a great thing. Necessary, but not sufficient; it requires a parallel positive program.)
• Social movement activism is the solution (Also, a great thing, but requires allies on the inside. Must be supplemented by Democratic Party entryism.)
• Labor Movement activism is the solution (Another great thing. Solidarity forever, and across all sectors of society through Democratic Party entryism)
• Working people simply don’t have the time for political activism.
• Americans have been conditioned to remain politically inert.

In the fourth and final article in this series, I will outline an effective strategy for transforming the Democratic Party through mass entryism. In the context of that strategy, I will address the objections listed above.

In the meantime, please internalize the message of this essay—nothing is more important:

Because of the structure of American society and politics, the Democratic Party is the only institution positioned to challenge, defeat, and reverse the Trump administration’s ongoing destruction of our constitutional order.

The Democratic Party is failing now. We cannot allow this to continue. Everyone reading this understands there must be change, and that requires action.

Either we get involved in transforming the Democratic Party into the means that will defeat Trump and 21st-century fascism, or we are complicit in its rise.

Join PDA’s efforts to create a truly progressive Democratic Party, which we desperately need at this crucial hour of our history.

President Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for immigrants, particularly the non-white variety from south of our border. His statements that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country,” coupled with Fox News reports on Hispanic-appearing migrants who commit crimes, leave little doubt about what he and his allies think of (non-white) immigrants and their contributions to this country.

So it didn’t surprise me that he recently began to follow through on his own and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership’s earlier intentions (as far back as 2018) to detain immigrants—including unaccompanied children—at military posts. Earlier this month, the first deportation flight carried a few men from the American mainland to our naval base and Global War on Terror offshore prison site in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt referred to those migrants as “the worst criminal illegal aliens” and “the worst of the worst.” The flight apparently included members of a gang from Venezuela. Yet troops had already been ordered to ready the base in Cuba to house some 30,000 immigrants—a dramatic increase in its capacity—in military tent encampments meant to supplement existing detention facilities there.

The move is part of President Trump’s signature public policy initiative: to deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. without clear legal status. Some 40% of those Trump deems “illegal” and has targeted for deportation actually have some sort of official permission to be here, whether because they already have temporary protected status, a scheduled date in immigration court, or refugee or asylum status.

The Trump administration isn’t planning to give the public the opportunity to critique the mistreatment of migrants deported to Guantánamo or any other military post or new detention center in an up-close-and-personal fashion.

Since none of them wear their immigration status on their shirts (thankfully!), it might prove unnerving indeed how officers from DHS will be selecting people for interrogation and detention. (It’s probably not the guy in front of you at Starbucks with a Scandinavian accent who just ordered a fancy drink.)

Everything from Ku Klux Klan flyers left in towns across the Midwest after the election to Trump’s order removing the protected status of schools, healthcare facilities, and places of worship when it comes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids paints a dire picture. We haven’t seen profiling on this scale since the days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when the federal government ordered tens of thousands of men of Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian descent to register and be fingerprinted, subjecting them to increased surveillance and vigilante violence.

Since then, globally, the U.S. has detained hundreds of thousands of men (and, in some cases, boys) domestically and at that infamous prison in Guantánamo Bay, many without the ability to challenge their detentions and without the Red Cross surveillance that international law grants them.

Given the way legal standards for the treatment of people detained at federal facilities have eroded over the last two and a half decades, what may happen to tens of thousands of migrants at incarceration centers like Guantánamo in the years to come can only be a matter of grim speculation. However, one thing is clear: Whatever the treatment of the “worst of the worst” at or near that infamous prison, now a recyclable holder for whoever is the enemy of the day, it will be hidden from public view.

My Backyard

Such developments seem ever more real to me because my family lives about 40 miles from downtown Washington, D.C., where the Trump administration is churning out executive orders at breakneck speed. We live in a beautiful rural community in a county where about one-third of all residents are foreign-born. Those immigrant families bring cultural and linguistic richness to our schools, fuel the day-to-day operations of our many nearby military posts, run some of the most affordable supermarkets and tastiest restaurants around, and do the physically and emotionally demanding work of growing our local food. It’s hard for me to imagine how such immigrants are the worst of the worst.

Sure, some of them—like some of any other population you choose, including, of course, that convicted felon Donald Trump and crew—commit crimes. Yet rates of criminal activity among immigrants are much lower than among U.S. citizens. According to a 2020 study by the Bureau of Economic Research, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in this country.

