The Trump Administration’s steep tariffs on toothpaste, floss, bourbon, and aluminum have triggered a global trade war, with countries retaliating by taxing U.S. goods. As costs soar—25% on aluminum and up to 50% on bourbon—consumers face pricier essentials, while industries brace for fallout. Canada and the EU, targeting American exports, signal escalating tensions. This tit-for-tat reveals a shifting value landscape, where everyday items become pawns in a high-stakes economic showdown, redefining what’s truly precious.

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Yes, “shock and awe” is back in the second age of Donald Trump. His border czar, Tom Homan, used that very phrase to describe border policy from day one of the new administration and, whether the president has actually said it or not, it’s now regularly in headlines, op-eds, and so much else. If you remember, it was the phrase used, in all its glory, to describe America’s massive bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003. (You remember! The country that supposedly threatened us with nuclear weapons but, in fact, didn’t have any!)

We Americans were, of course, going to shock and awe them. But from that moment on (if not from the moment, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when, rather than simply going after Osama bin Laden and crew, President George W. Bush launched a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan), you could say that it was we who were truly shocked and awed. After all, in their own disastrous fashion, our post-9/11 wars prepared the way for… yes!… Donald Trump to take the White House the first time around (shock and awe!)—and then blame the final disastrous retreat of the American military from Afghanistan in 2021 on the Biden administration. (“Kamala Harris, Joe Biden—the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.”) And of course, four years later, his reelection on a functional platform of Trump First, Americans Last, was distinctly a double shock and awe!

Tariff by tariff, tax by tax, act by act, Donald Trump stands a reasonable chance of taking this planet down with him.

And if you’ll excuse my being thoroughly repetitious, that was—or at least should have been seen as—the true definition of shock and awe. Donald Trump! Twice! Even now, can you truly take it in? In fact, more or less every moment since his reelection victory in November 2024 has been—pardon me for the turn of phrase—a first-class S&A experience.

And—shock, if not awe—I haven’t even mentioned Elon Musk yet, have I? I mean, who can take him in either? The richest man on Planet Earth (S&A!) and, at least until President Trump levied those massive tariffs on our three major trading partners (only to partially back off soon after), still making money hand over fist (wrist, pissed?)—about $224 billion extra dollars (S&A!) just between the November 2024 election victory of Donald Trump and the moment he actually took power again in January 2025—at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile, he’s been more or less running this country (into the ground) hand in glove with Donald Trump, who, by the way, is already talking about a possible third term in office! (“They say I can’t run again; that’s the expression… Then somebody said, I don’t think you can. Oh.”) Now, wouldn’t that be an all-American S&A first (or do I mean last?)!

An MMMW World

Phew, I’m already out of breath and exclamation points! No surprise there, of course, given the awesomely shocking and shockingly Trumpified (or do I mean Muskratted?) world we’re now living in and dealing with.

After all, we once again have a president who himself is (or may be—since you never know with him) a multi-billionaire and has at his side the DOGE-y man with a totally made-up position and an organization that nonetheless seems to have the power to dismantle whole parts of our government. (Science? Medicine? Who needs them? Veterans, who cares?) He could evidently even purchase Mars (and donate his sperm to help colonize that planet). And imagine this: Despite all the dough they and their billionaire pals possess—there are at least 13 of them in his administration, worth something like $460 billion—Elon and he seem intent on shoving through Congress a plan that would make his tax cuts for billionaires a permanent feature of American life (whatever it may cost the rest of us).

Don’t try to tell me that we’re not in a mad, mad, mad world (MMMW, if you prefer). And hey, the man who only recently set a record by spending more than an hour and 40 minutes giving the longest State of the (Dis)Union speech or speech of any sort ever to a joint session of Congress has done a remarkable job of foisting his version of an America First (Foist? Last?) policy on the rest of us and this world—a world that distinctly isn’t ours, but his. Think of us as now living in a Trump First World, or TFW. Of course, his version of America First includes those recent tariffs (some but not all of which have been delayed again) that, though officially levied against Canada, China, and Mexico, were actually being foisted on the rest of us. Count on one thing: In the end, we will undoubtedly pay through the nose for them. So, no question about it, we have certainly entered a distinctly S&A era.

The Double D of Donald

In truth, the 45th and 47th ( and 48th and 49th?) president of the United States is a genuinely remarkable figure. Truly historic—or do I mean hysteric? After all, who can’t bring some image of him to mind at any moment? That face, that stare, that glare, that red tie, that wave in his hair. Need I say more?

In his own remarkable fashion, he should be given full credit and a double capital D—for both Donald and Decline. Or just think of him as PD (for President Decline). And it is remarkable that a single figure, one man who once oversaw the bankruptcy of six different companies he had launched, could become responsible for potentially the greatest bankruptcy of all—the ending of the American Century (as we once knew it) and even, after a fashion, humanity’s centuries on Planet Earth.

I mean, who can even remember anymore the time in a distant century—the year was 1991, to be exact, the very moment when Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy for the Trump Taj Mahal and the year before he did the same for the Trump Plaza Hotel—when the Soviet Union went into the garbage pail, China had not yet truly risen, and this country was left alone as not just a great power but The Great Power or TGP, the only one left on Planet Earth? That, in retrospect, was a truly shock-and-awe moment. And isn’t it no less shock-and-awing to think that a mere 34 years later, that same country is now led by a raging maniac on an America First platform that could, in effect, prove to be an America Last one? In a mere two terms in office, he will have taken what was once known as the planet’s “sole superpower” into a world of chaos and, ultimately, disaster of a sort we still can’t really grasp. He will have been the monarch—and yes, that’s the appropriate word, not president—from hell. (In fact, the White House digital strategy team all too appropriately produced a portrait of President Trump with a golden crown and the phrase “LONG LIVE THE KING”!)

And if that (and he) isn’t the definition of shock and awe, what is?

Burn, Baby, Burn

Worse yet, tariff by tariff, tax by tax, act by act, Donald Trump stands a reasonable chance of taking this planet down with him. Think of it as little short of remarkable that, in a world in which every month, every year (and every decade) is hotter than the previous one in a record fashion, in a world in which the weather and its devastating effects—from fires to storms to floods—is only growing more extreme and more horrific, Americans freely voted in (a second time around!) someone whose election phrase of choice was “drill, baby, drill,” but might as well have been “heat, baby, heat” or “storm, baby, storm,” or simply “burn, baby, burn.”

And if his platform was America First (but truly Donald First), it distinctly should have been Planet Earth Last. (Of course—don’t be shocked—he also appointed as secretary of health a man who thinks that the way to fight measles outbreaks is with anything but a vaccine.) Yes, above all else, Donald Trump, who has called climate change both a “scam” and a “Chinese hoax,” continues to be focused on making sure that ever more oil, natural gas, and coal comes out of the ground and is indeed burned, baby, burned forever and a day.

Consider it a remarkable historical irony that America First has remained Donald Trump’s slogan all these years when, in reality (or what passes for it in his universe), it should certainly have been Trump First and, when it came to anything that truly mattered to him, America (not to speak of the rest of the world) Last!

Of course, no one should be surprised, given the way the fossil fuel companies funded his campaign. He’s already gone out of his way to cancel anything the Biden administration did to fight climate change and announced the country’s departure from the Paris climate accords (again). As The New York Times put it recently, “In a few short weeks [of his second term in office], President Trump has already severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.” What he’s doing is now considered a “deep freeze” on climate programs of all sorts (though it might better be thought of as a hot melt).

At one point, he was even talking about eliminating 65% of the employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (S&A!). Lasting implications indeed.

In any other era, President Trump would still undoubtedly have been considered a nightmare and a half, but not a potentially world-ending one (at least the world as humanity has known it all these endless centuries). The truth is that, once upon a time, if you had told anybody that this would be our S&A version of the future, you would have been laughed out of the room.

The Second Time Around with No End in Sight

And yet, there can be no question that, all these years later, despite bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and failure after failure, he remains the man of the second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Give him credit. It’s a remarkable record not just when it comes to the success of failure but of putting Himself (and yes, under the circumstances, I do think that should be capitalized!), not America First.

Oh, and while all of this has been going on, the Democratic Party has not completely but largely been missing in action. Imagine that! And as for Congress, remind me what it is (other than an audience for You Know Who).

Consider it a remarkable historical irony that America First has remained Donald Trump’s slogan all these years when, in reality (or what passes for it in his universe), it should certainly have been Trump First and, when it came to anything that truly mattered to him, America (not to speak of the rest of the world) Last!

Worse yet, if all of us hadn’t actually lived through the Trumpian epoch (epic? toothpick?), I don’t think anyone could have made this up or, in a previous version of America, even imagined it happening. And if they could, there can be little question that they would simply have been laughed out of the room, if not institutionalized, not once but twice.

And yet here we are, the second time around with no end in sight, and a third time a history-breaking possibility, leaving us fully and thoroughly in another America on another planet. Phew! Talk about shock and awe!

I must admit, with at least three years and 10 months to go in the era of You Know Who, I find it hard to imagine our future, even if (as is certainly possible) the American and global economies go down the tubes and the Democrats are swept back into Congress—I’m sorry, where?—in 2026.

Nonetheless, for the (un)foreseeable future, we’re all living with Donald Trump in a genuinely shock-and-awe world of almost unpredictable strangeness. In some fashion, all of us are now Afghans or Iraqis.

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

In this episode of TMI with Ted Rall and Manila Chan, the hosts dive into the National Archives’ recent release of JFK assassination files, spurred by an executive order from President Donald Trump. With over 63,000 pages unredacted, Ted and Manila unpack what’s new—and what’s still missing. They explore tantalizing details, like the CIA’s surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City and Kennedy’s growing distrust of the agency post-Bay of Pigs, as revealed in a memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

We don’t shy away from the letdown: no “smoking gun” upends the lone gunman narrative, leaving conspiracy theorists hungry for more. With sharp wit and skepticism, they debate whether this transparency push—tied to Trump’s alliance with RFK Jr.—clarifies history or just muddies it further.

