A few years ago, three French peace activists met with Pope Francis and asked him for advice. “Start a revolution,” he said. “Shake things up! The world is deaf. You have to open its ears.” That’s what Pope Francis did—he started a nonviolent revolution and invited us all to join.

I’m grateful for him for so many reasons, but mainly because he spoke out so boldly, so prophetically in word and deed for justice, the poor, disarmament, peace, creation, mercy and nonviolence. It is a tremendous gift that we had him for 12 years, that he did not resign or retire, but kept at it until the last day, Easter Sunday.

We’ve been hearing a lot about how he was the first non-European pope in centuries, the first Jesuit pope, the first pope from Latin America, the first pope trained after Vatican II, the first pope who was not a Vatican insider and the first to take the name of St. Francis (which was a bold and daring thing to do). But perhaps best of all: He was the first pope who worked as a bouncer at a pub before entering the seminary.

Francis wrote great books and greats encyclicals like “Fratelli Tutti,” where he called for a global fraternity rooted in love, solidarity, and respect for all people, where everyone moves beyond divisions and tries to work together to build a more just and compassionate world

Francis lived and proclaimed the Beatitudes. We Americans always think of ourselves in a kind of collective narcissism, but he always had a universal perspective. He looked at the whole human race and all of creation through the eyes of Jesus, one of the original nonviolent revolutionaries. As such, Francis spoke boldly about universal love, universal compassion, universal justice, and universal peace.

With this in mind, it’s worth focusing on the great themes of his papacy, and what they mean for us.

1. His Commitment to the Poor

Francis began his papacy saying he envisioned a church that is poor and for the poor. Yes, do charity work, he said, and serve the poor and marginalized, but have real relationships with poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised people. Get involved in their lives personally and join their struggle to end injustice and the systemic violence of poverty—and do it through love for actual suffering people. I loved that he opened a homeless shelter in the Vatican, visited prisoners, and met with and defended migrants and refugees, even bringing some to live at the Vatican.

2. His Commitment to Mother Earth.

Francis wrote great books and greats encyclicals like “Fratelli Tutti,” where he called for a global fraternity rooted in love, solidarity, and respect for all people, where everyone moves beyond divisions and tries to work together to build a more just and compassionate world. But his encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si,” might be one of the great documents in history. Not only does he denounce our destruction of the planet and its creatures, as well as the poor, but he denounces capitalism, corporate greed, and war as root causes of climate change.

The Earth “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote. He called climate change a spiritual and moral crisis and denounced what he called “an economy that kills”—a system that discards both people and creation in pursuit of profit. He denounced what he called our throwaway culture as moral failure, and named indifference itself as one of the greatest threats to our future. He insisted that “we can no longer turn our backs on reality,” and called everyone to take action for justice, compassion, and Mother Earth, our common home.

3. His Commitment to Mercy.

Over and over again, Francis called us to show mercy and clemency; to let go of grudges and put down our swords, guns, and weapons; to forgive to one another, reconcile, and seek peace. In particular, he changed canon law so there is not one sentence of support for the death penalty in church teaching. No Catholic, no Christian, can support the death penalty, he said. On many occasions, he tried to stop impending executions.

4. His Commitment to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

When a reporter asked him about LGBT folks, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” That’s precisely why the right hated him so much, because unlike U.S. President Donald Trump and so many others, he refused to make scapegoats of anyone or judge anyone, which, by the way, is a commandment in the Sermon on the Mount. However, he did judge and vehemently condemn hatred, prejudice, racism, war, corporate greed, capitalism, nuclear weapons, and, really, the U.S. itself for its imperial domination.

5. His Commitment to the Reformation of the Church

Francis tried to make many changes in the church, the Vatican, the Curia, and especially through the synod process, which has the potential to make the global church more egalitarian. If priests are good shepherds like Jesus, they need to “smell like the sheep,” he said. “The church is like a field hospital after a battle,” where people go for healing, recovery, and comfort—so it is messy and stressful because it is a place that welcomes and serves the suffering.

Could he have done more? Of course. I wish he had ordained women as deacons and declared that priests could marry. I wish he had placed women at the head of many, if not all, decision-making bodies within the Curia. As Joan Chittister just wrote, he really failed women. I wish he had made a much stronger response to the horrific sex abuse scandal, but I liked that he tried to get bishops and priests to stop acting like aristocrats—to let go of power and be of humble service to everyone.

6. His Commitment to Peace and Active Nonviolence

Everything Francis did was a form of Gospel peacemaking. Like Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and St. Francis, he was against war, all wars, no matter what the reason—and that’s the leap that few people make. One of his last books is called Against War. If you study the tributes in the mainstream press, you will notice that few mention his consistent stand against war, his opposition to nuclear weapons, and his efforts to end the wars in Africa and the Russian war on Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he went to the Russian embassy and violated protocol by dramatically begging for an end to the war.

Most of all, he denounced the horrific Hamas attack, killings, and kidnappings, and from then on, he denounced the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza that has killed over 51,000 people. Nearly every night since the war began, at 7:00 pm, he called the one Catholic church in Gaza, right up through Holy Saturday, to see how they were holding up. His last public words on Easter were a call for a lasting cease-fire in Gaza. I hope we can all speak out publicly like he did until the day we die calling for an end to all wars and all nuclear weapons.

He went to many places that few visit to fulfill Jesus’ commandment to make peace and practice the universal, compassionate love of God. He went to Iraq, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain, Mongolia, the Congo, South Korea, and Morocco. When he was in Palestine, he touched the shameful Israeli wall of occupation and prayed there, just as he had prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. In the United Arab Emirates, he had a historic meeting with Muslim leaders. In Canada, he apologized for the church’s treatment of Indigenous people over the centuries and tore up the Doctrine of Discovery.

Francis learned, as we all have to learn, that the only way forward, our only hope, is if every human being tries to practice, teach, and promote nonviolence.

In Greece, he made a surprise visit to a refugee camp and then brought three Muslim families back to Rome with him. In the Central African Republic, he went right into the warzone, and could easily have been killed. He literally placed himself in harm’s way. In Hiroshima, he denounced all nuclear weapons, and begged the world’s leaders to abolish all nuclear weapons. He said that the mere possession of them, the threat of using them as a deterrent, was immoral. No Catholic can support, build, maintain, threaten, or profit from nuclear weapons, he said.

Perhaps the most dramatic of all was in April 2019 when he brought the president of South Sudan and the rebel leaders together at the Vatican for a two day retreat. At the end, after pleading for negotiations and urging them to end the killing, he went around the room, got down on his knees, and begged each one of them for peace, and then kissed each person’s feet.

Francis consistently rebuked Trump and the Republican Party, as well as the many U.S. Catholic bishops and priests who support them. He even asked an associate to read JD Vance a long statement on the fundamentals of compassion and welcoming immigrants.

At the same time, Francis consistently met with leaders of popular movements from the Global South, encouraging them and all grassroots movements. Being from the Global South himself, he was determined to listen to their voices, not ours.

He called former U.S. President Joe Biden last December and made a personal appeal to release Leonard Peltier, and that, along with the grassroots movement, is why Leonard was released from prison. When Julian Assange was in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, Pope Francis had called him and talked for an hour, which I learned (first hand) really helped him. No one knows that.

Of all the stances he took, it was his growing commitment to nonviolence that gave me the most hope. Francis learned, as we all have to learn, that the only way forward, our only hope, is if every human being tries to practice, teach, and promote nonviolence.

My friends and I went to the Vatican many times over the years asking for an encyclical on Jesus and nonviolence, to make this the official teaching, position, and law of the church. We never got that, but Francis did much to turn the church back to its roots in Gospel nonviolence. In April 2016, he welcomed the first ever conference on nonviolence at the Vatican, and at the end we issued a strong joint statement saying there was no such thing as a just war, calling on everyone to practice nonviolence.

It was there that Cardinal Peter Turkson asked me to draft the Pope’s next World Day of Peace message, which came out on January 1, 2017, called “ Nonviolence, a Style of Politics for Peace.” I call it the first ever statement on nonviolence in the history of the church since the Sermon on the Mount.

Francis continued to speak about nonviolence over the years, saying “I think of nonviolence as a perspective and way of understanding the world, to which theology must look as one of its constitutive elements.” He also called nonviolence a “universal value that finds fulfilment in the Gospel of Christ” and called for a “nonviolent lifestyle,” noting “how nonviolence, embraced with conviction and practiced consistently, can yield significant results… This is the path to pursue now and in the future. This is the way of peace.”

To the Anti-Defamation League, he said, “Faced with so much violence spreading throughout the world, we are called to a greater nonviolence, which does not mean passivity, but active promotion of the good.” Elsewhere, he wrote, “Let us remember that, even in cases of self-defense, peace is the ultimate goal, and that a lasting peace can exist only without weapons. Let us make nonviolence a guide for our actions, both in daily life and in international relations. And let us pray for a more widespread culture of nonviolence, that will progress when countries and citizens alike resort less and less to the use of arms.” In his last statement on Easter, he prayed for an end to all violence, everywhere. That was his prayer, his hope, his message, his life’s work.

A good way to honor Pope Francis’s peacemaking life and his death at Easter is to rise to the occasion as he did, to claim our power as public peacemakers; reclaim our collective power in global grassroots movements of nonviolence; speak out; march in the streets; take public action; and resist war, injustice, poverty, racism, corporate greed, fascism, authoritarianism, genocide in Gaza, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. He urged us to be “pilgrims of hope.”

I invite us, in the face of so much despair, to rise up, reclaim, and promote nonviolence as he did, see the world through the eyes of the nonviolent Jesus as he did, and do what we can publicly as peacemakers to welcome God’s reign of peace on Earth. As Francis demonstrated, that’s the best thing we can do with our lives. That is the spiritual life, the fullness of life, the life of the peacemaker.

For decades now, Arabs, in particular Palestinians, and supporters of Palestinian rights have been the weak link in the civil liberties chain.

During this period, when a U.S. president or Congress has sought to take measures curtailing a range of civil liberties, they would exploit the perception of the danger posed by Arabs to justify their actions. They feel comfortable in doing this because they understand that the negative stereotypes associated with Arabs make the measures more acceptable and opposition to their efforts less likely to occur. Examples abound.

On three separate occasions in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration sought to roll back civil liberties, they began their assault with an attack on Arabs’ rights. Having established the identity of Arab or Palestinian with terrorist, they assumed no public support would be forthcoming in defense of Arab civil liberties. On the other hand, if their targets had been persons of another ethnicity, opposition would have been more likely.

In 1981, the Reagan administration issued an executive order that dismantled all earlier reforms by the Carter administration to outlaw domestic surveillance by the CIA and FBI, using Arabs as the scapegoats to justify this measure. As a result, for five years, the FBI infiltrated and disrupted Palestinian student groups nationwide—finally disbanding the effort with nothing to show but agents’ hours wasted and millions of dollars spent.