I’m also a military spouse of more than 10 years and, in my family and community, it’s taken for granted that you’re going to be spending a lot of time with people who were born elsewhere, since immigrants of various stripes make up about 5% of our service members and are a significant part of military spouse communities as well. And believe me, many of the folks I know in those foreign-born subcategories of military communities are truly scared right now, even if for wealthier white families like mine, the suburbs and rural rolling hills around our nation’s capital offer opportunities to learn and a peacefulness that make them great places to raise kids.

A Changing Landscape

That said, in the wake of President Trump’s recent orders, the landscape around me is already changing. Some children whose family members are immigrants or who themselves are foreign-born have been absent from local schools. One of my children came home upset earlier this week and has been complaining of an unsettled stomach since learning that a good friend will have to leave the country due to fear of harassment under Trump’s new policies. Nearby, a Maryland high school teacher has been placed on leave after boasting on social media that he would help ICE identify “illegals” among his students. School administrators are bracing for armed federal agents to show up, demanding access to kids.

This is the kind of mundane horror and sadness I see blooming around me these days, as the news starts to report similar developments elsewhere: the Syracuse restaurant workers who were called into an ICE office and left with ankle monitors; the Guatemalan-American father of four in Ohio who was told by an ICE agent during his annual check-in that he needs to book a flight back to the country he only remembers from his teenage years or be deported. And these are the “lucky” ones who at least have some forewarning. Others won’t and will simply be subjected to the whims of federal immigration agents like those in New York City, where a memo issued by Mayor Eric Adams informed city workers that they can allow ICE agents into municipal facilities if they “reasonably feel threatened or fear for your safety or the safety of others around you.”

I wish I could say that history has taught Americans about the human costs of war and the dangers of indifference to it.

At least, the Trump administration’s immigration policies and actions are still subject to criticism by plucky journalists and activists prepared to call out instances of abuse of executive power, racial profiling, and violations of the right to education and other human rights. Count on this, though: The Trump administration isn’t planning to give the public the opportunity to critique the mistreatment of migrants deported to Guantánamo or any other military post or new detention center in an up-close-and-personal fashion. Such areas will be closed to all but servicemembers and assigned workers.

Sometimes even military family members won’t have the special authorization to enter them. In order to get in, you’ll need to present an official ID, have a reason to enter, possibly have a military service member directly authorize your access, and abide by specific restrictions on movement and rules about whether you can photograph anything on the base. At that base in Guantánamo, restrictions are even tighter and there are no guarantees that journalists will ever have access to migrants and their living conditions there.

Isolation as Death

President Trump has undoubtedly chosen the U.S. military base at Guantánamo, Cuba not just because it has so much detention space or, in past times, was used to detain Haitian and other immigrants, but at least in part because the prison there that held so many tortured prisoners from this country’s war on terror is well known to rights groups and the general public as a nightmarish facility. A 2014 Senate report, along with numerous investigations by human rights groups, found that terror suspects, including in some cases boys, at that base had often been denied due process, detained indefinitely without charge, and subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment.

It’s a fact that people do poorly living in conditions of isolation from the rest of society. Our own military is a case in point. In the decades since fewer of us began to serve, thanks to the absence of a draft (even as the military budget ballooned), Americans generally know far less about what our military is like and what it does. In these same years, suicide rates among servicemembers and veterans have surpassed civilian rates, while violent crime and accidents have grown more common following post-9/11 deployments. Such problems are due, at least in part, to a culture of silence and isolation among military families, as well as a lack of access to military bases by journalists and the public. What we can’t know about or see, we naturally care so much less about.

Other examples of isolated populations, ranging from those in nursing homes during the Covid-19 pandemic (where there were staggering death rates) to closed mental institutions, remind us that isolation begets a lack of public accountability, indifference, and greater human pain.

Of course, the federal government has also had a deadly history of isolating people for national security reasons—from Indian reservations to the internment of Japanese- and German-Americans on military installations during World War II. Things have never ended well for such groups.