The post TMI Show Ep 101: “JFK Assassination Files Released” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Every day’s headlines now seem to bombard us with ever more outrageous Trumpian antics. Who could have possibly imagined, for instance, that a president of the United States would turn the White House lawn into a Tesla auto showroom?

But these antics actually do serve a useful social and political purpose—for President Donald Trump’s fellow deep pockets and the corporations they run. Trump’s kleptocratic arrogance and audacity have shoved the institutionalized thievery of Corporate America’s ever-grasping top execs off into the shadows.

Those shadows could hardly be more welcome. American corporate executive compensation, as the business journal Fortune has just detailed, is now “surging amid a roaring bonus rebound.”

Heads CEOs win, in other words, tails they never lose.

One example: Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King has seen his annual executive rewards leap from $13 million in 2023 to $22.7 million in 2024. To keep King smiling, Tyson’s board of directors has also extended his CEO contract into 2027 and guaranteed him “a post-employment perk that includes 75 hours of personal use of the company jet as long as he sticks around on the board.”

And what in the way of wonders has Tyson’s King been working to earn all this? Not much, concludes a new Compensation Advisory Partners analysis. Anyone who had $100 invested in Tyson shares at the end of fiscal 2019 today holds a nest egg worth just $80.54. Tyson’s most typical workers aren’t doing particularly well either. They took home $43,417 in 2024, 525 times less than the annual compensation that CEO Donnie King pocketed.

Over at Moderna, Big Pharma’s newest big kid on the corporate block, chief exec Stéphane Bancel saw his 2024 annual pay jump 16.4% over his 2023 compensation despite a 53% drop in Moderna’s annual revenue.

Back in 2022, at Covid-19’s height, Bancel personally collected over $392 million exercising stacks of the stock options he had been sitting upon. Between that year’s start and 2024’s close, Moderna shares plummeted from just under $254 each to under $42.

Moderna’s transition to our post-Covid world, the Moderna board acknowledges, has been “more complex than anticipated.” That complexity, the board apparently believes, in no way justifies denying Bancel his rightful place among Big Pharma’s top-earning CEOs. Bancel’s near $20-million 2024 payday is keeping him well within hailing distance of all his Big Pharma peers.

How can corporate CEO paychecks be continuing to go gangbusters while the corporations these execs run are—at best—just treading water? Lauren Peek, a partner at Compensation Advisory Partners and a co-author of the firm’s latest CEO pay analysis, has an explanation.

Corporate board compensation committees, Peek observes, want to keep their top execs adequately incentivized. These board panels simply cannot bear the sight of their CEOs getting down in the dumps. So what do these panels do? They exclude from their final CEO pay decisions any negative economic factors that CEOs can’t directly determine. But these same corporate panels never take into account unexpected positive economic factors that their CEOs had no hand in creating.

Heads CEOs win, in other words, tails they never lose.

Among those winners: Disney chief exec Robert Iger. His 2024 total pay jumped to $41 million, up nearly $10 million from his 2023 compensation. Disney’s total shareholder return, over that same year, didn’t even reach halfway up the total return that Disney’s peer companies recorded.

Disney hardly rates as an outlier among the 50 major publicly traded corporations that the recently released Compensation Advisory Partners report puts under the microscope. The median revenue growth of these 50 firms dropped to 1.6% in 2024, less than half their 2023 rate. Their earnings remained virtually flat as well. But their CEO compensation climbed an average 9%.

“With financial performance largely flat across these early Fortune 500 filers,” notes an HR Grapevine analysis of the Compensation Advisory Partners findings, “board-level decisions to maintain or raise executive bonuses may prompt further scrutiny from investors and stakeholders alike.”

“For ‘shop-floor’ employees,” adds the HR Grapevine, “news of CEO wage hikes despite average financial performances will undoubtedly prompt a good deal of rumination about their own levels of compensation.”

Equilar, an information services firm specializing in corporate pay, has also been busy analyzing the latest trends in CEO remuneration. Equilar’s latest look at corner-office compensation has found that median CEO pay within the corporations that make up the Equilar 500 jumped up from $12 million in 2020 to $16.5 million last year.

CEO-worker pay gaps have increased even more significantly. At the median Equilar 500 corporation, CEOs pocketed 186.5 times the pay of their most typical workers in 2020 and 306 times that pay in 2024. At America’s larger corporations—those companies sitting at the 75th percentile of the Equilar 500—CEOs made 307.5 times their typical worker pay in 2020 and last year collected 527 times more.

A key driver of this ever-widening CEO-worker pay gap? The sinking compensation going to typical corporate workers, as Equilar’s Joyce Chen concluded last week in an analysis for the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. These median workers took home $66,321 in 2020, but just $57,299 last year.

But top execs aren’t just shortchanging workers at pay-time. They’re also pressuring those workers to squeeze and defraud clients and customers at every opportunity, as former Wells Fargo bank manager and investigator Kieran Cuadras has just vividly detailed.

Nearly a decade ago, Cuadras relates, a mammoth phony accounts scandal at Wells Fargo led to fines totaling $20 million against the bank’s then-CEO John Stumpf. But those fines, she points out, hardly made a dent in the estimated $130 million that Stumpf “walked away with in compensation when he resigned.”

Wells Fargo’s current CEO, Charles Scharf, appears to be doing his best to follow in Stumpf’s footsteps. Scharf’s gutted risk and complaint departments are cutting corners “to create the illusion of fewer complaints.” The reality: Those departments are closing complaint cases prematurely. In 2024, these and other sneaky moves helped Scharf pocket a sweet $31.2 million .

Our nation’s political leaders, says Wells Fargo employee and customer advocate Kieran Cuadras, need “to step up and do something about a CEO pay system that rewards executives with obscenely large paychecks for practices that harm workers and the broader economy.”

Where to start that stepping up? Lawmakers ought to be levying new taxes on corporations “with huge gaps between their CEO and worker pay,” Cuadras posits, and increasing an already existing tax on stock buybacks.

Moves like these, she astutely sums up, “would encourage companies to focus on long-term prosperity and stability rather than simply making wealthy executives and shareholders even richer.”

At what junctures do Elon Musk and Donald Trump, each proceeding from a distinctive starting point, forge a new and hyper-dangerous coalition? Well, the Afrikaner refugee joins an extreme version of neoliberalism to a fascist drive to state takeover, and the fascist orange man, who demands unfettered state power and loves tariffs, nonetheless caters to neoliberal drives to concentrate wealth, income, and power even more extremely at the highest reaches of society. Together, they pursue what is best called oligopolistic fascism.

What's more, while both may have once believed the old Friedrich Hayek story of how market deregulation secures a robust economy of steady growth, each displays active signs today of no longer believing the very ideology he pedals. Musk does so through his project of planetary escapism and his obsession with driving Inspector Generals from governmental institutions; Trump does so through his constant lies and belligerent demonization of vulnerable people who disagree with him. Indeed, each contains within himself a minor voice sliding into the major voice of the other. They both now believe that the old order that has sustained their extreme privileges can now only be protected by fascist means.

So, let's define our terms a bit more closely. Neoliberalism was a market theory, most prominently developed by Friedrich Hayek in the 1960s and 1970s as a series of rejoinders to a Keynesian model of growth and social welfare. Neoliberalism promised rapid and sustained economic growth, if the state would radically reduce regulation of private corporations, subsidize them whenever needed, severely limit the power of labor unions, create a court system committed to neoliberal jurisprudence, and, most importantly (and too often less noted by critics), install a national ideology of regular individuals committed to a market regime--a national ideology saturating schools, unions, churches, the government, the media, think tanks, and universities.

In this ideology each individual and institution sees itself as first and foremost a participant and beneficiary of a privately owned market economy. Hayek himself emphasized these themes in his neoliberal social philosophy, a social philosophy that included an economic theory but extended well beyond it to include all other social and state institutions. This all found elaborate expression, for instance, in his 1970 book Rules and Order. In it he emphasizes how the Supreme Court must set rules beyond the powers of legislative revision to nurture the sinews of a neoliberal economy. And he says a neoliberal ideology "may well be something whose widespread acceptance is the indispensable condition for most of the particular things we strive for." (Rules of Order, p. 58). He knew that minority groups who refused or could not imbibe this ideology had to be controlled by other means. A neoliberal regime along Hayek’s lines, then, is one in which the prison population grows.

In fact the neoliberal order in the United States, supported actively by neoliberal Supreme Court justices, has pushed previously unheard of wealth concentrations to the top of the social hierarchy; supported a unitary President; increased economic insecurity for workers, the poor and mid-level professionals; encouraged hi-tech, super-rich bros to pour vast amounts of money into right wing electoral campaigns; restricted state efforts to fend off climate change and help the poor; and supported media gaslighting to deny the contributions a neoliberal economy makes to accelerating climate wreckage and periodic crises. You can take the 2008 economic meltdown, during the G. W. Bush administration, to be a notable instance of the latter.

What about fascism? Well, fascist movements seek to secure capitalist states by new means during hard times. This was true even in the most extreme instance, when Hitler in Nazi Germany protected large private industrialists as he attacked Jews, social democrats, labor unions, homosexuals, the Romani, and communists. In Mein Kampf, the Jews were defined to be the "red thread" that tied them, social democrats and communists together in one phalanx. To attack the Jews was thus to attack these other organizations and movements too. The regime was inaccurately called "National Socialism"; a closer label would be "National Capitalism," an economic regime of private profit in which a fascist state became the key definer and regulator of life.