What Trump’s administration policies share in common with his predecessors is the use of Arabs, in particular Palestinians, and their supporters, as convenient scapegoats to justify the erosion of rights and liberties.

Reagan’s Department of Justice was also able to rewrite U.S. extradition law, making it easier to fulfill the requests of foreign countries to extradite individuals without due process protections. They did so using the case of a Palestinian visa holder whose extradition had been requested by Israel. Based on this case, Congress rewrote the laws affecting all extradition requests.

It was also under former President Ronald Reagan that the Immigration and Naturalization Service released its “Alien Terrorist and Undesirables Contingency Plan,” detailing steps under provisions of the McCarren Walter Act to imprison, try in secret, and deport large numbers of aliens based solely on their ethnicity or their political beliefs or associations. Consistent with the approach taken, the “Plan” makes several references to Arab immigrants. In fact, the test case used to lay the groundwork for this “Plan” was the arrest of seven Palestinians and the Kenyan wife of one of them, charging them with nothing more than their political beliefs and association.

In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued an executive order “Prohibiting Transactions with Terrorists Who Threatened to Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process” and followed by the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995. Both efforts introduced draconian measures that would seriously erode civil and political rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and residents under the Constitution and international law. The law, for example, gave far-reaching powers to law-enforcement agencies, removed the presumption of innocence for those under investigation, made it easier for the government to conduct surveillance against persons suspected of violating conspiracy laws, allowed for prohibition of “material support deemed by the president to benefit terrorist organizations,” established procedures allowing the government to detain and deport individuals based on secret evidence with no opportunity for the detainees to defend themselves, and allowed law-enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance on individuals or groups, based purely on their beliefs and associations. Using the executive order and new legislation the Clinton administration unleashed a nationwide profiling program at airports, which harassed and questioned hundreds of Arab and Arab American airline passengers, even before checking in for their flights, based solely on their dress, appearance, or Arabic names.

After 9/11, the Bush administration and Congress upped the ante. While intelligence failures and lax airline safety requirements were at fault in allowing terrorists to be trained in the U.S. and carry out their horrific attacks, then-President George W. Bush issued a series of orders that resulted in the roundup and deportation of thousands of innocent Arab students, workers, and visitors. They also ordered tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim visa holders to report to immigration offices where many more were held for deportation. The anti-terrorism legislation that passed through Congress allowed expanded surveillance by law enforcement, including warrantless wiretapping, searching library records, and an expanded use of profiling. Using the expanded powers given to them by the administration, law enforcement agents infiltrated mosques and Arab social clubs, entrapping a few gullible individuals in plots that were often organized by the law enforcement agencies themselves.

This is only a partial history, but it lays the predicate for the actions being taken by the Trump administration: threats to civil liberties like freedom of speech, assembly, and academic freedom; expanded authority given to law enforcement agencies to use unconstitutional measures to detain and deport individuals based on their ethnicity or political beliefs; and an expanded interpretation of the “material support” argument used by the Reagan and Clinton administrations to violate the protected rights of citizens and residents.

There are differences to be sure. While the measures taken during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations were based on exaggerated fears of terrorism in the U.S., it’s important to note that a review of the profiling, surveillance, and immigration programs established during these administrations did little to uncover or prosecute actual cases of terrorism. At the end of the day, despite billions of dollars spent and precious law enforcement resources expended, these programs did nothing more than contribute to an expansion of law enforcement powers and erosion of rights. In the case of the Trump orders, there’s not even the pretense of fighting terrorism—rather, an exercise in the brutal use of power to create fear and force institutions and individuals to cower and submit.

What Trump’s administration policies share in common with his predecessors is the use of Arabs, in particular Palestinians, and their supporters, as convenient scapegoats to justify the erosion of rights and liberties. What Trump knows is that in the midst of Israel’s war on Gaza, his support base will enthusiastically back his efforts. He also knows that liberals in Congress, who might otherwise oppose his policies, will be hesitant to offer full-throated support to the victims of his policies if it appears they are defending Palestinians or critics of Israel. For Trump, it’s the perfect storm. For those who care about defending rights and liberties, it’s just another example of Arabs, Palestinians, and those who defend them being the weak link in the civil liberties chain.

U.S. President Donald Trump has made “cracking down” on illegal immigration and “securing our border” his primary political aim. He has baselessly blamed immigrants for a range of social ills: taking jobs, causing economic strain, and committing crimes—all stoking fear and outrage. This messaging proved highly effective, with many Americans identifying immigration as the most important issue during the election.

On his first day in office, Trump hit the ground running with 10 executive orders challenging and reforming our immigration system, from rolling back birthright citizenship to expanding military presence at the border, where he ended the right to seek asylum. That was just the start. Each of these moves is concerning and worthy of deeper analysis. But there is a broader story to tell about the stakes—one highlighting that our democracy itself is on the line.

Indeed, a few of these actions—from expanding expedited removal and using the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds without evidence or trial to revoking visas and legal status for many international students to legitimizing the idea that opposing Trump can be construed as an act of terrorism—are evidence that we are already far down the terrifying slippery slope into fascism. In this deluge we can trace a dark arc bending toward an America where dissent—the mere exercise of First Amendment rights—is punishable by deportation without due process. Let’s take a closer look at this chain of actions.

The message? If even as a legal immigrant, you exercise your first amendment rights but disagree with Trump’s agenda, you may lose your status and be detained without due process.

Typically, expedited removal—deportation without a hearing—has been used against undocumented immigrants arrested within 100 miles of the border and within 14 days of entering the country (unless they are seeking asylum). But on Day 1, the Trump administration vastly expanded its enforcement area to the whole country and all migrants unable to prove they have been in the U.S. for at least two continuous years, including those admitted via parole programs. This huge expansion means many more undocumented immigrants will not be afforded due process—i.e. a hearing with evidence—before being deported.

Moreover, for the first time except in war, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act (1798) to deport and detain hundreds of Venezuelan migrants whom he claimed had gang ties. The act similarly allows for expedited removal so, despite a lack of evidence against most of those arrested, they were still removed from the U.S. and have been detained in a “mega prison” in El Salvador without a hearing. It’s worth noting here that the Trump administration also blatantly defied a judge’s order to turn around the plane to El Salvador. These are clear attempts to supersede legal norms and procedures and make expulsion from the U.S. even easier.

We should already be sounding the alarm. Instead, we’ve slid even further down this awful slippery slope as seen in the detainment of—or visa revocation for—around 800 students in the U.S. Let’s look at the case of Alireza Doroudi, a student at the University of Alabama whose visa was revoked before he was then arrested and detained at a remote facility in Louisiana. Here, the absence of due process is coupled with the abrupt disruption to one’s legal status—blurring the lines between legal and “illegal” immigration.

Unfortunately, many such cases feature a third troubling element: the stifling of free speech. The case of Mahmoud Khalil has rightly received significant attention. Khalil, a U.S. green card holder, was a student leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestine protests. Without evidence of any criminal act, he was stripped of legal status and detained. Here, the Trump administration yet again stretched the law, this time citing “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” as the rationale.

The threat? Speaking out in favor of a cause contrary to Trump’s agenda.

The message? If even as a legal immigrant, you exercise your first amendment rights but disagree with Trump’s agenda, you may lose your status and be detained without due process.

We have traced this dark arc: from increasing removals without due process—first by expanding and invoking obscure laws and then by blurring citizenship status—to threatening First Amendment rights by using a person’s speech to deprive them of vital legal protections and ultimately detain and deport them.

And here’s the final step: Trump and his cadre are doing everything they can to expand what speech can be deemed dangerous. Elon Musk has called largely peaceful protests against his company Tesla—including a few acts of vandalism—“wide-scale domestic terrorism.” The increasingly pervasive use of “terrorism” to describe speech critical of Trump’s agenda suggests that the already-dark actions against immigrants will likely be applied even more broadly. On April 14, Trump told El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele “homegrowns are next” and encouraged him to build five more prisons to house future citizen deportees.

As historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, warns: “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

The stakes are incredibly high, and the risks are very real, but we cannot be scared into silence. Those of us who are citizens are the most protected. So, it’s up to us to do all in our power to sound the alarm bells before it’s too late.

We can join pro-democracy efforts led by organizations such as Indivisible and the American Civil Liberties Union, support independent journalism that speaks out, and organize in our communities. The famous poem “First they came for…” by German pastor Martin Niemöller reminds us that those of us who still can, must speak out now before no one left to speak out for us.

Significant numbers in the Black community feel betrayed by our so-called allies who ignored the warnings of Black people regarding the election, its political rhetoric, and the history of racism and white supremacy in the country. So, in response to feelings of betrayal a Black preacher in Chicago recently framed the sentiment on social media, writing, "Nope, I turned out in November; they didn't!"

This feeling is pervasive within the Black community as people articulate the frustrations felt because of the outcome of the presidential elections last November. When asking people to turn out for the "Hands Off" rallies, the Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or even to protest the roundup of immigrants, there is a post-November 2024 pushback which is derived from a sense of betrayal because the people now asking for our participation and support did not stand with the Black community in the 2024 elections. In barbershops, beauty shops, nail salons, social clubs, fraternities, and sororities discussions have been animated expressing various theories in America's rejection of a Black person for President, and particularly in this case, a Black woman. The underlying feelings is that of betrayal and desertion.

Sure, there are all kinds of justifications for the rejection of the Harris-Walz ticket ranging from the Biden-Harris support of the genocide in Gaza, "She was a prosecutor who contributed to mass incarceration", to "I will not vote for the lesser of two evils." There were also the economic arguments citing inflation, and the failure of the Biden administration to deal with the cost of going to the grocery store. There were also the clandestine discussions laced with misogyny and race offering that a woman was unable to lead, and a Black woman was even worse than a Black man. Race and gender hatred are strong undercurrents of the Harris rejection, which is confirmed by the Trump-MAGA obsession with attacking and dismantling all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.

We have been played, and it is important for us to remember that the political game of fascism will have its way with us if we decide to sit out the various movements that attempt to resist this currently hostile order.

The dog whistle to white America is that DEI led to the election of a Black president in 2008, the increasing visibility of other Black faces, the prominence of people of color and different kinds of people in government and leadership, as well as advancing the sensibilities of gender equality. The anti-DEI framework also believes that immigrants have been welcomed and coddled by offering sanctuary and protection, multiplying their numbers, which dilutes the white population and poses a serious threat to the powers of white supremacy and the white ability to rule. Indeed, we are seeing and witnessing currently an aggressive clutch for power and the reassertion of white supremacy.

The Black community had seen all this before and can still hear the ghostly chains of enslavement synchronized to the racist tropes of old. The Black community largely was not fooled by the appeals of grocery store affordability or removing immigrants to make way for "Black" jobs, or the other empty promises of MAGA-Trump. We had seen it all, and it is difficult for us to believe that others could not see what we saw. Likewise, it is difficult and unbelievable to hear people now state that "it is worse than I imagined." We knew what would happen, and we feel betrayed by so-called allies who did not listen to our counsel and should have understood the racist history of America better and heeded the violence planned against people because of race, immigration, gender, or belonging to the LGBTQIA community. Instead of heeding all our warnings and alarms, significant enough numbers of white women, Latinos, and even some Black folks chose to drink the Kool-Aid of a sanitized racism sweetened with appeals of bringing jobs home, cheaper eggs, and making America first in the world.