The Sound of Silence

As our country’s next wave of abuse toward supposedly dangerous “others” begins, it’s possible to pay attention. Yet when I go out into my community and speak with neighbors, other parents, friends, and acquaintances, I’m reminded of how easy it is to do nothing in the face of what’s happening around us. When I urge people to write their representatives about the treatment of immigrants, they all too often look away and don’t respond, or say they’re afraid of violent retribution if they post a yard sign on their lawns about how “everyone is welcome here.” And I can’t blame them. After all, you bring kids into this world and your first loyalty is to their safety. By the same token, ignoring signals of growing authoritarianism in the interest of peace and continuity has its obvious problems.

In my area, populated by many federal employees recently ordered to return to full-time in-person work, daily life will soon be overflowing (with little room for anything else). Residents will commute two-plus hours each way to crowded office buildings in D.C. so that voters in red states can be happy. Possibly the only ones among us who will have no choice but to pay attention to what happens in their own backyards are those who have already lost their jobs; activists at local NGOs serving immigrants and other vulnerable groups; and schoolchildren who, by necessity, see the horrors of this administration through the eyes of their vulnerable friends and parents.

For us adults, especially parents occupied with the care of our children, I’m reminded of how easy it is to ignore or forget what happens right in our own backyards. Recently, I read a New York Times article about a house in Poland on the edge of what used to be the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, where its wartime commandant once lived. It overlooks a former gallows and the gas chambers where more than a million civilians were murdered, even as many Poles then carried on with their daily lives. A widow who brought up two kids there in the post-war years called the house “a great place to raise children.”

I wish I could say that history has taught Americans about the human costs of war and the dangers of indifference to it. Yet, around here at least, as Donald Trump and his administration scapegoat immigrants to distract from the impunity of their own actions (particularly those of Elon Musk, perhaps the most prominent immigrant ever to work here “without a legal basis to remain in the United States”), the silence is deafening. It seems to matter not at all that the infamous all-American prison in Cuba from this country’s grim war on terror has now become the “homeland” for a new nightmare (and a half).

Among the flurry of actions by the Trump administration, it could be easy to miss one that poses a grave danger to public health and our planet: a no-holds-barred attack on science.

In a series of disturbing moves, the administration has censored scientific research, slashed resources for public health and the environment, and advanced fossil fuel industry propaganda. These moves only serve corporate interests—at the expense of ordinary people and the planet.

Already, the administration has scrubbed government websites providing information on climate change and environmental justice. And it’s attempted to slash funding for research on climate and medical science (though a federal judge has temporarily blocked the defunding of medical research).

An administration claiming to crack down on “fraud, waste, and abuse” in government is doing the opposite.

Meanwhile, in a pair of astonishingly irresponsible moves, the administration has fired a large number of staff of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which identifies and tracks emerging epidemics, and pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization— even as we face the serious risk of a worldwide bird flu pandemic.

On the climate front, President Donald Trump has launched an ideological attack against the very idea of environmental justice. That’s the idea that marginalized communities—including people of color and poor people of all races—suffer the worst from pollution. There’s a large body of peer-reviewed scientific literature confirming this pattern, but Trump and his ideologues don’t care.

Elsewhere, Trump’s Energy Secretary—former fossil fuel executive Chris Wright—has made the outlandish claim that electricity in the U.S. is more expensive today, and the electric grid is less reliable, because of closure of coal-fired power plants.

Every part of this industry propaganda is verifiably false. The U.S. electricity grid is highly reliable. While electricity rates are rising, the increase over the 10-year period from 2013 to 2023 was only about 1% in inflation-adjusted terms.

If anything, coal plant retirements were a factor in keeping rates lower, since the plants being retired are older plants with higher operating costs. And this year, solar energy is expected to be a major contributor to keeping rates almost unchanged.

Significantly, every one of these facts comes from the Energy Department’s own research and data. That’s why we shouldn’t let them scrub it.

The administration’s erasure of data has profound human consequences.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the foremost international climate science institution, “Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people,” including “reduced food and water security.”

These statements are in the present tense. Severe climate change impacts are already occurring, and will get much worse if we don’t slash our greenhouse gas emissions rapidly. Disasters like this year’s Los Angeles wildfires and last year’s floods in Appalachia and the Southeast will become more frequent and damaging.

By censoring and defunding climate science, Trump and his cronies are trying to erase the link between these impacts and fossil fuel pollution. Trump has been effectively bribed by fossil fuel oligarchs—and he’s returning the favor by making it official U.S. government policy to remove all restraints on the growth of their industry.