How does a distinctive aspiration to fascism proceed today? It does so by promulgating "big lies" to mobilize hatred in its base; fostering an extreme version of white, Christian nationalism; ransacking state regulatory institutions; intimidating the media, courts, unions, localities, and universities; engaging in coups; mobilizing private militia to intimidate vulnerable elements of the populace; treating immigrants of color to be inferior and "vile" people; and joining with other autocratic states to weaken democracy and promote oligarchical rule. Indeed, today Trump treats immigrants of color and their liberal supporters to be the red threads tying all his enemies together. And he never acknowledges how the very anti-climate policies he promotes accelerate the desperate marches from South to North that he castigates so fervently.

As I previewed in a 2017 book, Aspirational Fascism, Trump has profound fascist aspirations, displayed prominently today in promulgating a battery of big lies, fostering a violent coup attempt after he lost an election, aligning with Putin in foreign policy, pardoning all those who participated in his 2021 violent coup attempt, attacking universities, insisting upon the hegemony of a unitary president who sidelines Congress, the states and (increasingly) courts, and unleashing Musk to reshape the state.

What draws Musk and Trump so closely together now?

Well, Musk shows signs of losing faith in the neoliberal ideology that informed his thinking hitherto, while continuing to deploy it strategically to clean out the federal government of officials—the "Deep State"—who could expose fraud and regulate corporate excesses. To take one instance, he has moved from an earlier stance of concern about accelerating climate wreckage to saying, even as he knows better, that climate change is real but moving at a very slow pace. Even after more extreme hurricanes, the Los Angeles wildfires, and other destructive events.

And Trump, who knew in fact that he had lost the 2020 election, has joined belligerently the project of heaping more and more wealth on the extremely wealthy at the expense of those working and middle class white nationalists who provide a key portion of his political base. The tax cut for the rich he is pushing through Congress shows that. He may well think he will not need to cater to that portion of his base so much, after he has silenced the media, universities, unions, progressive churches, and Democratic Party. He has already silenced critical Republicans and high rolling donors.

What about white working- and middle-class members of the Trump/Musk base? They have displayed signs not so much of believing all the Trumpian lies peddled to them as embracing the lies because of the ways they unsettle liberal elites on both coasts and activate racist impulses already there. Not too many Trump supporters believed the ugly story about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats. They merely loved to hear and repeat the story. That is why intense media efforts to expose Trump's lies have not penetrated the armored base. That protective armor itself was forged during a period when the democratic left had lost touch with the needs and insecurities of those constituents, while focusing only on their ugly racist and misogynist tendencies. In fact, curtailments of racism and misogyny need to be pursued in tandem with reductions in class inequality, if either agenda is to succeed. But it remains to be seen whether Democrats can learn this lesson.

Today, the neoliberal/fascist nexus is taking another turn. While it focuses white working class attention on violent immigrant deportations, it also plans to weaken Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security severely, perhaps even to destroy them. Why? To give yet another huge tax break to the superrich who also finance their campaigns. Increasing numbers of the old base are now beginning to see through this scam by the scammer they used to love. It turns out the "Deep State" contains many essential services and protections, now on the block.

The Trump/Musk team hopes to complete dismantling and then reordering the Deep State before the base catches on. Then, once the media, universities and liberal donors have been intimidated sufficiently, it will be too late to protest effectively. That is the plan.

The urgent task today is to expose this nexus and its plan at every turn, in every possible venue, and by all democratic means necessary, from publicity to protest to electoral mobilization. For time is short during a fascist takeover attempt. And Trump and Musk are moving at breakneck speed. The stakes could not be higher, nor the urgency more acute.

Three hours before he was to be murdered by the State of Louisiana, Jessie Hoffman greeted me with a strong handshake and an embrace. He stared deep into my eyes and thanked me for coming. We discussed his son, also named Jessie, and how proud he has made his dad.

Also visiting were three of the many lawyers who had been fighting for his life, Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the Loyola Center for Social Justice, Samantha Bosalavage Pourciau of the Promise of Justice Initiative, and Sarah Ottinger, who had been representing Jessie Hoffman for 19 years. I was there to witness the murder of Mr. Hoffman if Louisiana reversed its course and allowed one of the legal team to remain through the whole process.

Already in the room when we arrived was Rev. Reimoku Gregory Smith, a Buddhist priest Hoffman chose to accompany him. Jessie is a practicing Buddhist and has been a leader among those in prison for decades. Reverend Reimoku was in long black robes. He was serene and almost glowing in kindness.

We sat around a big wooden conference table that had the logo of the State of Louisiana carved into the middle of it. Uniformed officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary sat in opposite ends of the room. There were two big pictures on the walls—one of Elijah on a flaming chariot and one of Daniel in the lion’s den.

The room in which Louisiana planned to murder Jessie Hoffman was steps away.

The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

Jessie Hoffman is about six feet tall and muscular. He was wearing a black t-shirt that said Life Row in white letters on it—the name that its 50+ occupants prefer to call what the outside world calls death row. He has been fasting for days and mostly sits quietly with his arms on the wooden table, staring intently at whoever was talking to him.

Jessie was holding his favorite book, "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation" by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, author, poet, and peacemaker who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jessie asked Reverend Reimoku to read his favorite passage from the book to us. It was called the Four Immeasurable Minds: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity. He read and reflected as we took in these words together. Jessie occasionally closed his eyes.

Louisiana was scheduled to murder Jessie Hoffman by first immobilizing him by tying down his arms, hands, legs, and torso on a crucifix-like platform. Then, once he was helpless to resist, they would cover his face with an industrial-grade respirator and pump his lungs full of poison high-grade nitrogen gas. Nitrogen gas causes death by depriving the body of oxygen, essentially causing suffocation in a phenomenon known as hypoxia. This method is so horrible all but two states have stopped using nitrogen gas on animals declaring it inhumane. The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights has condemned the use of nitrogen gas in executions saying its use could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment in violation of international human rights law.

Jessie Hoffman was to be murdered by Louisiana because he had as a teenager, after years of shocking physical, sexual and psychological abuse, committed a horrible murder in 1996.

Now the Louisiana Governor claimed it was necessary for the state to respond to this murder by itself murdering Jessie Hoffman to “prioritize victims over criminals.”

Yet the actual family members of the victim of Jessie’s murder were not asking Louisiana to murder him.

The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

The victim’s husband refused to attend the state execution and said he is now “indifferent to the death penalty vs life in prison without parole.” He also another reason for not attending was he was “just not really feeling like I need to watch another human being die."

Years before, Jessie Hoffman wrote a statement apologizing to the victims. Louisiana refused to deliver it to the family.

Jessie and the victim’s sister-in-law tried to talk by zoom so Jessie could apologize to her directly but Louisiana would not allow it.

As our visit continued, another long-time lawyer arrived. Caroline Tillman, who has been working to save Jessie Hoffman from state murder for 22 years, came directly from federal court in New Orleans. Teams of lawyers tried to stop the state murder of Jessie Hoffman, filing in several state and federal courts. Only the U.S. Supreme Court had not been heard from yet.

More prayers were said. The letter from the sister-in-law asking that the state murder not go forward was read aloud. More prayers. More than 250 faith leaders had recently signed letters asking Louisiana not to revive the practice of state murder with nitrogen gas.

With less than an hour to go before the scheduled murder of Jessie Hoffman, the Warden came in and politely but firmly terminated the lawyers’ visit. He refused permission to allow any lawyer to stay and witness the murder of Jessie Hoffman. Only Reverend Reimoku was allowed to remain.

After the lawyers were escorted out, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the murder of Mr. Hoffman by a vote of 5-4, one vote short of the 5 votes needed for a stay.

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana could now begin.

John Simmerman, a journalist with Nola.com, was one of two media witnesses allowed to view the execution of Jessie Hoffman. He reports that at 6:21 pm the ultra-high-grade nitrogen was pumped into the immobilized Mr. Hoffman. His breathing became uneven. His chest rose. He made a jerking motion. His body shook. His fingers twitched. He pulled at the table. His hands clenched. His breathing slowed. His head moved inside the mask. He jerked slightly around 6:27 pm and stopped moving. Louisiana officials reported the poison gas was pumped into Jessie Hoffman for 19 minutes until he was pronounced dead. The last view of Jessie Hoffman with his face now uncovered showed “his head was tilted back, teeth exposed in a grimace.”

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana was now complete.

Samantha Pourciau, who was with Jessie Hoffman on his final day on earth, said: “Tonight, while many in our state cannot afford groceries, the state used countless resources to kill one man. The governor cannot cloak this in fighting for victims, because today we learned that this is not, in fact, what this family wants. This is what the governor wants. This has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”

A recent story in the New York Times about Merle Oberon, an actress who was nominated for an Oscar in 1936, promotes a version of biological racism that is more severe than the anti-Semitic Nazi Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1935.

The article points out that Oberon, whose mother was Sri Lankan, became a star because “she decided to pass as white, hiding her South Asian identity to make it in an industry that was resistant to anything else.” But she really was “of color,” a term the Times uses without explanation.

We get it. Oberon was the child of a mother who we assume had darker skin color because of her ethnic heritage, and an Anglo father, who was definitionally “white.” So, even though Merle looked “white,” according to the newspaper, the article implies there was some kind “of color” trait in her blood.

The Nazis of the 1930s would not have accepted this “of color” definition, which is so casually used in the article. If Oberon’s mother had been Jewish, for example, Oberon would not have been classified as a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws, which required that three out of four grandparents be Jewish. Oberon would only have had two.

So why does the paper make such a big deal about Oberon “passing?” Why is it important that we consider her to be “of color?”