There are all kinds of justifications for the Trump victory in 2024. Economic grievances, the lesser of two evils argument, objections resulting from the Gaza genocide, concern over former Vice President Kamala Harris' legal career and governmental service, and the secret handshakes and winks expressing real disdain for a Black woman led to Harris' defeat. But the latter three arguments or justifications were not persuasive to the Black community because the choices offered in this political system have always been between the lesser of two evils, and race history in America has taught us of the precariousness of life and that we always live under threat of a massacre or genocide.

We have never experienced a benevolent government. Though some governments and candidates have been better than others, the very structure of governance has never been benevolent. The system is not a system that is just or fair, but it has always been a system where fights have had to be waged for justice and fairness. We have always had to weigh who would be better on race, and who would be worse. We have had to weigh who would be better to fight against versus who would be worse. We have had to analyze and understand what sources of money and forces of political power were behind a candidate and what that ultimately meant for the safety of the Black community and our advancement. The lesser of the worst argument has always been the Black reality, and we have understood historically that the system is malicious in character, racially unjust, and unfair. There has been a constant fight to go forward, and a continuous struggle against being pushed back.

We said to the immigrant community that the assault on race was real, that the immigrant community would be hunted and hounded like Black folks were before and after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act or stopped and arrested like scores of people "driving while Black," but we were not heard or understood. Portions of the Latino community were pulled to the right and voted against their own interest despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump-MAGA campaign. A segment of the Latino community did not realize at the time that the rhetoric would criminalize and endanger all the Latino community. A resident of Prince Georges County, Maryland, Kílmar Abrego García, was disappeared to El Salvador. According to the administration his arrest and deportation were a mistake, but it is a mistake that the administration obstinately refuses to correct. There are also numbers of Latinos being stopped and arrested by masked goons and swept away. It is reported that the administration is scouring through social media and legal documents gleaning any kind of justification for the cancelling of student visas and the deportation of immigrants (documented and undocumented). Yet, 43% of the Latino community voted for U.S. President Donald Trump! This represented an increase of 8% more Latino votes going to Trump than in the previous presidential elections. When we hear this statistic, we are rightfully alarmed, yet we cannot lose sight that this also means that 57% of the Latino community understood the struggle in America and took seriously the alarm cited by the Black community.

We were further alarmed by women who seem unable to hear the warnings of misogyny that have been experienced throughout the Black sojourn in America. The struggle to have autonomy over being, health, and existence have been all too real in the Black experience. Therefore, the Black community felt that women would surely hear, understand, and mobilize around the assaults on reproductive freedom, healthcare, and body autonomy. So, it was a surprise to know that 53% of white women voted for Trump. Similar majorities of white women have backed Republican presidential nominees in every election since 2004. But we have also forgotten, because of the ways statistics are sensationalized, that a majority of "ALL" women voted for the Harris-Walz ticket. They rejected the narrow and racist perspectives of the right-wing agenda in this election and in previous elections as well.

We can emotionally understand the Arab-Muslim-Pro-Palestine base not voting for Harris. By any stretch of the imagination, it would have been a steep climb to expect them to simply vote for the supporters of the Netanyahu-Zionist genocide in Gaza. So, this bloc of voters in protest either voted for Trump, a third-party candidate, or sat out the elections as punishment for the Biden-Harris blind support of Israel and its occupation and genocide. But not voting for the lesser of two evils in this case was to cast a vote for the victor—Trump. The protest vote, whether for Trump, a third-party candidate, or to sit out the election had the effect of turning loose and unmuzzling the monster of America's original sin—racism and white supremacy. The deserved punishment of Harris meant rewarding the deeply entrenched agenda of whiteness and unleashing a ferocious and unapologetic form of hatred that will require extreme and Herculean measures to resist.

Yet even the Black community is not immune from its own contradictions rooted in sexism and racial self-hatred. We are infected with all the gender bias that exists in the larger community, as well as our own struggles against one another—self-hatred. For example, though Harris won 80% of the Black vote, that however represented a 10% drop from former President Joe Biden in 2020. This means that 90% of the Black community would vote for a white man versus only 80% for a Black woman. Biden received 81 million votes in 2020 and Harris only 75 million in 2024. Six million voters either stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate. It was not necessarily that Biden was a better candidate over Harris, but he was white and male!

The Trump-MAGA forces exploited the gender and race biases within the Black, Latino, and white (male and female) communities. The political right offered and framed news stories and opinions promoting the gender crisis for Harris among Black males in an effort to give permission to Black males to desert a Black woman. There is also the psychological damage of being Black in a white world where the culture has conditioned people to think that white is better than Black, and white male is far better than Black female!

The impurity and contradictions of the American political system have always placed before us choices of evil. The Black perspective however had always had to discern which evil is more entrenched and enshrined in the callous and sub-human hatred of old. One evil represents a historical cloth that produced the Trail of Tears, protected slavery, removed Indigenous people from lands at home and abroad, and celebrated white supremacy and power and theologically called it Manifest Destiny. The other is a liberal appearing form of evil. It speaks in terms of the rule of law and democracy but lacks in each. It forms alliances internationally with other flawed liberal-appearing democracies, if those governments are aligned financially and politically with its interests. It is permissive toward racism and white supremacy at home and abroad as evidenced by the massive urban "renewal" (removal) programs of the 1960s and 70s, mass incarceration that fell disproportionately on Blacks, and its support of the old racially segregated regime in South Africa or apartheid Israel today. It speaks to Blacks and other politically oppressed people in patronizing and paternalistic terms. It offers empty solutions to real problems to present themselves as magnanimous and sincere while not threatening or giving away their own grip on power. We have had to constantly organize against and challenge this evil, endeavoring to bend it toward justice or break it. One evil is clothed in the hatred and imperialism of old, and the other, though bad, was the lesser of evils that represented a dynamic that the Black community always had to live and struggle with. Again, people did not and could not hear our counsel to stand and fight another day rather than to lose and have it all taken away by madmen unapologetically bent on a white agenda in a white world.

We recognized who and what the Trump-MAGA movement is and what it meant for the safety of the Black community. We also knew intuitively that the safety of the Black community also meant the safety of all our allies, whether those allies were real or not. Black people could see the writing on the walls because we have heard all the rhetoric before lingering in the air and echoing through the cobwebbed hallways of racial struggle that unfortunately is not only of the past but in the present.

We are startled to think that people are still deluded by myths of democracy and think the system is well-meaning. People believe in the kindness of the system only because the legacies of enslavement, exploitation, and genocide are ignored along with the continuing effects of those legacies. The banning of books, the discarding of photographs showing images of Black people and women, the erasing of history, and the castigation of Critical Race Theory are calculated programs to further sanitize the foul odors of the country's past and present. Given all those factors it should be no surprise that Trump was able to declare victory because of a combination of arguments and reasons that were woven from the torn mythologized fabric of America's illusion of democracy and its altruism. We were surprised and shocked by what appeared to be a betrayal by people and movements that we considered to be part of the wall guarding against the re-entrenchment of racism, misogyny, hatred, xenophobia, and white supremacy. We were surprised, in shock, bewildered, and astonished by people who did not recognize the historical language of racism or the vicious actions that would ensue from it. The feelings of betrayal are real but are also shallow and misguided.

The sense of betrayal and alienation plays into the hands of the forces dismantling DEI, deporting immigrants, curbing First Amendment rights, and flagrantly violating the rule of law. They were able to get elected because they fostered spears of division that separated us over gender, race, and economics. Their strategy worked superbly. Our unity is our strength. If we don't join together in this current crisis and the battles to come but sit on the sidelines licking our wounds, continuing to feel offended and betrayed, then the forces of oppression win.

Let's admit that we have all been played, and their agenda was to play us against one another, fracturing votes over one issue or another and splintering one constituency group from the other until the numbers secured their victory. We have been played, and it is important for us to remember that the political game of fascism will have its way with us if we decide to sit out the various movements that attempt to resist this currently hostile order. Let's get over it and get back to work. This means that we must support one another from federal workers to Palestine, from Black Lives and reparations to LGBTQIA Rights, from immigrants to the rights of foreign students to study and speak out. All the issues are mine. And all the issues must be ours. We must support one another and join together so that no one is left out or behind. As Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emma Lazarus said similarly, "No one is free until everyone is free."

I write forgive me, not forgive us, because this guilt is deeply personal. It's a burden I carry in the comfort of my home, sipping clean water while the children of Gaza drink from brine water wells mixed in sewage—their small bodies wracked with dehydration and disease—if they even find water at all.

I can pluck wild mallow leaves from my backyard—not to satisfy hunger, but for the luxury of a healthy diet. I'm guilty of throwing away leftovers, when fathers and mothers in Gaza search through the rubble of demolished homes for a can of food that might have survived an Israeli bomb. Or they dare crawling through cratered fields, scavenging for wild greens to silence their children's growling stomachs—only to become moving targets under the cold gaze of Israeli drones.

Forgive me—I have a home, a heater and blankets to keep my children warm. While in Gaza, parents lie awake—not just from the cold, but from the torment of being unable to warm their children's tiny, freezing feet.

Gaza, your blood is a mirror the world dares not face. But I will not look away.

Forgive me when I kiss my daughter on her birthday and her laughter rings in my ears—while only the buzzing of Israeli drones rings in yours. She blows out her candles in a breath of joy, while you light a candle to push back the darkness, wheezing for air in a world that denies you breath.

I can hold my daughter, while you can't even retrieve yours from beneath the rubble—can't gather enough of her remains for one final embrace. American-made Israeli bombs scattered her flesh like sand in the wind, leaving you empty, aching with grief and dust.

Your hospitals, doctors, medics, and first responders who chose their professions to save lives—but became targets, because saving a Palestinian life is deemed existential threat for Israel. I beg forgiveness from every journalist whose words to expose war crimes became bullets, and whose cameras were more dangerous to Israel than cannons.

Forgive the world that calls your starvation, the destruction of schools and universities—and the murder of your educators—Israel's "self-defense."

Dear people of Gaza, forgive them if you once believed humanity had learned from the sins of African enslavement, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the European Holocaust. I repent, Gaza, if you believed that "Never Again" included you.

I'm sorry that the progeny of the victims of "Never Again" have organized under the agency of the Anti-Defamation League, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Political Zionism to kosher a genocide—carried out in the name of Judaism. "Never Again" is not for everyone, dear Gaza; it is only for the white West and the self-chosen.

The ideological antisemites are now Israel's closest allies. Today, "antisemite" no longer means those who hate Jews, but it is those who protest Israeli genocide. "Never Again" is monopolized by the professional victims—licensed by a god using past European cruelty to justify present Israeli injustice in Palestine.