Under Biden, fossil fuel companies reported record profits as drilling reached record highs in the United States. Yet consumers still battled high gas prices and other costs. Under Trump, doing favors for this polluting industry is no likelier to benefit regular people.

An administration claiming to crack down on “fraud, waste, and abuse” in government is doing the opposite. It’s engaging in corruption on a massive scale to benefit wealthy, politically connected oligarchs—at the expense of the rest of us.

In many countries, politics happens 365 days a year. Citizens hold their governments’ feet to the fire when they’re unhappy. Not so in the United States. We outsource politics to the politicians and check in every two to four years to see how they’ve been doing.

The post The Outsourcing of Politics first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post The Outsourcing of Politics appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

           As Democrats continue to deconstruct the root causes of their recent defeat and attempt to regroup for next year’s midterm elections, they might want to consider a new factor in American politics: the seductive power of a movement compared to a boring old party.

            On the surface, the 60th American presidential election was the usual two-way contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. But, as Democrats tried their best to run as normal and competent a campaign as they could despite Biden’s ill-timed withdrawal, Trump had re-branded and re-organized the Republican Party as a vessel of his MAGA movement.

            A movement is dynamic. Its number-one goal is building excitement and a sense of belonging.

            A party strives for constancy. It represents a set of principles through thick and thin.

All things being equal, a movement beats a party.

            “The difference between parties and movements is simple,” the progressive pundit David Sirota wrote back in 2009. “Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda. Movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it.” Democrats who were skeptical of military interventionism under Bush embraced it under Biden yet remained Democrats; the abortion-rights movement would vote Republican if the GOP were to come out as firmly pro-choice.

            Donald Trump has scrambled Sirota’s formulation.

Trump has built a highly-personalized movement detached from any discrete policy prescription. Rather than remain independent of party politics, his MAGA movement seized control of the Republican Party. Despite having achieved a sweeping victory, MAGA continues to act like an outsider insurgent movement.

Personality is everything. The dauphin J.D. Vance notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the MAGA movement without Trump. While I don’t give much credence to arguments that the president is a Nazi-in-waiting, there is an echo of the Führer Principle that gave the force of law to anything Adolf Hitler said. MAGA Trumpism is anything that Trump says at any given time.

At first glance at the man on the golden escalator in 2015, this highly individuated politics seems ill-fated. Trumpism is riddled with internal contradictions and existential hypocrisies. Trump’s habit of reversing himself, as he did recently by threatening Russia only to turn around and embrace it after a call to Putin seems destined, by traditional political standards, to turn off supporters who care about those issues. So does the conflict between his personal and political lives; surely evangelicals will turn against a crude serial adulterer who screws porn stars and doesn’t appear to have ever darkened the door of a church in session.

People who evaluate Trump by traditional metrics fail to understand that everything has changed. For a party, Trump’s inconsistencies and changing his mind 180° would be weaknesses to overcome or explain away. Not so for a movement. First and foremost, a movement moves. Where and how it moves is beside the point.
            A movement is entertaining. Think about Trump and his wild and crazy rants, not as appalling or racist but as unpredictable—and thus interesting. Think about Trump supporters and their giant flags, their sense of community.

Trump kept holding rallies throughout his first term—a party doesn’t do that. A movement does. A party doesn’t stick with an individual politician through thick and thin, as Trump supporters did through his legal troubles. A movement does. It has to, because it’s all about one man.

            If there is a 20th century authoritarian parallel to Trump, I have argued before, it is not the totalitarianism of Hitler but the culturally-centered rule of Mussolini. As the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who grew up under Italian fascism, noted, “Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” Mussolini, who started out as a socialist journalist, came to believe that people were drawn to action—any action—for its own sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection,” Eco wrote in an influential essay about fascism in 1995. “Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

            Writing at Salon, Chauncey DeVega complains: “President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president’s first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law.” DeVega blames the media for normalizing Trump and Democrats for not taking him seriously enough to convince voters.

            What such mainstream analyses dismiss is how soul-deadening the technocrats who run the West have been. Not only have they been unresponsive to people’s complaints about internationalism and declining living standards, they have been boring.

            Democrats (and many Republicans) have repeatedly run on not promising anything. The only surprise is that they got away with it for so long.

            Whether Trump is influenced by Mussolinian tactics, or his acute political instincts rediscovered the potency of a “cult of action,” the United States was primed for the politician Trump had become by the time he ran a third time in 2024—energetic, focused, retributive, imaginative—and stormed out of his inaugural ceremony with a blizzard of pardons, sweeping executive orders and bold diplomatic initiatives.