In the 1930s, the U.S. may have been even more racist than Germany. The U.S. then adhered to a very strict notion of biological racism. In the South, the “one drop rule” held that if you had any Black ancestry at all you were considered Black, no matter your skin color.

American “race scientists,” who were an inspiration to the Nazis, had determined that the hierarchy of biological races included country of origin and religion, as well as skin color. Each race was endowed with traits that could be ranked from best to worst, with Anglo White at the very top, of course. For the Nazis, make that Aryan on top. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers for a closer look at race hierarchies.)

To be sure, the New York Times today rejects that hierarchy. Yet it still runs stories that expect us to believe that there is something that defines “of color,” even if that “color” doesn’t meet the eye test. And they’re not talking about cultural traits or ethnic customs.

If Oberon is “of color” but has no “color,” doesn’t that imply some kind of biological difference that runs deeper than skin color, the one-drop kind that so obsesses biological racists?

This isn’t new for the New York Times. They continually use the word “race,” instead of “ethnic group.” for example, even though the word “race” conjures up a biological cause for difference. But after nearly two centuries of fruitless attempts, “race scientists” old and new have found no biological races.

The New York Times should stop using the word “race,” and instead point out that race is a sociological category, not the biological one which originally was devised to maintain hierarchies of power. How hard is it to say, ‘there is only one race, the human race?”

(By the way, that’s a quote from one of our worker-trainers, who doesn’t find it hard to say at all)

Bobby Kennedy Jr. Carries On the Torch of Biological Racism

Pseudo race science is alive and well in the head of the head of the Health and Human Services Department. In a 2023 New York Post video tape, Kennedy reveals that he, like the race scientists of old, believes that ethnic groups are races, and that races are biologically different.

Just watch how, in July 2023, he slides unselfconsciously between ethnicities, races, and biology:

Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black People. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

During his confirmation hearings he denied that he said this, and instead, claimed he was simply quoting NIH studies. But that wasn’t true either.

But the senators grilling him missed the big point. They never asked if Kennedy believes that Jews, Chinese, Blacks, and Caucasians are biologically distinct races.

Wait! Did I join the Woke Word Police?

It’s true that I want people to stop using the word “race,” unless they make clear they are not talking about biology in any shape of form. (Falling into that biology rabbit hole, we are more susceptible to believing in phony—indeed, racist—differences in intelligence, athleticism, pain thresholds, violence, lust, and even penis size.)

But my point here is radically different from those focusing on the proper words we should use to show respect to different identities.

Working people with similar interests and goals have often been divided by bosses and a corporate power structure using language, religion, and ethnicity. Our goal should be to build solidarity and overcome those artificial distinctions, so that we can fight together for our best interests. Workers are only hurt by the idea of biological races, which reinforce the fictitious existence of a white race and a white identity. Who wants that?

As my colleague and friend, Tom McQuiston, pointed out to me, labor unions have a better idea – solidarity. By promoting and believing that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” any form of discrimination is a violation of the basic solidarity needed for working people to get a fair shake against corporate power. We fight all forms of discrimination because they are wrong and because they weaken our collective power, no matter who our ancestors are.

In a worker’s movement based on solidarity, Merle Oberon’s Sri Lankan ancestry would be an interesting story but nothing special, unless it had been used to discriminate against her. She, along with her fellow artists, should have been much more worried about how best to band together to get a fair shake from the movie moguls.

It’s almost understandable that biological racism would infest Bobby Jr.’s worm-addled brain. But 90 years after the Nuremberg Laws, shouldn’t the “Paper of Record” know better?

Twenty-two years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the U.S. Department of State. I was the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq on March 19, 2003.

22 Years Later, I Don’t Regret My Decision One Bit

Former President George W. Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

In 2003, Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Four Presidential administrations after I resigned—Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump—another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a president: Project 2025.

Instead, Bush was following the advisers who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century, which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.

The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bush had already lied about the reason to send the U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran. But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.

I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001. Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaeda was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere… and it turned out to be in overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

If I had one more resignation…. no, two more resignations...

One Resignation Over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza

In the next 22 years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.

Former President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation… and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.

And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine, including the 2014 right-wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.

Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025

And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.

Four Presidential administrations after I resigned—Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump—another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a president: Project 2025.

While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisers, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.

The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants. Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.

Trump is emboldened by the lack of congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump: “Elbows up!”

Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.

While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, did hammer out a much-needed cease-fire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the cease-fire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter, and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons. As the cease-fire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”... but without them.

And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities, and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—as his henchmen erase mentions of women, minorities, disability, and gender in his white male nationalist agenda, seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.

So many issues… and opportunities for resignation and resistance.

From Resignation to Resistance

I resigned two decades ago due to criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.

Working with many, many organizations on the local (Hawaii Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait, Students and Faculty for Palestine, Hawaii For Palestine: Under the Olive Tree), national (CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Veterans For Peace, Shut Down Drone Warfare), and international levels (International Peace Bureau, NO to NATO, No to War, World Beyond War, Women Cross DMZ, Pacific Peace Network, Ban Killer Drones) has given me outlets for protest and, very importantly, being with others who are deeply concerned about U.S. administration actions here in our own country and around the world.

You Must Resist

If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails, and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!

On March 8, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and a prominent leader of pro-Palestinian protests on the university’s campus. They claimed that Khalil’s student visa had been revoked and, when told that he had a green card, said that too had been revoked.

While the full facts of the case are yet to emerge, there seems little doubt that Khalil was detained in retaliation for his activism. U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently and explicitly threatened to go after university protestors, including in his Executive Order on “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” which I analyzed in an earlier post. Trump celebrated Khalil’s arrest on social media, warning that it was the first “of many to come.”

Some of the “many to come” will likely be identified via the State Department’s newly launched AI-enabled “Catch and Revoke” initiative, which will scrape social media to find “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups” and cancel their visas. Like the executive order cited above, this effort is framed as an anti-terrorism measure. Instead, it is being used to terrorize foreigners and to dissuade people from participating in First Amendment-protected activity for fear that they too will be targeted in some way.

It is part of Trump’s broader effort to subdue all potential sources of opposition by attacking universities, the press, law firms, and jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with ICE.

Starting with the Obama administration, the federal government has built an extensive infrastructure for agencies to comb social media looking for certain types of speech. Even as civil society groups have raised concerns about how these programs could be used to target unpopular speech, they have continued to proliferate.

The State Department, for example, collects social media handles from certain types of visa applicants—some 14 million people a year—which are saved indefinitely in government databases. (The Brennan Center, where I work, and the Knight Institute have challenged this program in court.)

The second Trump administration is aiming to dramatically expand these efforts, collecting social media identifiers from an additional 33 million people, including those applying for permanent residence or adjustment of their immigration status. The first Trump administration’s attempt to do so was blocked in 2021 by the Biden White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on the grounds that the government had not demonstrated “the practical utility of collecting this information.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) runs at least 12 overlapping programs that track what Americans say online, several of which are focused on protests. DHS used social media to track protests against the first Trump administration’s immigration policies. During the Biden administration, DHS scanned social media for other targets, such as Americans discussing abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and trucker convoys protesting Covid-19 mandates, as well as broadly monitoring online “narratives and grievances”—i.e., people talking politics.

Even as it adds more and more social media monitoring programs to its repertoire, the government has never shown that these efforts are effective. A February 2017 DHS Inspector General audit of six pilot programs found that the department had not even measured their effectiveness. And the few government evaluations that are publicly available undermine any governmental claims of efficacy. A brief prepared by DHS for the first Trump administration concluded that social media monitoring did not provide useful information for vetting refugees. And, according to a 2021 analysis by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, social media identifiers added “no value” to the immigration screening and vetting process.

Looking for unknown foreign protestors who may have made ostensibly pro-terrorist statements is much harder than vetting the posts of a known person, such as a visa applicant. It will undoubtedly sweep far too broadly and result in mistakes. The AI tools that will be deployed by the State Department likely will be tasked to search for specific words or phrases. The Trump administration has used these types of lists in its attempt to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government, resulting in various blunders. In one instance, a federal employee who managed relations with private equity-held businesses was placed on administrative leave “pursuant to the president’s executive order on DEIA.” The Internal Revenue Service purged its employee manual of references to the “inequity” of holding on to taxpayer money longer than necessary and the “inclusion” of a taxpayer identification number on a form. The Defense Department flagged for deletion mentions of the World War II Enola Gay aircraft and references to people who have the last name “Gay.”

Even without mistakes, broad social media monitoring will have enormous First Amendment consequences. The types of speech that the administration has declared it intends to target is exceptionally broad. In defending his arrest, DHS said Khalil led activities “aligned” with Hamas, a term untethered to any law or regulation. Statements from Trump and his cabinet characterize foreigners who are in the administration’s crosshairs as “pro-Hamas” (most common), “pro-terrorist,” “terrorist sympathizers,” people who “support terrorism,” and “antisemitic.” These are broad and contested terms. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel sentiments have often been conflated with antisemitism or pro-terrorism, leaving a broad swath of people vulnerable to being caught in an AI-enabled social media net.

The Trump administration’s efforts ultimately may sweep even more broadly, seeking out speech that it views as anti-American. The vetting executive order instructed the Secretary of State to recommend measures for foreign nationals who call for the “overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” In addition, the sole justification provided by the administration for acting against Khalil is a single line in the Notice to Appear in immigration court: “The Secretary of State has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse policy consequences for the foreign policy of the United States,” citing 237(A)(4)(c)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.” As Adam Cox and Ahilan Arulanantham explained on Just Security, this provision cannot be read as a blank check for the administration to deport people based on an unarticulated foreign policy rationale. But if the administration wants to deport foreigners who take positions contrary to U.S. foreign policy, they will certainly find plenty of fodder on social media.