I'm sorry, Gaza, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has betrayed you. Instead of shielding you, it became an arm of your oppressor. When the refugee camps of Jenin, Nur Shams, and Balata rose to support you, they faced not just Israeli force, but PA bullets and batons. And in cities and towns that didn't rebel, the PA still failed to protect them from Jewish settler rampages—burning homes and groves, killing livestock, and shooting farmers.

Forgive me, Gaza, for believing in the illusion of Arab unity—that you were part of a greater Arab nation. That the rulers of Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Baghdad, Riyadh, and others would rise for you. I believed we shared a common pain, a common struggle. I believed the Arab world would never let you starve. I was wrong.

Instead, they became part of your siege. Rafah is sealed not only by Israeli soldiers but by Egyptian concrete walls and watchtowers. Arab dictators shake hands with those who bomb your hospitals. Rulers from the rich Arab Gulf buy Israeli technology—tested first on your neighborhoods.

Forgive me, Gaza, for believing the rulers who betrayed Palestine in 1948 would ever defend you. Like their ancestors who opened the gates to the Crusaders 900 years ago—trading Palestinian blood for their survival—they do so again today.

History repeats itself, Gaza. The same kings and emirs who welcomed invaders then, embrace Israel now—gorging themselves on roasted camels while your children wither from hunger. Their capitals glow with the lights of music festivals, while Gaza's nights are set ablaze by the flares of American-made 2,000-pound bombs.

To the Arab tyrants who still bow to their colonial masters, I say: The European Crusaders did not spare your ancestors once they conquered Palestine. They turned their swords on the very rulers who helped them, devouring their mini kingdoms one by one.

I'm sorry, Gaza, that when the people of Yemen stood for you—blocking shipments to an Israeli port to demand food for your children—their own children were murdered in an Israeli-American proxy war. Like yours, their suffering is silent, and their pain earns no headlines.

Forgive me that only the Lebanese Resistance—unyielding under Israeli bombardment—steadfast, while other Arabs profited from your agony. Yemen and the Lebanese Resistance sought not applause, but to let you know you are not alone. Though the Arab world and much of humanity turned their backs, they did not waver. Yemen and the Lebanese Resistance traded neither dignity nor principle with the forces of evil.

Gaza, your blood is a mirror the world dares not face. But I will not look away.

Forgive me for my helplessness.
Forgive me for every sip of water, every bite of food, every breath I take while you suffocate.
Forgive me, if those I met in Gaza years ago ever thought I'd forgotten them.
Forgive me if I couldn't help everyone who asked.
Forgive my comfort.
Forgive my peace.

I seek not your absolution—
Only that you know:
You are not forgotten.

By Ralph Nader April 25, 2025 From a recent peaceful student rally at Columbia University came a chant that summed up their protest – “FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD AND YOU’RE ARRESTING US INSTEAD.” This is the bloody omnipresence that the co-belligerent Trumpsters and their fearful University leaders, whom Trump has targeted for submission, are relegating…

The Trump Administration has announced its intention to withdraw over $1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that supports public broadcasting in the United States in the form of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

Although federal funding makes up only a small portion of the overall budgets for these organizations—a combination of private donations, corporate sponsorship, state financing makes up a larger part—the funding is vital for public television and radio in smaller local markets where public or corporate support is difficult to obtain. The cuts would likely kill off those smaller stations and weaken those in larger markets.

In effect, the last traces of public media would disappear from large sections of the United States, leaving them entirely in the hands of corporate media.

This attack on U.S. public media is perhaps the least surprising news imaginable. When I was interviewed last month here in Sweden after Trump effectively shut down Voice of America (VOA), I was asked what could be next on the Republican media agenda. I didn’t hesitate in my response: next would be the de-funding of the nation's public broadcasting system. To me, it wasn’t a question of if…but when.

In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens.

The threat to kill public broadcasting in the U.S. is not the same as the killing of Voice of America. Through stations such as Radio Free Europe, VOA had always had been the mouthpiece of the U.S. state. It was part of global U.S. soft power, promoting the nation's foreign policy and economic interests. It was anything but objective, independent journalism.

PBS and NPR, on the other hand, are something entirely different. They represent an alternative model for how media in the U.S. could be…or, at least, could have been. Created in 1967 under President Lyndon Johnson, and decades after private media giants ABC, NBC, and CBS had been allowed to take near-complete control over U.S. broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was meant to provide U.S. citizens with a non-commercial media alternative.

Unlike their European counterparts, however, which began as well-financed monopolies in the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. public media were born weak. They were never meant to challenge the power of U.S. corporate media.

For the past half century, U.S. public broadcasting has existed at the margins of the national media ecosystem, producing high-quality educational programming and decent news that attracted a predominantly well-educated, urban audience. Low levels of federal funding meant that U.S. public broadcasting, again unlike European counterparts such as Sweden's SVT or the UK's BBC, was forced to take money from corporations in order to survive. When I lived in the U.S., PBS took so much "sponsorship” money from oil companies such as ExxonMobil that it was jokingly referred to as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System.”

So, why kill off the last remnants of a media system that attracts only a tiny fraction of the U.S. audience and gets the majority of its financing from non-government sources?

Simple. Because of what it represents.

The Trump administration and its oligarchy of advisors have as their central goal to destroy or undermine any and all institutions in U.S. society that either suggest an alternative to private, corporate control or provide a counter-argument to the myth that the “free market” is the best option for structuring U.S. society: from education to health care to media. The very idea that the state could in any way contribute to the greater good is horrific and must be crushed.

In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens. In modern societies, absolutely soaked in the logic of consumption, there needs to be at least a few spaces where your value is seen as inherent and not related to how much disposable income you have.

Here in Sweden, for example, that includes not just public broadcasting, but things like universal healthcare and university education. The logic is simple: being informed, being healthy and being educated should not be privileges restricted to those who can afford it. And, a well-informed, healthy and well-educated society benefits everyone.

Public broadcasting in the U.S. is in need of serious reform. And, public broadcasting in Europe isn’t perfect. But, despite their various flaws, their value can be found not only in what they produce in terms of content, but in what they tell people about how society can be structured. That working alternatives exist and can co-exist. That it’s possible to have a free market, but at the same time recognize there are some elements of society too important to be left to the mercies of corporations, billionaires, and profit margins.

For people like Trump and Musk, these non-commercial spaces of citizenship are viruses eating away at profits. But they aren’t the virus.

They are the vaccine.

LIVE 10 am Eastern time! But you can watch anytime you’d like:

Tune in the TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan, where the dynamic duo dives into the transformative legacy of Pope Francis and the high-stakes papal succession process.

Joined by Catholic scholar Timothy Gordon, this episode unpacks the late pontiff’s revolutionary impact—his outreach to marginalized communities, progressive reforms, and polarizing clashes with conservative factions. From his bold stance on poverty and inclusion to navigating a divided Church, Francis’ era reshaped global Catholicism. The discussion explores the secretive conclave, where cardinals will elect the next pope, and highlights leading candidates poised to steer the Vatican’s future. Will the Church continue Francis’ progressive path or pivot to tradition?

Expect a thought-provoking, no-holds-barred analysis of faith, power, and the Catholic Church’s role in a rapidly changing world. With Ted’s incisive wit, Manila’s sharp insights, and Gordon’s deep expertise, this episode is a must-watch for anyone captivated by the Vatican’s past, present, and future. Catch it live or stream on-demand for a front-row seat to history in the making!

The post TMI Show Ep 125: “Pope Francis’ Legacy: What Next?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world—between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies—want their governments to take stronger climate action.

As co-founders of a nonprofit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.

For years—and especially at this fraught political moment—most coverage of the climate crisis has been defensive. People who support climate action are implicitly told—by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news coverage and social media discourse—that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view.

That is not what the new research finds.

What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do?

The most recent study, People’s Climate Vote 2024, was conducted by Oxford University as part of a program the United Nations launched after the 2015 Paris agreement. Among poorer countries, where roughly 4 out of 5 of the world’s inhabitants live, 89% of the public wanted stronger climate action. In richer, industrialized countries, roughly 2 out of 3 people wanted stronger action. Combining rich and poor populations, “80% [of people globally] want more climate action from their governments.”

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication—which, along with its partner, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, is arguably the global gold standard in climate opinion research—has published numerous studies documenting the same point: Most people, in most countries, want stronger action on the climate crisis.

A fascinating additional 89% angle was documented in a study published by Nature Climate Change, which noted that the overwhelming global majority does not know it is the majority: “[I]ndividuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act,” the report states.

In other words, an overwhelming majority of people want stronger action against climate change. But at least for now, this global climate majority is a silent majority.

Taken together, the new research turns the conventional wisdom about climate opinion on its ear. At a time when many governments and companies are stalling or retreating from rapidly phasing out the fossil fuels that are driving deadly heat, fires, and floods, the fact that more than 8 out of 10 human beings on the planet want their political representatives to preserve a livable future offers a much-needed ray of hope. The question is whether and how that mass sentiment might be translated into effective action.

What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do? How might this majority’s actions—as citizens, as consumers, as voters—change? If the current narrative in news and social media shifted from one of retreat and despair to one of self-confidence and common purpose, would people shift from being passive observers to active shapers of their shared future? If so, what kinds of climate action would they demand from their leaders?

These are the animating questions behind the 89% Project, a yearlong media initiative that launched this week. The journalistic nonprofit we run, Covering Climate Now, has invited newsrooms from around the world to report, independently or together, on the climate majorities found in their communities.

Who are the people who comprise the 89%? Given that support for climate action varies by country—the figure is 74% in the U.S., 80% in India, 90% in Burkina Faso—does support also vary by age, gender, political affiliation, and economic status? What do members of the climate majority want from their political and community leaders? What obstacles are standing in the way?

The week of coverage that started on Tuesday will be followed by months of further reporting that explores additional aspects of public opinion about climate change. If most of the climate majority have no idea they are the majority, do they also not realize that defusing the climate crisis is by no means impossible? Scientists have long said that humanity possesses the tools and knowhow necessary to limit temperature rise to the Paris agreement’s aspirational target of the 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. What has been lacking is the political will to implement those tools and leave fossil fuels behind. The 89% Project will culminate in a second joint week of coverage before the COP30 United Nations climate meeting in Brazil in November.

While it’s impossible to know how many newsrooms will participate in this week’s 89% coverage, early signs are heartening. The Guardian newspaper and the Agence France-Presse news agency have joined as lead partners of the project. Other newsrooms offering coverage include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, and Time magazines in the U.S.; the National Observer newspaper in Canada; the Deutsche Welle global broadcaster in Germany; the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy; the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan; and the multinational collaborative Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism based in Jordan.

We believe the current mismatch between public will and government action amounts to a deficit in democracy. Can that deficit be addressed if the climate majority awakens to its existence? Would people elect different leaders? Buy (or not buy) different products? Would they talk differently to family, friends, and co-workers about what can be done to build a cleaner, safer future?