            Asked if she would have done anything differently than Joe Biden during his presidency, Kamala Harris said: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

            And, four years earlier, Biden told a group of wealthy campaign donors that, were he to be elected, “Nothing would fundamentally change.” Turns out, he was truthful. Nearly a third of those who voted for him in 2020 didn’t turn out for Harris in 2024.

            Liberal Democrats I talk to are depressed and disengaged in this, the first month of the second term of Trump. They’re also jealous. Why, they ask, won’t the Democrats run a candidate who campaigns and governs as aggressively as Trump is doing now?

            As for those Democrats, the party faces a choice as it prepares to challenge MAGAism. It can reconstitute itself into something that looks and feels more like a movement, far less careful and far more energetic. Or it can keep going as a party that promises that nothing will ever fundamentally change.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post A Movement Beats a Party Every Time first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post A Movement Beats a Party Every Time appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

With an annual budget rapidly approaching $1 trillion, the Pentagon already gets more discretionary tax dollars than any other agency.

Now congressional Republicans are proposing to hike that figure by anywhere from $100 billion to $150 billion—while slashing funding for programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs that help keep Americans on their feet.

Lawmakers have it backwards: We need to invest more in those programs and less in the Pentagon, which simply can’t account for how it’s spending our money.

We have to curb our endless spending on the military—and put that money back into our real needs, like creating jobs, educating students, protecting our planet, and much more.

Late last year, the Pentagon failed its mandatory audit—yet again.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, either—in fact, the Pentagon has failed every audit it’s ever undergone. According to the Project on Government Oversight, the Defense Department is the only department to have achieved consistent failure over nearly 35 years of government audits. Quite the achievement.

While the Pentagon may not know where its money goes, we do know that about half of its budget each year goes to private, for-profit military contractors. The Pentagon’s deep over-reliance on these corporations not only wastes billions of taxpayer dollars, but also feeds conflicts and contributes to weapons proliferation. Ultimately, this creates a fundamentally less secure world.

Much of the Pentagon’s operations and personnel have been outsourced to “private military contractors,” or PMCs. The use of PMCs exploded during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars—by 2019, there were 1.5 times as many contractors on the ground in the Middle East as U.S. troops.

These corporations have turned our tax dollars into their private slush fund with rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.

Take for instance the time in 2020 when the Pentagon paid over $52,000 for a trashcan. Or when a Pentagon contractor made a 9,400% profit margin off of a half-inch metal pin. Last year, reports emerged that Pentagon contractor Boeing made almost $1 million in profit just from overcharging for spare parts on C-17 cargo planes, such as soap dispensers.

There are countless examples of Pentagon contractors defrauding American taxpayers like this, and yet we keep writing them bigger and bigger checks. And the wealthier these companies and their executives get, the easier it is for them to throw their weight around in government.

Look at Elon Musk, President Trump’s chief billionaire backer and the one he charged with rooting out “waste” from the government.

Musk, the wealthiest oligarch on the planet, has many glaring conflicts of interest as he meddles in the U.S. government. Not the least of which: He’s a Pentagon contractor CEO himself, through his company SpaceX.

Contractor fraud isn’t going away—in fact, it will only get worse with the most recent Pentagon budget’s loosened restrictions on how these companies can spend taxpayer dollars. Despite this, there is little political will to crack down on the companies that are bleeding taxpayers dry.

Our politicians can’t just allow the Pentagon to fail audit after audit forever. We have to curb our endless spending on the military—and put that money back into our real needs, like creating jobs, educating students, protecting our planet, and much more.

Targeting companies that make billions ripping off taxpayers is a perfect place to start.

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered Pentagon officials to draw up plans to cut 8% from the military over each of the next five years, the most radical attempt to rein in such spending ever.
There would be 17 exceptions to the proposed cuts, including military operations at the southern border. Cuts to defense will face opposition in Congress, where lawmakers focus on budget cuts that could affect their districts.
On “The TMI Show” Ted Rall and guest cohost Robby West discuss this shocking attempt to co-opt anti-militarism as an issue away from the Democrats.

The post TMI Show Ep 82: Trump Wants To Slash Defense first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 82: Trump Wants To Slash Defense appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.