Khalil’s case and the Trump administration’s promise to go after foreign protestors for their social media posts is an extraordinary assertion of executive power over immigrants living in the United States. But it should not be viewed in isolation. It is part of Trump’s broader effort to subdue all potential sources of opposition by attacking universities, the press, law firms, and jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with ICE. All of these endanger the fundamental constitutional promise of a democratic society in which a multitude of views and interests can be freely expressed.

Say what you will about the president who is dismantling our democracy, but at least he says “thank you” once in a while.

Two weeks ago, after delivering a lengthy and divisive address to a Joint Session of Congress, President Donald Trump mingled with the crowd, shaking hands with his supporters. In a revealing moment, he patted Chief Justice John Roberts on the back and said, “Thank you. Thank you again. I won’t forget.”

Presumably President Trump was thanking Chief Justice Roberts for aiding his election victory and granting him unprecedented power, and not for some great tips on fixing his backswing. Either way, Justice Roberts appeared much obliged. After all, it’s nice to hear a “thank you” when you compromise your personal integrity and trample the Constitution to help a convicted felon win an election.

Structural court reform will be a necessary step to rebuilding our democracy.

Trump understands that he owes a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court. Yet, as we look to the courts to protect us from the Trump administration’s abuses, many have overlooked or forgotten how SCOTUS got us here in the first place. As people harmed by this flood of illegal actions turn to the courts for relief, we must be clear that the Supreme Court helped bring about this crisis by helping Donald Trump win the 2024 election. While the Supreme Court did not directly decide the election for Trump in the way it did for former President George W. Bush in 2000 with its decision in Bush v. Gore, the justices interfered with our elections, our politics, and our society in ways that certainly helped, and may have been decisive, to Trump’s win.

The People’s Parity Project Action released a new report, “The Supreme Court Helped Trump Win,” which examines the numerous forms of assistance the court gave to Trump, from the structural to the political. The court shielded Trump from prosecution for his attempt to steal the 2020 election. The justices prevented states from striking him from the ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists holding office. They allowed unlimited money to flood our politics, permitting billionaires to buy the presidency. They gutted the Voting Rights Act and permitted racial and ethnic gerrymandering, which reduced competition, worsened extremism, and handed Republicans control of the House.

The court also obstructed the signature policy achievements of former President Joe Biden, including student debt relief, protections for transgender people, and immigration reform, leaving Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris with fewer successes to highlight in their campaigns. Over decades, the court weakened labor unions, harming working people’s economic and collective power and benefiting Republican candidates. The persistent threat that the court will strike down any progressive policies has created a sense of futility among voters and elected officials, reinforcing voters’ and potential voters’ belief that “both sides do nothing” and that traditional politicians will not enact meaningful change. This bolstered Trump's renegade, antihero image, making his promises to break everything and start anew more appealing.

As Trump and Musk barrel into Trump’s second term, they are defying laws and the Constitution at every turn. In just a month, they have attempted to end birthright citizenship; frozen federal spending and payments that were already appropriated; illegally accessed Americans’ private data; attempted to eliminate or stymie legislatively created agencies and fire officials in violation of the law; and launched assaults on Black people, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities.

Trump’s actions are so extreme and lawless that the Supreme Court will likely step in to curb some of them, such as the ruling this week to stop the Trump administration from illegally blocking $2 billion in funding to USAID. The USAID ruling, and any other SCOTUS attempts to rein in the would-be king, will not outweigh the court’s role in causing this crisis. It will not mean the court has become a brave defender of our most cherished principles. It will simply mean that some breaches are too blatant for even the justices to justify.

As we confront this daunting moment, we must be realistic and clearheaded. This is not the time for false heroes or misplaced faith in systems that have consistently failed the people. We cannot afford to fall into a collective Stockholm syndrome regarding the nation’s highest court, even if the justices do rein in some of Trump’s most extreme actions.

Structural court reform will be a necessary step to rebuilding our democracy. There are no shortcuts or silver bullets; systemic change will require a broad, long-lasting movement of Americans who claim a different vision for our country’s future. Although the idea of significant court reform and planning for the future—four, eight, or even twelve years out—may seem daunting, it is far less radical than what unfolds right before our eyes.

Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?” And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands—in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

Why not put our best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease, and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?

Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is not just a but the genuine path to national salvation, and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.

Militarism as a Unifying Force

Karp may be right that this country desperately needs a new national purpose, but his proposed solution is, to put it politely, dangerously misguided.

Ominously enough, one of his primary examples of a unifying initiative worth emulating is World War II’s Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. He sees the building of those bombs as both a supreme technological achievement and a deep source of national pride, while conveniently ignoring their world-ending potential. And he proposes embarking on a comparable effort in the realm of emerging military technologies:

The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield—the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century.

And here’s a question he simply skips: How exactly will the United States and its allies “retain exclusive control” of whatever sophisticated new military technologies they develop? After all, his call for an American AI buildup echoes the views expressed by opponents of the international control of nuclear technology in the wake of the devastating atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II—the futile belief that the United States could maintain a permanent advantage that would cement its role as the world’s dominant military power. Nearly 80 years later, we continue to live with an enormously costly nuclear arms race—nine countries now possess such weaponry—in which a devastating war has been avoided as much thanks to luck as design. Meanwhile, past predictions of permanent American nuclear superiority have proven to be wishful thinking. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume that predictions of permanent superiority in AI-driven weaponry will prove any more accurate or that our world will be any safer.

Technology Will Not Save Us

Karp’s views are in sync with his fellow Silicon Valley militarists, from Palantir founder Peter Thiel to Palmer Luckey of the up-and-coming military tech firm Anduril to America’s virtual co-president, SpaceX’s Elon Musk. All of them are convinced that, at some future moment, by supplanting old-school corporate weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they will usher in a golden age of American global primacy grounded in ever better technology. They see themselves as superior beings who can save this country and the world, if only the government—and ultimately, democracy itself—would get out of their way. Not surprisingly, their disdain for government does not extend to a refusal to accept billions and billions of dollars in federal contracts. Their anti-government ideology, of course, is part of what’s motivated Musk’s drive to try to dismantle significant parts of the federal government, allegedly in the name of “efficiency.”

An actual efficiency drive would involve a careful analysis of what works and what doesn’t, which programs are essential and which aren’t, not an across-the-board, sledgehammer approach of the kind recently used to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to the detriment of millions of people around the world who depended on its programs for access to food, clean water, and healthcare, including measures to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS. Internal agency memos released to the press earlier this month indicated that, absent USAID assistance, up to 166,000 children could die of malaria, 200,000 could be paralyzed with polio, and 1 million of them wouldn’t be treated for acute malnutrition. In addition to saving lives, USAID’s programs cast America’s image in the world in a far better light than does a narrow reliance on its sprawling military footprint and undue resort to threats of force as pillars of its foreign policy.

The most damning real-world example of the values Karp seeks to promote can be seen in his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

As a military proposition, the idea that swarms of drones and robotic systems will prove to be the new “miracle weapons,” ensuring American global dominance, contradicts a long history of such claims. From the “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam to former President Ronald Reagan’s quest for an impenetrable “Star Wars” shield against nuclear missiles to the Gulf War’s “Revolution in Military Affairs” (centered on networked warfare and supposedly precision-guided munitions), expressions of faith in advanced technology as the way to win wars and bolster American power globally have been misplaced. Either the technology didn’t work as advertised; adversaries came up with cheap, effective countermeasures; or the wars being fought were decided by factors like morale and knowledge of the local culture and terrain, not technological marvels. And count on this: AI weaponry will fare no better than those past “miracles.”

First of all, there is no guarantee that weapons based on immensely complex software won’t suffer catastrophic failure in actual war conditions, with the added risk, as military analyst Michael Klare has pointed out, of starting unnecessary conflicts or causing unintended mass slaughter.

Second, Karp’s dream of “exclusive control” of such systems by the U.S. and its allies is just that—a dream. China, for instance, has ample resources and technical talent to join an AI arms race, with uncertain results in terms of the global balance of power or the likelihood of a disastrous U.S.-China conflict.

Third, despite Pentagon pledges that there will always be a “human being in the loop” in the use of AI-driven weaponry, the drive to wipe out enemy targets as quickly as possible will create enormous pressure to let the software, not human operators, make the decisions. As Biden administration Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put it, “If you have a human in the loop, you will lose.”

Automated weapons will pose tremendous risks of greater civilian casualties and, because such conflicts could be waged without putting large numbers of military personnel at risk, may only increase the incentive to resort to war, regardless of the consequences for civilian populations.

What Should America Stand For?

Technology is one thing. What it’s used for, and why, is another matter. And Karp’s vision of its role seems deeply immoral. The most damning real-world example of the values Karp seeks to promote can be seen in his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Not only were Palantir’s systems used to accelerate the pace of the Israeli Defense Force’s murderous bombing campaign there, but Karp himself has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Israeli war effort. He went so far as to hold a Palantir board meeting in Israel just a few months into the Gaza war in an effort to goad other corporate leaders into publicly supporting Israel’s campaign of mass killing.

Are these really the values Americans want to embrace? And given his stance, is Karp in any position to lecture Americans on values and national priorities, much less how to defend them?

Despite the fact that his company is in the business of enabling devastating conflicts, his own twisted logic leads Karp to believe that Palantir and the military-tech sector are on the side of the angels. In May 2024, at the “AI Expo for National Competitiveness,” he said of the student-encampment movement for a cease-fire in Gaza, “The peace activists are war activists. We are the peace activists.”