The first step to answering such questions is to give the silent climate majority a voice. That will happen, finally, this week in news coverage around the world.

This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Let Earth Day be every day! Let it transcend the present state of politics and our economic hierarchy. Let it open us to the future we long for but do not yet envision.

We live on one vulnerable, extraordinary planet. We are not its overlords; we are part of an evolving circle of life, which we are still trying to understand. And we can only understand it if we also value it, ever so deeply. Earth Day is also Love Day.

Oh God, let it flow beyond the invisible borders we have created. To that end, I call forth the late Pope Francis, who died two days ago as I write—a day before Earth Day 2025. He was 88. Unlike most world leaders, he saw the need to transcend the present worldview—including religion—that currently holds the planet hostage.

The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life.

As Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado professor and contributor to the Jesuit publication America Magazine, noted recently in a Democracy Now interview, Pope Francis was insistent on linking major political issues, such as protecting the planet’s ecosystem and halting the war on migrants. “Justice for both,” Schneider said. We must “counter the idea of disposability.”

This is a cry from the depths of our soul. Value the planet. Value all of humanity. We have to reach beyond the world we think we know and, as the Pope put it, according to Schneider, “learn from the periphery.”

The migrant crisis and the climate crisis are intertwined. The Pope “called for solidarity across borders. He called for taking down the idols of our world—the things that we think are real that really aren’t: borders created with imaginary lines.”

That is to say: Tear down that wall, this is a wall we’ve built in our own hearts. Planet Earth is a single entity; our complex differences are interrelated. Yes, conflict is inevitable, but dehumanizing those with whom we disagree is never the answer. Yes, this is an inconvenience for those in power—and for those who want, and feel entitled, to use up the planet for personal gain. Humanity, as Pope Francis understood, is at an extraordinary transition point: beyond exploitation.

As Cynthia Kaufman writes:

The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function...

Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.

Principles of solidarity? This is a huge leap for the part of humanity that assumes itself to be in control of the future. Kaufman is not talking about an alliance of good guys against bad guys, but solidarity in a total way: solidarity with the planet and its extraordinarily complex ecosystem. “Solidarity” values continuous learning, understanding, and protecting, not simply controlling. That is to say: environmental stewardship.

According to the Earthday website:

It is widely acknowledged that Indigenous people, despite making up just 5% of the global population, protect a significant amount of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a term for the collective Indigenous knowledge and beliefs about nature and man’s place in it, and serves as an alternative to the more objective and resource-oriented Western worldview of the environment as something to be exploited.

I would put it this way: Planet Earth has a soul.

I say this in a non-religious way, without a sense of explanatory understanding, just a sense of wonder. The planet itself is alive. And life itself should be what we value most, not... money (the invisible god).

As Earthday notes:

Like the Maōri, many Indigenous communities consider themselves “guardians” of their local environmental resources.

Within the 2.7 million square miles of the Amazon Rainforest, there are approximately 400 distinct tribes which call the rainforest home. The Guajajara tribe, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are particularly known for their fierce protection of their local forests from illegal loggers, and continue to risk their lives daily for their home.

Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible god who holds us hostage. I don’t say this with a simple shrug but, rather, without knowing how this will happen—just that it must. The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life. This is what I have called empathic sanity. Real change is impossible without it.

People of a certain age will remember the old black-and-white movies, The Twilight Zone, and countless Cold War-era dramas set in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. In scene after chilling scene, people in uniform approach random pedestrians and bark, “Papers, please.”

Those who hesitate—who don’t have their documentation in order, who look “out of place,” or simply fail to comply fast enough—are dragged away. Vanished. Disappeared into the gulag or the prison camps, never to be seen again.

It was always framed as national security. Public order. Protecting the homeland. But what it really was, in both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR, was authoritarianism dressed up as bureaucracy.

This combination of surveillance, identification, and coercion has always been the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, and Trump’s is no different.

Republicans in the House have passed legislation requiring people to bring their passports to register to vote; increasingly Americans with brown skin are today carrying their citizenship papers, birth certificates, and even passports out of fear of a chance encounter with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Because it’s already started here: On his first day in office, President Donald Trump issued a directive requiring all noncitizens in the U.S.—including those on visas and green card holders—to carry proof of their legal status at all times. Failure to comply will result in imprisonment.

This policy, part of Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” has sparked fears among civil rights groups that it could lead to racial profiling and wrongful detentions of U.S. citizens who may be unable to immediately prove their status.

As recently happened to Jose Hermosillo, who was held in a detention facility for undocumented immigrants for 10 days after simply asking an officer for directions.

It’s as if the Trump regime is taking a cue from those old movies, like they were templates for America’s future. After all, if you want to control a civilian population this is tried and true.

The Soviet Union’s internal passport system, introduced in 1932, became the backbone of state control over citizens. Those domestic passports—containing personal information and required for anyone over 16—weren’t just identification but permission slips for existence itself. Without the proper stamps and approvals, citizens couldn’t access employment, housing, education, or even food rations. The system created a population dependent on state approval for their most basic needs.

During crackdowns like those following the 1968 Prague Spring, these identification systems became weapons allowing authorities to swiftly target, detain, and “disappear” political opponents under the guise of administrative violations. The message was clear: Your papers aren’t just documentation; they’re the difference between freedom and vanishing into the system.

Another poignant example of this oppressive system was the “Green Ticket Roundup” on May 14, 1941, in Paris. Immigrant Jews received summonses from the Nazi-collaborating Vichy government printed on green paper, instructing them to report for a “status check.” Upon arrival, over 3,700 individuals were arrested and deported to death camps, marking one of the first mass arrests of Jews in France during World War II .

A regime of fear, enforced by ID checks and compliance demands, that began with targeting outsiders—immigrants, ethnic minorities, refugees—and then, inevitably, turned inward toward its own citizens: starting with marginalized groups, political dissenters, even the merely inconvenient.

Today, in the United States, we are witnessing the early stages of this same playbook.

Donald Trump recently attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for temporarily blocking his administration’s attempt to summarily deport migrants without due process. He raged, “We cannot give everyone a trial,” signaling his belief that constitutional protections shouldn’t apply to undocumented people, or perhaps to anyone he deems unworthy.

This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was a direct statement of naked authoritarianism.

Across the country, stories are piling up of ICE arrests and detentions with no transparency, no due process, and no answers. A mother from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, was suddenly detained by ICE, leaving her children and family in a panic, not knowing where she had been taken or why. She had no criminal record, no apparent reason for the arrest, and is still missing.

In another case, the U.S. government detained a father of two under a highly questionable interpretation of immigration law, claiming he was involved with a gang despite a complete lack of evidence or criminal charges. The Center for Constitutional Rights called the detention illegal, noting it was based on racial profiling and guilt by association, not rule of law.

Even places of education are no longer safe. ICE agents reportedly detained a Harvard affiliate in what critics called a targeted enforcement action meant to intimidate immigrant students and faculty. In Los Angeles, ICE showed up in a public school district, triggering fear and outrage among parents and teachers alike.

What kind of country sends armed agents—not local police, but militarized agents of the federal government—into school communities to drag away parents or students?

A country rapidly sliding into fascism.

Remember: What happens to the most vulnerable among us eventually happens to us all.

Trump and his allies claim this is about law and order. But when you strip people of their rights based solely on their immigration status—and create a culture where anyone who “looks” undocumented can be interrogated or detained without cause—you are not enforcing the law. You are weaponizing it.

Estimates suggest there are around 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States today. Trump has made it clear he sees the Black and brown people among this group as a political tool, not as people. He has floated mass deportation plans that would require enormous internment facilities and a paramilitary-style enforcement mechanism.

This is not idle talk; it is a blueprint for authoritarian control that will quickly expand beyond immigrants: He’s already said that he wants to be able to deport average U.S. citizens who piss him off to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador.

Consider how quickly this can escalate. In Venezuela, for example, internal identification cards are linked to government food distribution and political loyalty. Those who criticized the regime or fail to demonstrate allegiance are routinely denied basic necessities and even healthcare.

This combination of surveillance, identification, and coercion has always been the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, and Trump’s is no different. This is an old story.

And let’s not forget how it begins: first by singling out the “outsiders,” then targeting the marginalized, and finally sweeping up anyone who dares resist. We saw it in the 1930s. We saw it in the 1950s. And now, disturbingly, we are seeing echoes of it today.

Axios reported Wednesday that the Trump administration is floating the idea of arresting U.S. citizens who criticize their “anti-terrorism” policies (people who protest Israel’s Gaza policies at universities, and people who condemn Trump’s actions against immigrants) and deporting us to the same CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador:

Trump administration officials are suggesting their immigration crackdown could expand to include deporting convicted U.S. citizens and charging anyone—not just immigrants—who criticizes Trump’s policies…

Some officials say U.S. citizens who criticize administration policies could be charged with crimes, based on the notion that they're aiding terrorists and criminals.

“You have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them, because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime,” White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism Seb Gorka said in an interview with Newsmax.

Trump’s team also has questioned the legality of civic groups providing immigrants with “know your rights” trainings on how to respond to federal agents. Border czar Tom Homan suggested that such seminars help people “evade law enforcement.”

This is how it starts. Soon it could be policy, and anybody who protests or resists the Trump regime could end up disappeared.

The American public must resist the normalization of “papers, please” politics. We must reject the idea that entire populations can be stripped of rights simply because of how they look, where they were born, or what kind of documentation they carry.

Because once the machinery is built and the culture of silence takes hold, it doesn’t stop at the border. It never has.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Just this month, a family in Arizona reported that their grandmother, a legal permanent resident for over 30 years, was detained by ICE during a routine check-in. No explanation was given. No timeline for release. Just the bewildering silence of bureaucratic cruelty.

For the millions living in fear, and for all Americans who value liberty, the time to act is now:

• Contact your representatives and demand oversight hearings on ICE enforcement.
• Support legal aid organizations providing representation to detained immigrants.
• Document and report ICE activities in your community to civil liberties watchdogs.
• Show up for weekly protests.
• Participate in social media and other venues to get the word out.
• Send small donations ($5-$25) to politicians who show the courage to speak out or take action against the regime every time they do so; it’ll have far more impact than a call or postcard.

Remember: What happens to the most vulnerable among us eventually happens to us all.

History has taught us this lesson repeatedly. We ignore it at our peril

In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has moved aggressively to expand the authority of the executive branch, thereby upending our traditional system of checks and balances among the three branches of government. Reforming this system while he still holds office will be impossible, but he will eventually move on, and Congress should be planning now for changes to the system of shared governance to limit outsize executive authority and prevent future autocratic abuses.

Although President Trump has pushed the envelope further than most could have imagined possible, his abuse of power is reminiscent of the Nixon administration. After the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon, Congress took steps, such as the Anti-Impoundment Act, to curb presidential excesses. Following the second Trump administration, an even more fundamental restructuring may be in order.