Invasion of the Techno-Optimists

And, of course, Karp is anything but alone in promoting a new tech-driven arms race. Elon Musk, who has been empowered to take a sledgehammer to large parts of the U.S. government and vacuum up sensitive personal information about millions of Americans, is also a major supplier of military technology to the Pentagon. And Vice President JD Vance, Silicon Valley’s man in the White House, was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir founder Peter Thiel before joining the Trump administration.

The grip of the military-tech sector on the Trump administration is virtually unprecedented in the annals of influence-peddling, beginning with Elon Musk’s investment of an unprecedented $277 million in support of electing Donald Trump and Republican candidates for Congress in 2024. His influence then carried over into the presidential transition period, when he was consulted about all manner of budgetary and organizational issues, while emerging tech gurus like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz became involved in interviewing candidates for sensitive positions at the Pentagon. Today, the figure who is second-in-charge at the Pentagon, Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military firms, including the emerging tech sector.

But by far the greatest form of influence is Musk’s wielding of the essentially self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to determine the fate of federal agencies, programs, and employees, despite the fact that he has neither been elected to any position, nor even confirmed by Congress, and that he now wields more power than all of Trump’s cabinet members combined.

As Alex Karp noted—no surprise here, of course—in a February 2025 call with Palantir investors, he’s a big fan of the DOGE, even if some people get hurt along the way:

We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.

Even as Musk disrupts and destroys civilian government agencies, some critics of Pentagon overspending hold out hope that at least he will put his budget-cutting skills to work on that bloated agency. But so far the plan there is simply to shift money within the department, not reduce its near-trillion-dollar top line. And if anything is trimmed, it’s likely to involve reductions in civilian personnel, not lower spending on developing and building weaponry, which is where firms like Palantir make their money. Musk’s harsh critique of existing systems like Lockheed’s F-35 jet fighter—which he described as “the worst military value for money in history”—is counterbalanced by his desire to get the Pentagon to spend far more on drones and other systems based on emerging (particularly AI) technologies.

Of course, any ideas about ditching older weapons systems will run up against fierce resistance in Congress, where jobs, revenues, campaign contributions, and armies of well-connected lobbyists create a firewall against reducing spending on existing programs, whether they have a useful role to play or not. And whatever DOGE suggests, Congress will have the last word. Key players like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) have already revived the Reaganite slogan of “peace through strength” to push for an increase of—no, this is not a misprint!—$150 billion in the Pentagon’s already staggering budget over the next four years.

What Should Our National Purpose Be?

Karp and his Silicon Valley colleagues are proposing a world in which government-subsidized military technology restores American global dominance and gives us a sense of renewed national purpose. It is, in fact, a remarkably impoverished vision of what the United States should stand for at this moment in history when non-military challenges like disease, climate change, racial and economic injustice, resurgent authoritarianism, and growing neofascist movements pose greater dangers than traditional military threats.

Technology has its place, but why not put our best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease, and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?

Reaching such goals would require reforming or even transforming our democracy—or what’s left of it—so that the input of the public actually made far more of a difference, and leadership served the public interest, not its own economic interests. In addition, government policy would no longer be distorted to meet the emotional needs of narcissistic demagogues, or to satisfy the desires of delusional tech moguls.

By all means, let’s unite around a common purpose. But that purpose shouldn’t be a supposedly more efficient way to build killing machines in the service of an outmoded quest for global dominance. Karp’s dream of a “technological republic” armed with his AI weaponry would be one long nightmare for the rest of us.

Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.

In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”

Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide.

Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent—underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”

Those statements “by people with command authority—state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers—and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”

Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza—using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians—has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.

On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”

It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.

A growing number of congressional Democrats—still way too few—have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.

This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.

For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.

This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.

That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.

While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”

J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.

It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.

The stereotype that youth-led climate initiatives are too risky to fund is outdated and, in fact, severely limits the opportunities for talented young entrepreneurs and activists. It stifles the very innovation needed to create a sustainable future. As we grapple with the pressing realities of the climate crisis, it is no longer a matter of whether we should support young leaders; it’s a matter of urgency. To succeed in addressing our environmental challenges, we need to tap into the energy, creativity, and bold leadership that young people bring to the table.

When I was just 16 years old, I submitted a climate research paper to the United Nations Development Program in Pakistan. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of working with global organizations, speaking on CNN about the devastating impact of climate change in my home country, and leading the transformation of a college club into a full-fledged nonprofit. These experiences have shown me firsthand how young people are not just passionate about environmental change—they are driving it.

Yet, despite their passion and fresh ideas, youth-led environmental action remains massively underfunded. Less than 1% of institutional climate funding currently goes toward young people. Many, like myself, have struggled to secure the necessary resources to bring our ideas to life. As the next generation holds the key to solving the climate crisis, failing to support these leaders only exacerbates the problem. The global climate crisis is urgent, and so is the need to empower young people with the funding, mentorship, and platforms they need.

We know time is running out to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis. If we are to truly address it, we must fund and support young activists today.

I’ve seen this challenge play out in my own journey. As a student in London, I faced challenges from being a woman of color trying to secure funding and support for environmental initiatives. Back in Pakistan, while I’ve been able to push forward with awareness campaigns and advocacy, I’ve encountered plenty of hurdles—whether it’s dealing with politicians who don’t take me seriously or navigating security concerns because of my public activism. Despite these challenges, I remain convinced that the future of climate change solutions lies in the hands of young people—especially women.

Supporting youth-driven solutions is not just about giving young people opportunities—it’s about ensuring our movement is more inclusive, diverse, and effective. Young leaders have the ability to solve problems that older generations may not recognize. I founded the Climate Action Society at University College London, a project that eventually became an international nonprofit. The key to its success was understanding that leadership doesn’t come with age—it comes from a commitment to action and collaboration. The support we received, including recognition from the United Nations and the U.K. Government, was crucial in amplifying our impact.

One of many initiatives directly addressing the need to support youth-led climate solutions is The Iris Prize by The Iris Project, an international award that celebrates and funds young environmental stewards dedicated to catalyzing climate action in their communities. Fiscally hosted by the Global Fund for Children, The Iris Prize invites young people aged 16-24 who are actively protecting local ecosystems, restoring natural habitats, and driving community-based environmental efforts to showcase their innovative ideas and solutions for a sustainable future.

The awards aim to help close the funding gap by shining a light on the action young people are already taking to protect and restore nature, and the lives of those working to defend their environment. Beyond financial support, winners also receive climate communications training, organizational development training, and mentorship, equipping them with the resources they need to increase their impact and scale their projects.

The funds have supported a range of projects, such as revitalising ecosystems in Bolivia, training women in sustainable farming in Guatemala, and addressing pollution in Sierra Leone. These projects are having a real impact on communities, and supporting them through funding will go a long way in helping them scale that impact. At a time when global philanthropic funding has been cut, putting pressure on hundreds of organizations in the global South, funding grassroots initiatives is more important than ever.

As someone who has worked tirelessly in climate activism, I have seen how young people are already changing the world through their grassroots efforts. However, without the support of initiatives like The Iris Prize and others, many of these projects will struggle to scale and reach their full potential.

The global community must shift its mindset. If we are to make a real, lasting difference, we must embrace youth-led initiatives as central to our global strategy. The leaders of tomorrow are already here, working to solve the problems that older generations have failed to address. Now, it’s time to support them.

We know time is running out to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis. If we are to truly address it, we must fund and support young activists today. The future depends on it. Through initiatives like The Iris Prize and others, we can ensure that youth-led solutions not only thrive but are scaled for maximum impact. Let’s give these innovators the funding and resources to make the change we desperately need.

My name is Mahmoud Khalil, and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.

If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation.

On March 8, I was taken by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours—I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.

My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s cease-fire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.

I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention—imprisonment without trial or charge—to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.

I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.

While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Minouche Shafik, Katrina Armstrong, and Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns—based on racism and disinformation—to go unchecked.

Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students—some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation—and the expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.

If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change—leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.

The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.

Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.

Consumers obsess over inflation; like egg prices topping $4; but barely notice a green card holder’s arrest for peacefully criticizing Israel. The contrast is sharp: grocery hikes since 2022 spark loud gripes; while a free-speech crackdown gets muted shrugs. Eggs hit wallets daily; tracked by CPI; the detention feels remote; abstract. Economic woes drown out systemic overreach; showing how personal costs overshadow eroded rights.

The post Egg Prices Soar, Free Speech Sinks appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

There was at least one heartwarming moment during President Donald Trump’s long-winded speech to Congress on March 4. Just before he announced that his administration is going to prioritize reducing childhood cancer (a plan that I debunked last week), Trump introduced Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a Black 13-year-old cancer survivor sitting with his father in the balcony. DJ, who dreams of becoming a police officer, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018 and given only five months to live. Since then, he has undergone 13 brain surgeries.

“A young man who truly loves our police,” said Trump. “…DJ has been sworn in as an honorary law-enforcement officer actually a number of times.” Trump then took DJ by complete surprise by making him an honorary member of the U.S. Secret Service.

On its face, it was a magnanimous gesture. One could only feel for DJ, who has gone through so much. A closer look, however, reveals that the tribute Trump paid to DJ masks at least two hypocritical realities.

Just how serious is Trump about getting toxins out of the environment? If his first administration is any indication, not at all.

First—and most obvious—Trump betrayed the police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was sworn in on January 20 he pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly all of the 1,600 convicted insurrectionists who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, including hundreds who were guilty of assaulting police. He also ordered the Justice Department to dismiss all pending cases.

Second, Trump’s new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator just closed the agency’s environmental justice offices, wants to slash its budget by at least 65%, and has targeted more than two dozen rules and policies for elimination, putting people like DJ at greater risk.

Houston Area Residents Are Exposed to Multiple Carcinogens

How did DJ get cancer? “DJ’s doctors believe DJ’s cancer likely came from a chemical he was exposed to when he was younger,” Trump explained. He then linked DJ’s plight to the increase in childhood cancer rates over the last 50 years and pledged to make reversing that trend “one of the top priorities” of his administration’s “make America healthy again” initiative. “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment,” he said, “poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

If so, the Trump administration could start with cleaning up DJ’s home town of Houston, which ranks sixth on the list of the top 10 U.S. hotspots with the worst fine-particle air pollution, according to a March 2023 analysis by The Guardian. Like the other nine places on the list, Houston metro neighborhoods with a high percentage of Black and Latino residents have the most contaminated air because they are “fenceline communities” next door to polluting facilities. As one of the researchers who conducted the analysis told The Guardian, “What we’re seeing here is segregation. You have segregation of people and segregation of pollution.”

DJ lives in Pearland, a suburb that sits on the border of Harris and Brazoria counties, 14 miles south of downtown Houston. Although Pearland is not a fenceline community, it is only 10 to 20 miles from some of the dirtiest petrochemical plants in the metro area, and air pollution does not stop at political boundaries.

Based on federal data from 2011 to 2015, The Guardian analysis did not identify the companies most responsible for Houston’s foul air, but subsequent studies based on more recent data did.

Ten Houston-area facilities wound up on a list of the top 100 worst air polluters in the country compiled in 2020 by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. Using 2018 data from the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, EIP’s report weighted pollutants based on how hazardous they are when inhaled and calculated that only 10 Houston area facilities were responsible for nearly 38% of the 288 million tons of “toxicity-weighted” air pollution the 410 petrochemical facilities in the metro area emitted.

Five of those 10 facilities, including Dixie Chemical, ExxonMobil Chemical, ExxonMobil’s Baytown Refinery, and LyondellBasell Channelview, are located in Harris County. Two others, INEOS USA Chocolate Bayou Works chemical plant and Dow Chemical—at 7,000 acres the largest chemical manufacturing facility in the Western hemisphere—are in Brazoria County. Pearland is only 10 miles from Pasadena, where Dixie Chemical is located; 22 miles from Baytown, home to the two ExxonMobil facilities; and 18 miles from Channelview, home to LyondellBasell’s 4,000-acre chemical manufacturing complex.

EIP tracked the top three chemicals each of the 10 facilities released. It found that the seven plants in Brazoria and Harris counties collectively emit at least five that cause cancer in humans—1.3 butadiene, benzene, formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, and nickel—and another four that are “probable” human carcinogens, including cobalt and naphthalene. LyondellBasell Channelview is the biggest source for ethylene oxide, which poses one of the metro area’s highest health risks.

More recently, a July 2024 report by Air Alliance Houston identified the top “dirty dozen” air polluters in the area based on 2018 to 2022 data from the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The 12 facilities include three cited in the EIP report—Dixie Chemical, ExxonMobil’s Baytown complex (including the refinery and chemical plant), and LyondellBasell Channelview—and nine others, including Calpine’s Deer Park Energy Center, Chevron Phillips Baytown, and Shell Deer Park Chemical. Deer Park, in Harris County, is only 14 miles from Pearland.

Like EIP, Air Alliance Houston found that the majority of the worst polluters are located near low-income and Black and Latino neighborhoods, causing health problems ranging from respiratory irritation in the short term to cancer over the long term.

The Trump Administration Wants to Destroy the EPA

Just how serious is Trump about getting toxins out of the environment? If his first administration is any indication, not at all.

Just after he was elected president in 2016, Trump gave The New York Times his first on-the-record news media interview and proclaimed that “clean air is vitally important” and “crystal clean water is vitally important.” By the time he left office, his administration had rolled back or eliminated nearly 100 environmental safeguards.

This time around, Trump has wasted no time undermining the government’s ability to protect the public from environmental hazards. Back in 2017, Trump proposed cutting the EPA budget by 31%. Last month, his new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, said he wants to cut the budget by at least 65%, which would severely cripple the agency.

Over the past 20 years, 82% of oil and gas industry donations and 90% of coal industry donations went to Republicans, so well before Trump first ran for office, the party has functioned as an arm of the fossil fuel industry.

Just last week, Zeldin announced his agency will kill 31 key environmental safeguards. “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said in a statement on March 12. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more.”

Three former EPA administrators—William K. Reilly, who served under George H.W. Bush; Christine Todd Whitman, who served under George W. Bush; and Gina McCarthy, who served under Barack Obama—warned that Zeldin’s plan would endanger the lives of millions of Americans. Dismantling longstanding regulations would be a “catastrophe,” said Reilly, “and represents the abandonment of a long history” of EPA actions protecting public health and the environment.

That same day Zeldin issued his “historic” announcement, it was reported that he is also planning to eliminate EPA offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution in minority and low-income communities as a part of Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). An internal EPA memo obtained by a number of news outlets revealed that Zeldin is going to shut down all of the agency’s Environmental Justice Divisions at its 10 regional offices “immediately.” Zeldin already closed the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., which was established in 1992 during the George H.W. Bush administration.

In the memo, dated March 11, Zeldin said closing the environmental justice offices is in part a response to a Trump executive order calling for “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferences.” When CBS News asked him to elaborate, Zeldin said in a statement: “President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people. Part of this mandate includes the elimination of forced discrimination programs.” Never mind that Black, Brown, and low-income communities suffer the most discrimination, environmental and otherwise.

A Government for Sale

Why are Trump and the Republican Party so intent on weakening and eliminating health and environmental protections? Follow the money. Over the past 20 years, 82% of oil and gas industry donations and 90% of coal industry donations went to Republicans, so well before Trump first ran for office, the party has functioned as an arm of the fossil fuel industry.

Last April, Trump promised roughly two dozen oil executives at a private meeting at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he would roll back Biden-era environmental rules if they donated $1 billion to his presidential campaign. Although the attendees, who included officials from Chevron, Continental Resources, ExxonMobil, and Occidental Petroleum, did not honor Trump’s request, fossil fuel interests poured $96 million directly into Trump’s campaign coffers during the 2023-24 election cycle, according to an analysis by the environmental group Climate Power. Meanwhile, 83% of the oil and gas industry’s contributions to congressional candidates—$15.7 million—went to Republicans, according to Open Secrets.

The oil and gas industry also dug deep to help pay for Trump’s inaugural bash. His inaugural committee received $2 million from Chevron, $1 million from ExxonMobil, and $1 million from Occidental Petroleum.

So when Donald Trump says his administration is going to rid the environment of toxins, you can bet that the exact opposite is going to happen. More kids like DJ Daniel—as well as more adults—in Houston and other highly polluted places will suffer from respiratory diseases, cancer, and other serious health problems. It’s no wonder why the Republican Party’s nickname, GOP, now stands for Gas and Oil Party.

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

In high school, when we studied the separation of powers, I asked my civics teacher: “What happens if the executive branch ignores the judiciary?” He didn’t have much of an answer.

It has happened before. One famous case was President Andrew Jackson’s refusal to enforce a Supreme Court ruling overturning Georgia’s seizure of Cherokee lands. “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” a defiant Jackson supposedly said. Georgia expelled the Cherokees in an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears. Lincoln shrugged off a federal judge’s habeas corpus order to release a Confederate sympathizer. The administration of George W. Bush defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rasul v. Bush (2004), ordering Guantánamo prisoners be given access to U.S. courts for habeas petitions. Still, presidents usually respect the courts. The Constitution’s checks and balances have mostly held up over 236 years.

But there’s another factor—one that political scientists and teachers like mine rarely mention: we the people. We are the fourth branch of government.

Throughout U.S. history, direct protests have reined in an out-of-control executive branch that disregards the judiciary.  During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, state governments in the South routinely violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and federal court orders, like Brown v. Board of Education (1954), mandating desegregation. Sustained protest demonstrations like the Montgomery bus boycott and Freedom Rides culminated in the 1963 March on Washington, attended by more than 250,000 people. The March amplified pressure on JFK and Congress, leading to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, based on an incident that likely never happened, allowed LBJ to send troops to Vietnam. But the expansion of the war under Nixon and especially his “secret bombing” of Cambodia in 1970 marked a seeming usurpation by the president of the constitutional assignment under Article I of the right to declare war to Congress. Massive popular demonstrations erupted across thousands of cities in 1969, including a November rally in Washington that drew over 500,000 people, and then the violence of the Kent State shootings in 1970, forced a debate over war powers that led Congress to pass the 1973 War Powers Act, which reaffirmed the legislative branch’s supremacy over military action.

Now we face new executive overreach. President Donald Trump has ignored a federal court order, and signals that he will keep doing so. This time, however, there probably won’t be enough big protests to slow him down.

On March 16th, the Trump Administration deported 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. This happened despite an explicit order by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg not to. Airplanes carrying the Venezuelans were ordered to return to the U.S. The administration blew off the federal court order. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele even mocked the federal court’s impotence, saying, “Oopsie…Too late,” while Trump officials thanked him.

There’s a broader pattern here. In February, a Rhode Island federal judge ruled that the administration had defied his order to unfreeze federal grants. If the executive can ignore the courts without consequence, the judiciary is no longer a co-equal branch.

While the courts risk diminishment, the fourth branch of government that might restore balance—we the people, exercising political force via sustained popular protests in the streets—is all but dead, as are the grassroots organizations, Left of the Democrats, that have typically organized them in response to constitutional crises. American Leftists are splintered into a myriad micro-causes, scared off by state surveillance and repression, and sidetracked by digital slacktivism. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical Left group, claimed 100,000 members in 1968. Today, the Communist Party, with a few thousand, endorses Democrats.

The Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 rivaled the sustained, high-attendance scale of the 1960s. But they took place during the unique circumstances of the pandemic lockdown. As one BLM demonstrator told me that summer in New York, “I’d usually be at the Yankees game. There’s nothing else to do!”