One thrust of Trump’s second term has been a concerted effort to sideline the legal referees charged with checking abuses. Nearly a score of inspectors generals charged with addressing fraud and abuse have been summarily dismissed without cause. The Office of Government Ethics has been decapitated. The head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel charged with enforcement of civil service laws, such as whistleblower protection, has been removed.

America did not intend to elect a dictator.

The net result is that violations of laws and ethics go unchecked because independent oversight has been neutralized. To prevent the recurrence of future lawless regimes, Congress should reinstitute some of the checks Mr. Trump has shredded but in a way that insulates them from unilateral executive reversal. Congress needs to strengthen the institutional guardrails against executive violations of ethical standards and for protection of federal employees from illegal actions and enforceable standards for scientific integrity.

One step would be a statute relocating inspectors general (IGs) within the legislative branch. IGs do not perform an inherently executive function as they lack authority to implement their recommendations. Congress should appoint fixed-term IGs and team them with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), another legislative body, to keep this strengthened watchdog function beyond executive obstruction.

In this restructuring, the independent IGs could also conduct scientific integrity reviews to resolve challenges to the accuracy of scientific and technical agency information. This would put control of scientific and technical data and analyses beyond the unilateral control of the very bureaucracies responsible for creating them and thereby prevent them from peddling disinformation. Moreover, uniform procedures would facilitate the use of expert scientists from other agencies, universities, and other institutions to serve as review panels.

Similarly, institutions charged with enforcing civil service protections, such as the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics, should be moved into the legislative branch, as well, to prevent them from executive nullification.

Most fundamentally, the executive should not be able to control the judges who decide on disputes the executive branch has with its employees, contractors, and others. Basic fairness requires that these referees be impartial and not under the direct control of one party in the disagreement.

These referee positions are also not inherently executive in nature. For example, under the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, Congress designated its GAO to serve as an independent and impartial forum for the resolution of disputes concerning the awards of federal contracts. Similarly, investigations into and reviews of employment abuses and related disputes could be handled by statutorily relocated Offices of Special Counsel and Government Ethics.

Significantly, one of the more insidious recent Trump initiatives is asserting his authority to summarily remove administrative law judges (ALJs) who preside over hearings regarding administrative or legal disputes between federal agencies and affected parties. The prospect of removal at will undoubtedly pressures ALJs to alter their decisions to favor the executive agencies.

Mr. Trump is also attempting (once again) to sideline the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the civil service court which hears legal disputes about the illegal termination or treatment of federal employees. During his first term, President Trump shuttered MSPB by refusing to appoint any persons to fill MSPB vacancies. The three-member MSPB soon lost a quorum to decided cases and entered the Biden administration with a backlog of undecided appeals of more than 3,700 cases.

In his current term, Trump is trying the same approach, seeking to remove one of the two remaining MSPB members midway in her five-year term. As a result, the MSPB has once again been shuttered and may not reopen for years,

To enforce the basic rule of law, Congress should move the cadres of administrative law judges and the MSPB to the judicial branch so that the basic fairness of these decision-makers is safeguarded and they are shielded from further executive interference.

While President Trump may claim that he is implementing the will of the public, a recent Wall Street Journal poll found broad bipartisan support for limiting Trump’s unilateral executive authority. America did not intend to elect a dictator.

Yet, the principal takeaway from events of the past few months is that President Trump has conclusively demonstrated that the executive branch cannot be trusted to police itself in following the law. To prevent future presidents from assuming the same authoritarian posture as Trump, Congress must act decisively to fundamentally rebalance our system of checks and balances.

U.S. President Donald Trump is following the authoritarian’s handbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to consolidate power in Hungary. He is attacking the independent institutions that comprise the infrastructure supporting democracy—universities, law firms, culture, and the media.

And he is winning.

Major media outlets have “bent the knee” his press secretary’s preferred phrase for capitulation to Trump’s specious demands. His latest conquest is CBS.

CBS

Days before the 2024 election, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit accusing the network of bias in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeking $10 billion in damages, the complaint claimed that the edited interview and associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in Harris’ favor.

Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that “the First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation.” Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet called it “ridiculous junk and should be mocked.” Attorney Charles Tobin warned, “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”

A few days later, Trump won the election. And now CBS’ parent company, Paramount, wants to settle the case.

Whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion.

Through her family’s holding company, Shari Redstone who is “friendly with Trump” is Paramount’s controlling shareholder. If the Federal Communications Commission approves its pending merger with Skydance Media, Redstone will reap millions.

On February 6, Redstone told the Paramount board that she wanted to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The next day, Trump doubled his damages claim to $20 billion. As the media reported Redstone’s desire to resolve the case, Trump pounced. On April 13, he asserted on social media that the FCC should impose “the maximum fine and punishment” on CBS and the network “should lose its license.”

The parties have agreed on a mediator, but whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion. The more profound cost is the loss of CBS’ journalistic independence, which became apparent on April 22 when the producer of “60 Minutes” resigned.

In the program’s 57-year history, Bill Owens—who became the “60 Minutes” executive producer in 2019 after 30 years at CBS—was only the third person to run it. Owens’s memo to his staff should be a warning to all of us:

“[O]ver the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

CBS wasn’t Trump’s first media victim.

The Washington Post

In early November 2024, The Washington Post editorial board had signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Owner Jeff Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades, the paper did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.

A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump.

After Trump won the election, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million.

On February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift for the Post: It would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.

The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change. Prominent columnists followed him out the door, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.

The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times had an established record of presidential endorsements too—until 2024. Its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden blasted Trump. But in 2024, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong quashed an editorial that would have endorsed Vice President Harris. As at the Post, columnists and editorial board members resigned in protest, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers.

After the election, Soon-Shiong killed another editorial set to run with this headline: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”

Self-censorship is the most effective, enduring, and dangerous method of abridging free speech.

Facebook

More than one-half of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. One-third of all adults in the U.S. get their news from Facebook (operated by Meta). Meta’s president Mark Zuckerberg was among the billionaires who traveled to Mar-a-Lago after the election, met with Trump, and donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. (With the help of corporate and billionaire megadonors like Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump raised a record $239 million for the fund.)

Then Zuckerberg gave Trump a bigger gift: Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking of Facebook posts. As his rationale, Zuckerberg repeated Trump’s false talking points that fact-checking was “censorship” and reflected an “anti-Trump bias.”

Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats” that Trump had made to him in the past, Trump answered: “Probably.”

Meanwhile, Meta invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to join its board of directors.

PBS and NPR

On April 26, Trump will send Congress his request to halt all funding for public media—including NPR and PBS.

Viktor Orbán’s Playbook—The Trump Sequel

Since his return to power, Hungary’s prime minister has used “muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends,” according to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Orbán is “attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media.”

Orbán began “working with friendly oligarchs to purchase and transform media companies into conservative stalwarts; directing government advertising budgets to politically-aligned outlets;… and pressuring the holdover state media… to provide more favorable coverage.”

Rufo insists that Hungary “has a media environment at least as competitive as that of many Western nations.” Experienced observers disagree:

Human Rights Watch found that the government is using its near media monopoly to strengthen its hold on democratic institutions… The government’s increased control over the media market is linked to its broader assault on rule of law in Hungary, including undermining judicial independence and state capture of public institutions…

Trump’s attacks on universities, law firms, culture, and the media are all of a piece. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary provides a roadmap of his battle plan and a preview of his end game.

The Trump administration has sparked outrage by releasing photos showcasing alleged Venezuelan gang members, deported from the US, enduring harsh conditions in El Salvador’s maximum-security CECOT prison. Unlike the Abu Ghraib scandal under George W. Bush, where leaked images exposed prisoner abuse in Iraq, Trump officials openly shared these images, framing them as proof of tough immigration policies. The photos show detainees in shackles, heads shaved, packed into crowded cells, echoing the brutality of Abu Ghraib. Human Rights Watch reports 350 deaths in Salvadoran prisons since 2022, citing torture and neglect. The administration claims the detainees, linked to Tren de Aragua, threaten US security, but evidence remains thin, fueling comparisons to past war on terror abuses.

The post Trump Brags About El Salvador Prison Abuse appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Wars end. Bombs remain. In December 2020, the crew of an English fishing boat were pulling in a string of crab pots 22 miles northeast of Cromer when they noticed a tug on the main line. An explosion blew the Galwad-Y-Mor into the air, injuring five crew members, one of whom lost an eye. The cause was a bomb dropped by Nazi Germany three quarters of a century before.

America’s complex tapestry of federal, state and local laws, which has evolved over centuries through legislation, judicial rulings and amendments—a system that includes over 80,000 pages in the U.S. Code and millions of state regulations—contains numerous obscure laws and obsolete case decisions. Like unexploded ordnance from World War II, they lie hidden until they detonate without warning.

A case in point: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which grants a president the authority to detain, deport or restrict non-citizens from nations deemed hostile during times of war, or when a foreign government invades the U.S. The Trump Administration revived this ancient law, deemed “outdated and dangerous” by the Brennan Center for Justice, to justify deporting hundreds of Venezuelan men whom the White House calls gang members.

The Supreme Court will soon consider whether or not they buy Trump’s dubious claim that the Tren de Aragua gang is acting on behalf of the Venezuelan nation-state, his tenuous argument that their presence in the U.S. constitutes a military-style “invasion” under the meaning of the statute signed into law by President John Adams, and his sketchy declaration that the men are all gang affiliated, no due process required.

A better question is: why is this law still on the books? The last time it was used was by FDR, who invoked it after Pearl Harbor to round up, detain and deport non-citizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent. While two-thirds of the 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to U.S. concentration camps were American citizens detained under a presidential Executive Order, the Alien Enemies Act was used to imprison law-abiding non-citizens. With such an infamous history of abuse and executive overreach, it’s weird that Congress didn’t repeal the Alien Enemies Act in the 1980s, when the U.S. formally issued apologies and reparation payments to FDR’s internment-camp victims.

Trump is also exploiting the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, a relic of the McCarthy era that includes unconstitutionally vague provisions allowing the government to deport non-citizens for actions it deems to violate the foreign policy interests of the United States, however the government chooses to define it. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, fighting anti-Semitism is a core national security policy (that’s new to me and everyone else), protesting in favor of the people of Gaza is tantamount to supporting Hamas, which is anti-Semitic, so supporting Hamas promotes anti-Semitism, so participating in a demonstration against Israel’s war in Gaza is harmful to national security interests. That’s the pretext for ICE’s abductions and attempted deportations of college students Mohsen Mahdawi, Ranjani Srinivasan, and master’s degree graduate Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, and Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Öztürk.

Courts are trying to sort out which, if any, of Trump’s claims hold legal water. Really, though, they shouldn’t have to. Also really: it shouldn’t have been available for Trump to abuse in the first place.

As with the Alien Enemies Act, the INA remains American law after repeatedly being used as a tool of oppression—to deport labor organizers during the Red Scare of the 1950s, prohibit leftist intellectuals from giving speeches under Reagan, deport thousands of Muslims after 9/11, and even to deport HIV/AIDS patients. Its repeal is long overdue.

Other legal landmines abound.

The USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11 expanded government surveillance, allowing warrantless data collection, roving wiretaps and access to personal records under the guise of counterterrorism. As we learned from Edward Snowden, the NSA abused the Patriot Act to collect millions of communications from innocent Americans, yet it remains the law of the land. The Act’s vague definitions (“relevant to an authorized investigation”) and minimal oversight allow government thugs to target political opponents and suppress dissent. The Patriot Act is un-American. It should be shredded.

Civil asset forfeiture laws allow cops to seize your property. All they have to do is claim that they suspect the cash or cars or whatever of being tied to a crime, even if you are never charged or are found not guilty. Federal and state laws place the burden on owners to prove their innocence. It’s well-documented that federal forfeitures totaling $45.7 billion between 2000 and 2019 often targeted low-income individuals unable to fight back. Supreme Court justices have repeatedly expressed skepticism about these statutes, but neither they nor Congress has acted to protect the public. Every time you drive past a policeman, one of those laws lurks like a highway robber, ready to devastate your personal finances in an instant.

Laws with potential for abuse often serve the interests of powerful political forces. The Espionage Act, a 1917 law used against whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Snowden, remains in force. Both parties have exploited it—Trump prosecuted eight leakers, Biden continued the case against Julian Assange. Suppressing dissent is bipartisan. Civil asset forfeiture is a cash cow.

Periodic attempts at reform, like the piecemeal Law Revision Commission of the 1970s and Congressional Research Service reports, are mostly ignored.

The current system, where laws once passed are nearly impossible to repeal regardless of their flaws, is unworthy of a rational society. Congress and state legislatures should establish permanent standing committees to continuously review old laws for repeal or amendments to modernize them. Similarly, federal and state courts should regularly review case law to flag flawed decisions like the 1944 Korematsu decision in which the Supreme Court upheld FDR’s internment camps for Japanese Americans, and has since been used to justify such outrages as Bush’s extraordinary renditions and Trump’s first-term Muslim travel ban.

Insanely, Korematsu remains in force.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems,” which will be published May 1st. He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)

The post Detonating Democracy: The Threat of Obsolete Laws appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 3 pm Eastern but you can Stream at your convenience:

Don’t miss this episode of DeProgram with hosts John Kiriakou and Ted Rall, delivering razor-sharp analysis on three explosive stories rocking the political sphere.

First, they dive into the Ukraine crisis, focusing on President Trump’s proposed peace deal to end the war with Russia. As Trump pushes for a swift resolution, sidelining NATO and pressuring Kyiv, what are the implications for U.S. foreign policy and global alliances? The hosts unpack the deal’s promises and pitfalls, questioning whether it’s a genuine path to peace or a geopolitical gamble.

Next, they tackle the Pete Hegseth scandal, where the Defense Secretary allegedly used his personal computer and Signal chats to handle classified Pentagon data. This reckless breach raises alarms about national security and Hegseth’s fitness for office—is this a one-off error or evidence of deeper incompetence?

Finally, Kiriakou and Rall expose Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s stunning lapse: her purse, containing $3,000 cash and sensitive documents, was stolen at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. If Noem can’t safeguard her own belongings, how can she protect the nation from terrorism and border threats?

With their trademark candor and wit, the hosts connect these stories, revealing a troubling pattern of chaos and mismanagement in America’s leadership. DeProgram cuts through the noise, challenging mainstream narratives and empowering listeners with unfiltered truth. Whether you’re skeptical of government overreach or hungry for clarity on today’s headlines, this episode is a must-listen. Stream now on YouTube, Rumble and X and join the conversation as Kiriakou and Rall dissect Trump’s Ukraine peace deal, Hegseth’s personal computer fiasco, and Noem’s security blunder!

The post DeProgram: “Trump’s Ukraine Gamble, Hegseth’s Laptop Blunder, and Noem’s Purse Fiasco” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.

Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, 12 years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”

As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”

“Why,” he asked, “would anyone give weapons to people who use them for war?... The answer is money, and the money is drenched in blood.”

Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.

“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”

Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Toward a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a cease-fire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”

During the current war, beginning in 2023, Pope Francis developed a strong relationship with parishioners of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza. By holding virtual gatherings with the hundreds of people sheltering in the church, he was able to stay in daily touch with the realities they faced under Israel’s siege and bombardment. On days when he learned that the bombing was particularly heavy, Pope Francis would call to check in on them as many as five times a day.

Pope Francis carried his anti-war message to the seats of power in places around the world. In September 2015, exasperated by the superpowers’ desire to control others through militarism, he posed a simple question to the U.S. Congress: “Why,” he asked, “would anyone give weapons to people who use them for war?... The answer is money, and the money is drenched in blood.”

Pope Francis emphasized the stewardship so vitally needed for future generations to have a habitable planet, sounding an alarm about the need to address climate change. “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” he stated in a magisterial document released in October 2023. “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over, or relativise the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident.”

The Pontiff likewise denounced the use of atomic energy for the purposes of war, and declared possession of nuclear weapons to be immoral, asking, “How can we speak of peace even as we build terrifying new weapons of war?”

In accordance with his wishes, Pope Francis will be buried in a basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a place he went to pray before and after each of his 47 “apostolic missions.” The Basilica of Saint Mary Major is located in one of Rome’s poorer neighborhoods, a church in a neighborhood with refugees. Francis has entrusted himself to the protection of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

I’d like to think that those words, “Todo, todo, todo,” will break down the barriers creating illusory divisions between us, leading us toward true egalitarianism, embracing Earth and one another, grateful always for the chance to “choose life, so that you and your descendants can live.”

Beloved Franciscus, “Oremus.” Let us pray.

“America needs something more right now than a “must-do” list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story… the leaders, and thinkers, and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people… The right story will set our course for a generation to come…”

“Tell it—for America’s sake.”—Bill Moyers, A New Story for America (2006)

The time has come. The crisis intensifies, and the struggle is being joined. Abraham Lincoln’s warning of 1862–“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth”—speaks ever more directly to us. But keep listening. Lincoln did not merely issue a warning to his fellow citizens. Believing they already essentially knew what he was to say, he reminded them of who they were and made it perfectly clear to them what they had to do to overcome the crisis and prevail against the enemy they confronted. He told them that winning the war and sustaining the Union required not simply defeating the Confederacy, but also making America’s revolutionary promise all the more real for all the more Americans. He told them that to truly secure the United States they had to end slavery. He called on them to make America radically freer, more equal, and more democratic.

The time has come for us to do the same. The time has come for us to remind ourselves of who we are and what that demands. The time has come for us to take hold of our history and make America radical again.

The resurgent democratic energies and agencies we are sensing and seeing reveal that Americans not only continue both to believe in America’s revolutionary promise and to feel the radical impulse imbued in American life by the Revolution and sustained by the struggles of generations, but also yearn to defend American democratic life. Thus, they challenge not only a treacherous and reactionary president and his party. They challenge us—the democratic left—as well.

Even as we draw inspiration and encouragement from America’s progressive and radical story, we should never forget what our forebears never forgot, that the America we seek lies not in the past, but in the future that we are struggling to make.

They challenge labor unionists, progressives, radicals, socialists, and true liberals to do what we have failed to do for the past 50 years. They challenge us to finally fulfill the fearful expectations that in the 1970s drove the corporate powers that be and their conservative and neoliberal champions to declare war on the progress of American democratic life and pursue to this day class-war and culture-war campaigns against the democratic achievements of generations; the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; and the very memory of how those achievements were secured and those rights were won. They challenge us to unite in a coalition—call it a “popular front” if you wish—to liberate the Democratic party, the historic Party of the People, from the Money Power and to take up the fight to truly assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all Americans. A coalition determined to not only win elections, but also harness the powers of democratic government, subject capital to ever greater public regulation and control, and push the nation all the more in a social-democratic direction.

We cannot delay. We must start doing what we have not been doing. We must embrace our history and recognize that we are radicals at heart. And we must build a coalition of democratic forces which is committed not merely to restoring the democratic legacy of generations and the rights of workers, women, and people of color, but also, if we are to truly secure them, to radically or, if you prefer, progressively extending and deepening them. We must address the needs of the commonwealth and its citizens by re-appropriating through taxation the wealth transferred from working people to capital and the rich. We must empower labor both private and public to organize and bargain collectively and to elect union brothers and sisters to corporate boards. We must make ourselves more secure by demilitarizing and de-weaponizing everyday American life and by establishing a system of universal national healthcare. We must enact the Equal Rights Amendment and guarantee a woman’s right to control her own body. We must not simply abolish the Electoral College, but actually enact a constitutional amendment guaranteeing citizens the right to vote. Moreover, we should redeem FDR’s vision of an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans.

We must, however, do more than come up with a “must-do list” that will appeal to and draw together diverse interests. We must do what America’s finest radical and progressive voices have always done in the face of crises and forces determined to stymie, or bring an end altogether to, the progress of American democratic life. We must recover and proclaim anew the revolutionary promise projected in Common Sense, the Declaration, the Preamble, and the Bill of Rights so as to call out the powers that be and call forth our fellow citizens.

We must do what our greatest democratic poet Walt Whitman did on the eve of the Civil War when he wrote in his continuing epic, Leaves of Grass:

YOU just maturing youth! You male or female!
Remember the organic compact of These States,
Remember the pledge of the Old Thirteen thenceforward to the rights, life, liberty, equality of man,
Remember what was promulged by the founders, ratified by The States, signed in black and white by the Commissioners, and read by Washington at the head of the army,
Remember the purposes of the founders,––Remember Washington;
Remember the copious humanity streaming from every direction toward America;
Remember the hospitality that belongs to nations and men; (Cursed be nation, woman, man, without hospitality!)
Remember, government is to subserve individuals,
Not any, not the President, is to have one jot more than you or me,
Not any habitan of America is to have one jot less than you or me.

We must do what Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues did at Seneca Falls in 1848 when they stated in the Declaration of Sentiments that “all men and women are created equal”; what Frederick Douglass did in 1852 when he asked his fellow Americans “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”; what Lincoln did most eloquently at Gettysburg in 1863 when he projected a “new birth of freedom” to assure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”; what Eugene Debs did when he called forth Paine and other radicals and progressives to champion the causes of labor and socialism; what Franklin Roosevelt did in proclaiming the Four Freedoms and envisioning the creation of an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans; and what Martin Luther King, Jr. did when demanding a fulfillment of America’s revolutionary promise on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

Moreover, we must lay claim to or, better, reclaim America’s past and—without discounting the terrible tragedies and ironies that have marked the lives of so many Americans—articulate the truly radical story of America, the truly radical story that is America. The story of how, in the face of fierce opposition, and despite all of our terrible faults and failings, generations of Americans native-born and newly-arrived, men and women in all their extraordinary diversity, have struggled both to realize the nation’s fundamental promise of equality and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and to enlarge not only the We in We the People, but also the powers of the people. Indeed, the story of how our greatest generations confronted and transcended mortal threats to American democratic life in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s-40s (not to mention the 1960s) by making the United States radically freer, more equal, and more democratic. And we must tell that story in a way that enables us to not only appreciate why we feel the democratic impulses and yearnings we do, but also to recognize and embrace our many and diverse struggles to make real the nation’s promise past and present as ours not respectively “theirs” alone.