Failing another lockdown, Trump will likely keep steamrolling the system.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)

The post We Are the Fourth Branch of Government appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

U.S. President Donald Trump has never been coy about his desire to bend universities to his will. Last week, Columbia University became the testing ground to see how far he can push that agenda.

On March 7, the Administration announced it was cancelling $400 million in federal funding from Columbia, alleging that the university violated Title VI by failing to redress the “persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Last Thursday, it issued a list of demands that Columbia must fulfill before any talks on reinstating funds can even begin.

Among them: Place the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership;” devise a plan to “hold all student groups accountable” for violating university policies; and empower law enforcement to “arrest and remove” students who “foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment.”

The question is whether Columbia will fight or whether it will sacrifice the free speech rights of its faculty and students to appease the Trump administration.

But there’s one demand that gives the others their bite: Columbia must adopt a new definition of antisemitism. This definition matters because it will determine what speech gets muzzled in the departments under receivership, and what speech results in discipline, removal from campus, and expulsion.

While the letter stops short of explicitly mandating a specific definition, it unsubtly reminds the reader of the Trump administration’s embrace of the so-called IHRA definition, which declares it antisemitic to hold Israel to a “double standard,” “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or compare its policies to those of the Nazis.

The implication here is clear: Adopt IHRA or kiss a half billion dollars goodbye.

The purported interest in protecting Jewish students from antisemitism is a transparent pretext. The Trump administration is a den of antisemites. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews. The Pentagon’s deputy press secretary is an avid spreader of antisemitic conspiracy theories. And let’s not forget about Elon Musk, who turned X into a safe space for white supremacists, promoted tweets downplaying the Holocaust and blaming Jews for the “great replacement,” gave two Hitler salutes at a rally, and then jetted off to a right-wing convention in Germany where he opined that Germany’s real problem was “too much focus on past guilt.”

If Elon Musk were the president of Columbia, the university would have lost its Title VI funding long ago.

Nor is the right-wing’s love affair with IHRA rooted in its solicitude for Jews. IHRA is their definition of choice because, unlike other working definitions of antisemitism, IHRA is broad enough and vague enough to sweep up virtually any criticism of Israel. Pro-Israel litigants have invoked IHRA to argue that it is inherently antisemitic—and creates a hostile environment for Jewish students—to criticize Israel for supporting “Jewish supremacy,” notwithstanding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that Israel is a “state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” Or to suggest that Israel is maintaining an apartheid in the occupied territories, even though Israeli’s third-largest newspaper, its human rights NGOs, and the International Court of Justice agree with that assessment. Or to accuse Israel of committing ethnic cleansing, even though Israel’s former defense minister came to the same conclusion and Israeli officials openly advocate mass expulsions. Even calling for Palestinians and Jews to have equal immigration rights has been labeled antisemitic on the grounds that the influx of Palestinians would make Jews a minority and “obliterate the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.”

There’s a malign genius to the administration’s approach. Trump and his enablers know they can't directly muzzle students or faculty without facing First Amendment lawsuits. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the administration won’t try. ICE has already begun arresting foreign student activists, and DOJ has signaled plans to charge protestors under federal counterterrorism laws. But the administration surely understands that most of those actions will be thwarted in the courts.

As a private institution, however, Columbia is unconstrained by the First Amendment. There’s no redress in the courts if Columbia starts expelling students for criticizing Israel. So the trick is to find a way of outsourcing the censorship to university administrators. And that’s where the funding cuts come in. As explained by one of the strategy’s architects, the threat of defunding is designed to create an “existential terror” that will “discipline [universities] in a way that you could not get through administrative oversight with 150 extra Department of Ed bureaucrats.”

To be clear, this tactic is also blatantly illegal. The Executive cannot withdraw Title VI funding without making findings of fact, providing an opportunity to be heard, and submitting a written report to Congress—none of which has happened here. And the Executive can only defund the specific programs that are found to be out of compliance. The law doesn’t allow the sort of blanket cuts that have been imposed.

And even if the administration complied with these requirements, the First Amendment bars the government from conscripting universities into their efforts to censor protected speech. It likewise bars the government from leveraging public funds to force a university to endorse a state-sanctioned view on a matter of public concern (i.e., whether criticism of Israel is antisemitic). In a 2013 case, Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring an NGO to have “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking” before it could receive grant money to help combat the spread of HIV. Writing for a 6-2 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the NGOs (like Columbia) were free to turn down the funding, but held that the government could not force the NGO to choose between its First Amendment rights and federal largess: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The question is whether Columbia will fight or whether it will sacrifice the free speech rights of its faculty and students to appease the Trump administration.

The Trump Administration is clearly counting on the latter, and not without cause. Columbia has been a case study in preemptive acquiescence: In recent weeks, university administrators have threatened disciplinary measures against students for writing op-eds calling for divestment from Israel, for sharing social media posts in support of the protests, and for co-hosting an art exhibition in a private building about the occupation of a campus building. After two students—one a recent IDF soldier—showered protesters with a foul-smelling spray, Columbia responded by forcing into retirement a professor who expressed concern about Israeli students coming to Columbia “right out of their military service,” and then paid a $400,000 settlement to the students who sprayed the chemical.

This is not going to end with Columbia: the Department of Education has sent similar letters to 60 other universities. And the assault on academic freedom is not going to be limited to discourse about Israel. This battle is, in a real sense, the front lines. If Columbia—with its $14 billion endowment—folds, it’s hard to imagine others won’t follow. If Columbia’s administrators cannot find the backbone to protect free speech on its campus, students and faculty will have to defend their constitutional rights themselves, in court.

After a federal judge pressed the Trump administration to provide evidence by 5 pm Monday about whether the White House had violated the court’s order in deporting migrants with little to no due process, so-called border czar Tom Homan said that the flights would continue regardless. “We’re not stopping,” he said. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

In our system, judges don’t just “think.” They have the final say, unless their rulings are appealed to the Supreme Court, in which case the high court’s majority has the final final say.

On Monday afternoon, it became apparent that Trump’s Justice Department shares Homan’s odd view of our judicial system. DOJ lawyers filed papers telling the judge that the administration would not provide any further information about the deportation flights, and that the court should vacate the hearing.

Later, speaking Monday evening on Fox News, Attorney General Pam Bondi criticized the judge, saying “What he’s done is an intrusion on the president’s authority.”

What’s going on here?

A very dangerous game.

On Sunday night, Trump told reporters that a federal judge in California who ordered the administration to rehire thousands of fired probationary workers was “putting himself in the position of the president of the United States, who was elected by close to 80 million votes.”

Excuse me? In our system of government, courts pass judgment on actions of a president and the executive branch. Courts don’t put themselves in the “position” of a president. They act as the Constitution empowers them to act — as a co-equal branch of government.

If the executive branch doesn’t agree with what a lower-court judge decides, it can appeal to a higher court and ultimately to the Supreme Court.

Trump isn’t the only one to make this unconstitutional claim. In early February, Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” It was an odd statement coming from someone who has studied at one of America’s preeminent law schools — and it was logically absurd, since it’s up to judges (and eventually the Supreme Court’s justices) to determine a president’s “legitimate power.”

Let’s be clear. Trump has openly violated numerous laws and constitutional provisions — such as ending birthright citizenship; giving associates of Elon Musk’s government-slashing effort access to a sensitive Treasury Department system; transferring transgender female inmates to male prisons; placing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees on leave; and effectively dismantling USAID and folding it into the State Department.

In response, federal judges have temporarily barred a slew of Trump orders from taking effect.

But not until now has Trump or his regime blatantly refused to follow a judge’s order.

What happens when this or another lower-court ruling goes to the Supreme Court, and the high court rules against Trump?

Vance has said that if this occurs, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Never mind that the quote attributed to Jackson is, as one scholar has noted, “probably apocryphal.” It’s heard more and more from Trump appointees these days, as exemplified by Homan’s remark this morning and this afternoon’s Justice Department filing.

Trump’s appointments in his second term are having the opposite effect of his first-term appointees. In his first term, they restrained him somewhat. Recall that the Justice Department’s top brass threatened to resign en masse if he appointed as attorney general the one assistant attorney general who was prepared to sell his soul to Trump and say the 2020 election was stolen from him.

This time, his appointees are magnifying his worst instincts. Rather than act as guardrails, they are egging Trump on.

Many people wonder if we’re in a “constitutional crisis.” Definitions of that phrase vary considerably, as do opinions about whether we’re in one now.

My worry is that Trump is surrounded by extremist anti-democracy nihilists, including his vice president, who are encouraging him to defy the Supreme Court.

If and when he does, we’ll be in a constitutional crisis that should cause every American to take to the streets.

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

In this episode of The TMI Show, hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan address the escalating conflicts in the Middle East, starting with Israel’s latest bombing campaign in Gaza. The airstrikes, which began days ago, have killed over 400 people, including many children, shattering a two-month ceasefire. We examine the scale of the destruction, with residential areas reduced to rubble and an ongoing aid blockade exacerbating the crisis for Gaza’s surviving residents.

We also talk about Donald Trump’s recent military actions in Yemen, where airstrikes targeting Houthi rebels have killed at least 31 people since Saturday. Trump has intensified this proxy war, with the U.S. deploying what he called “overwhelming lethal force” to counter Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes, which are in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

We also cover the broader rivalry between Israel and Iran, a key undercurrent in both conflicts. They discuss Israel’s strikes as a signal to Iran, which backs Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—collectively known as the “Axis of Resistance”— as well as recent U.S. warnings to Tehran to cease supporting the Houthis. The show ties these threads together, analyzing these interconnected crises.

The post TMI Show Ep 99: “Time to Cut Israel Loose?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.