Finally, even as we draw inspiration and encouragement from America’s progressive and radical story, we should never forget what our forebears never forgot, that the America we seek lies not in the past, but in the future that we are struggling to make. And in that spirit, we should recall, if not publicly recite, lines such as these from Langston Hughes’ 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again”:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

The time has come to take hold of our history and make America radical again. The time has come not merely to take back America, but all the more to make America America.

Note: This article is based on the Afterword to my 2020 book Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again.

Under the guise of efficiency, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs and agencies that are the backbone of America’s civilian government. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and plans to shut down the Department of Education are just the most visible examples of a campaign that includes layoffs of budget experts, public health officials, scientists, and other critical personnel whose work undergirds the daily operations of government and provides the basic services needed by businesses, families, and individuals alike. Many of those services can make the difference between solvency and poverty, health and illness, or even, in some cases, life and death for vulnerable populations.

The speed with which civilian programs and agencies are being slashed in the second Trump era gives away the true purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In the context of the Musk-Trump regime, “efficiency” is a cover story for a greed-driven ideological campaign to radically reduce the size of government without regard for the human consequences.

The first two months of the Trump-Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic.

So far, the only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is—don’t be shocked!—the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed—finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in—yes!—other military programs without any actual reductions in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7, President Donald Trump announced that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military... $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.”

So far, cuts to make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons contractors have barely been touched—hardly surprising given that Elon Musk himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.

The legitimacy of his role should, of course, be subject to question. After all, he’s an unelected billionaire with major government contracts who, in recent months, seemed to have garnered more power than the entire cabinet combined. But cabinet members are subject to Senate confirmation, as well as financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules. Not Musk, though. Not only hasn’t he been vetted by Congress, but he’s been allowed to maintain his role in SpaceX.

A Hollow Government?

The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in the early years of the Cold War. And mind you, all of that’s true before Republican hawks in Congress like Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who is seeking $100 billion more in Pentagon spending than its officials have asked for, even act.

What’s at stake, however, goes well beyond how the government spends its money. After all, such decisions are being accompanied by an assault on basic constitutional rights like freedom of speech and a campaign of mass deportations that already includes people with the legal right to remain in the United States. And that’s not to mention the bullying and financial blackmailing of universities, law firms, and major media outlets in an attempt to force them to bow down to the administration’s political preferences.

In fact, the first two months of the Trump-Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic, a move that undermines our ability to preserve, no less expand, the fundamental rights that are supposed to be the guiding lights of American democracy. Those rights have, of course, been violated to one degree or another throughout this country’s history, but never like this. The current crackdown threatens to erase the hard-won victories of the civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights movements that had brought this country closer to living up to its professed commitments to freedom, tolerance, and equality.

Back in 2019, right-wing populist and Trump buddy Steve Bannon told PBS “Frontline” that the key to a future victory was to increase the “muzzle velocity” of extremist policy changes, so that opponents of the MAGA movement wouldn’t even know what hit them. “All we have to do,” he said then, “is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

The Trump/Musk administration is now implementing just such a strategy in a staggering fashion.

Sparing the Pentagon

Despite a certain amount of noise about DOGE-driven efficiencies at the Pentagon, the department has indeed been spared the fate of civilian outfits like the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education, which have been either decimated or are slated for elimination altogether.

A proposal to lay off 60,000 civilian employees at the Pentagon will have harsh consequences for those expecting to lose their jobs, but it is only 5% of the department’s workforce of 700,000 government employees and another more than half a million individuals under contract. By contrast, the workforce of USAID, which offered a peaceful helping hand to countries around the world, was rapidly reduced from 10,000 to less than 300.

The goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th century, in the proverbial dust.

In addition, the layoffs of research scientists and public health experts may prove to have disastrous consequences down the road by reducing the government’s ability to prevent or respond to infectious diseases and possible pandemics like new variants of Covid-19 or the bird flu. To compound the problem, the administration has ordered the firing of 1 in 5 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is now pressing that agency to terminate more than one-third of its outside contracts.

In addition, the almost instant firing of independent government inspectors general, who were charged with overseeing government waste, fraud, and abuse, at the start of Trump’s second term in office bodes anything but well for policing an administration already awash in conflicts of interest. Worse yet, the freezing of actions by the civil rights division of the Justice Department will allow racial injustice to flourish without the slightest meaningful legal pushback.

Then there are the plans of both the Trump administration and House Republicans to slash programs from Medicaid to Social Security to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that serve tens of millions of Americans. In addition, there have already been staff cuts at the Social Security Administration, as well as steps taken to make it harder to apply for benefits there, and that’s undoubtedly just the beginning. In the future, there could be devastating direct benefit cuts to a program that serves more than 70 million Americans. And such crucial programs may, in their own fashion, end up on the chopping block, in part to make way for a planned multi-trillion-dollar tax cut geared mainly—you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn—to helping individuals at the high end of the income scale.

In short, the goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th century, in the proverbial dust.

The Pentagon Exception

While most government agencies are either under siege or fear that they will be so in relatively short order, one agency has largely escaped the budget cutter’s knife: the Pentagon. In 2024, that agency (including nuclear warhead work done at the Department of Energy) already received an astonishing $915 billion, accounting for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget that year.

Meanwhile, as a New York Times analysis recently showed, the revenues of major weapons contractors have barely been touched. So far, General Dynamics (with a loss of less than 1%) and Leidos (with a loss of 7%) are the only firms among the top 10 weapons contractors to experience any kind of reduction in revenues from DOGE’s efforts.

One possible tradeoff within the Pentagon could be a move away from big platforms like aircraft carriers and piloted combat aircraft toward faster, nimbler, more easily produced systems based on applications of artificial intelligence, including swarms of drones. Elon Musk is already a longtime critic of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, which he’s slammed as “the worst military value for money” in the history of Pentagon procurement. His solution, however, is ever more advanced drones, presumably produced by his Silicon Valley allies.

But there is another possibility: The Pentagon might further boost its budget so that it can fund systems large and small, simultaneously feeding both the big contractors and the emerging military tech firms. After all, despite Musk’s critique, the president only recently announced that Boeing will produce a new plane, the F-47 (that “47” being—you guessed it!—in honor of America’s 47th president).

If there is a move toward tradeoffs between existing systems and new tech, both sides will have ample lobbying clout at their disposal. After all, the Silicon Valley crowd is literally embedded in the Trump administration from Musk to Vice President JD Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, the founder of the military-tech firm Palantir. Shortly after graduating from Yale Law School, Vance took a job at Mithril, a venture capital firm owned by Thiel. When Vance left that firm in 2019 to run for the Senate in Ohio, he did so with $15 million in backing from Thiel.

And Thiel is just one of the tech moguls backing Vance. An analysis by CBS News found that:

Vance, a relative newcomer to national politics, has assiduously courted billionaires and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling memoirist of despair, drugs, and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket that could seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The conservative New York Post summarized the state of play in an article headline in July 2024: “Silicon Valley Cheers Vance Pick as More Tech Billionaires Back Trump.” And keep in mind that Musk and Vance are not the only advocates for the military-tech sector embedded in the Trump administration. Stephen Feinberg, second-in-charge at the Pentagon, worked for Cerberus Capital, an investment firm that has a history of investing in the handgun and defense industries. And Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been selected to serve as the deputy secretary of the Army. A recent analysis by Bloomberg, in fact, found that “more than a dozen people with ties to Thiel—including current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefited from his investments and charitable giving—have been folded into the Trump administration.”

For their part, the Big Five arms contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, still have a firm foothold in Congress, having made millions in campaign contributions, employed hundreds of lobbyists serving on commissions that influence military spending and strategy, and placed their facilities in a majority of the states and districts in the country. Even if some in the Pentagon tried to phase out the F-35, Congress might well add funds to that institution’s budget request to save the program.

Recent procurement decisions suggest that there may be a desire in both Congress and the Trump administration to finance traditional contractors and emerging tech firms alike. The two largest recent program announcements—Boeing’s selection as the prime contractor for that F-47 next generation combat aircraft and President Trump’s commitment to a “Golden Dome” defense system supposedly geared to protecting the entire United States from incoming missiles—will offer ample opportunities to both traditional arms firms and emerging military tech companies. The procurement phase of the F-47 program could cost up to $20 billion, but as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has noted, that $20 billion will be “just seed money. The total costs coming down the road will be hundreds of billions of dollars.” Meanwhile, General Atomics and Anduril are competing to build drone “wingmen” that would work in coordination with those future F-47s in battle situations.

At this point, President Trump’s Golden Dome isn’t a fully fleshed out concept, but count on one thing: Attempting to meet his goal of a comprehensive, leakproof defense against missiles would require building large numbers of interceptors and new military satellites woven together with advanced communications and targeting systems, at a potential cost over time of hundreds of billions of dollars. And while the big weapons firms may have an inside track on building the hardware for the Golden Dome, emerging tech firms are better positioned to produce the software, targeting, surveillance, and communications components of the system.

Golden Dome is poised to go forward despite the fact that, as Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has asserted, “It has been long understood that defending against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is technically and economically unfeasible.” But that reality won’t stem the flow of massive quantities of tax dollars into the project, no matter how unrealistic it may be, since profits from producing it will be all too realistic.

Resistance Rising?

There are signs of growing resistance to the Musk-Trump agenda from lawsuits, to rallies against the oligarchy led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), to a boycott of Musk’s Tesla automobiles. Such efforts will need to be supplemented by the involvement of millions more people, including Trump supporters hurt by his cuts to essential programs that had helped them stay above water financially. The outcome of all this may be uncertain, but the stakes simply couldn’t be higher.

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On “The TMI Show,” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dive into the U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, where religious parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, seek to opt their children out of LGBTQ storybook time in public schools. The conservative majority appears poised to rule in favor of the parents, emphasizing religious freedom and parental rights. Manila argues parents should have the right to customize their children’s education, reflecting the views of many who believe public schools should accommodate personal beliefs. Ted, however, contends that allowing such choices undermines a standardized curriculum, questioning what’s next—parents picking specific history or math chapters?

On one side, parents assert their constitutional right to guide their children’s moral and religious upbringing, feeling that exposure to certain materials conflicts with their values. On the other, the school board argues that opting out disrupts educational goals of inclusivity and diversity, potentially fragmenting the system if every family cherry-picks lessons. The hosts debate the broader implications: could this lead to a slippery slope where core subjects are dissected based on individual preferences? They also discuss potential outcomes, noting the Courts likely ruling may set a precedent for future cases, reshaping how public schools balance parental rights with the need for a cohesive educational framework.

The post TMI Show Ep 124: “The LGBTQ Storytime Case: A La Carte Education?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.