The recent waves of gang violence in Haiti, that have plagued the island since February 2024, have plunged it into another major humanitarian crisis. As reported by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the violence has been centered in Port-au-Prince and other areas in the Ouest and Artibonite Departments, but the reduced access to food, healthcare services, and general economic strain due to gang violence are being felt across the departments. With increasing armed violence events, 700,000 internally displaced people, almost 5 million people facing acute food insecurity, and only 28% of functioning healthcare services available, daily life and public safety continue to erode at a rapid pace. This is especially true for women and girls.

Lack of access to the formal economy, enduring threats of public violence, and lack of adequate protections from natural disasters make it exceedingly difficult for women and girls to safely navigate city and nation-wide emergencies. Such emergencies exacerbate the other substandard conditions of education, health, legal protections against gender-based violence, and political participation of Haitian women and girls. Historically, the Haitian women’s movement and feminist activists have provided essential educational resources, legal support services, and platforms for women’s stories to be heard and this political advocacy continues during the present violence.

Haitian women’s feminist groups developed the Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition. This document highlights the legal rights of Haitian women and girls established in the Haitian Constitution, the oppression Haitian women and girls endure in private and public life as well as recommendations on how the Presidential Transitional Council (TPC) should amend proposed harmful policies already set to be put in place. This Policy Framework is part of the rich legacy of political action taken by Haitian women and feminists since the emancipation of the island from French colonial rule. Haitian feminist activists and civil society leaders have time and time again shown up for their community on the ground during natural disasters and fighting against normalized gendered violence and discrimination. In this moment, they are pushing forward this Policy Framework to display the link between a successful democracy and gender equality.

The United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens.

Gang violence in Haiti isn’t a new phenomenon. Throughout the country’s history, the Haitian government relied on armed gangs to assert their authority and maintain power because there was no strong military or police presence. However, the type of armed brutality evident today is a result of the rapidly decaying relationship between Haitian politicians and armed gangs following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moreover, the armed power of these gangs, which has continued to overpower the Haitian National Police and the MSS mission, is primarily sustained by U.S. weapons sales into the country. The transitional government’s attempts to regain control and establish a stable democracy are failing to address the needs of Haitian women, expressly in this current crisis.

On the Transitional Presidential Council, its Haitian women’s groups have reported that of the nine members only one is a woman and she is one of two members who are unable to vote. In the newly established commission on criminal reform, the same pattern emerges—one woman to eight male members. The intention to restrict women in positions of political authority is cemented by the fact that during the search for an interim prime minister, there were no women invited to interview.

These patterns are dangerous because they directly undermine standards of gender equality established explicitly in the Haitian Constitution, where women are assured to hold at least 30% of political positions. Moreover, the few women that are granted access to political positions in the new government are not representatives of the women’s movement, which threatens to conceal the most pressing issues of Haitian women and girls and thus fail to adequately protect them. This is concerning because It’s been reported that women’s representation as leaders in peace processes is vital in developing sustainable peace agreements and post-conflict stability that create more just futures for the entirety of civil society.

It’s necessary that the international community, especially the United States, works according to the needs emphasized by grassroots women’s organizations and civil society. Prior international efforts meant to ease hardship in Haiti have worked to only make it worse. Decades of violent U.S. occupation, the unjust imposition of international debt from France, careless and corrupt U.N. peacekeeper missions, the destabilization of rice productions and the resulting economic fragility, along with current arms sales from the U.S., have helped create the Haiti we see today.

Because of this history, the United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens. Supporting Haitian feminist’s efforts such as the Policy Framework is the first step to respecting the lived experiences of people at the center of conflict and in remedying this historic violence.

On the morning of November 6, many of us found ourselves facing the seemingly inconceivable fact that Donald Trump had become the next president of the United States of America—again. Not only had he won the electoral college, but he had won the popular vote as well. There were no stories we could tell ourselves this time to explain it away. It was a clear victory and a clear loss.

As the hours and then days passed, I sat with this truth, and as I did, I came to realize that this outcome had never been inconceivable. In fact, we should have expected nothing less. We had been heading down this path for too long, so blind to reality that we hadn’t even stopped to check the map before finding ourselves utterly lost.

We didn’t begin this journey when Biden agreed to exit the race. We didn’t begin it when it was clear Trump would run again. Not even after the first Trump win. No, we had been hurdling down this road toward a complete disconnect with large swaths of the American people for quite some time. Looking back, the clearest indication to me was the Wikileaks release of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails showing their bias toward Hillary Clinton. That moment should have forced a reckoning. But none of us stopped long enough to reflect on how broken our party had become. Instead, we blamed Russian interference for forcing us to hold up a mirror to our own issues.

We did fail. This is no one’s fault but our own. This is not Trump’s fault. This is not the fault of those who voted for Trump. This is our fault.

The Democratic party is the party of organized labor. The party supporting civil rights and protecting minorities. The party of the working class, immigrants, the disenfranchised. But over the past two years, as we watched how the party chose to run the Biden campaign and then the Harris campaign, it was hard to see that party.

I truly wanted Harris to win, of course I did. She would have championed many of the issues I feel passionately about: job creation and economic growth; social and economic inequity; well-funded social services to protect the poor, the elderly, children, and other vulnerable populations; combatting threats to the civil rights of minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community; affordable health care options; sensible gun legislation; women’s reproductive rights; and climate change. I disagreed with her refusal to speak out against the war in Gaza and for not insisting a Palestinian-American speak at the Democratic National Convention. But I knew how dangerous any alternative would be. And, not for nothing, I needed to see a woman become president.

Unfortunately, the DNC didn’t allow us to choose our candidate. In silencing our choice, many felt detached from the entire process. By skipping the Iowa caucuses, it was impossible for anyone to challenge Biden’s candidacy. When he left the race, the candidacy was simply given to Harris rather than allowing Democrats to feel like they had made her their choice. At that point it was too late for her to introduce herself to the American people, to make her case, to earn our trust and our vote.

Harris’s campaign spent nearly a billion dollars. Focusing on celebrity endorsements and concert rallies only served to prove Trump’s message that Democrats were the elite, out of touch with everyday Americans. In the final days of the campaign, Harris went on a “blue wall” tour with Liz Cheney to win undecided independents and moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, alienated voters in mining towns, inner cities, and immigrant communities across the country didn’t get such royal treatment. Their votes were assumed. They shouldn’t have been.

On election day, I knew I needed to find some way to occupy my time rather than checking CNN every few minutes and watching the minutes tick by until the polls closed. I was fortunate enough to be able to work the phones from 6:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m. with Drive Your Ballot, a volunteer-run organization in Philadelphia. For thirteen and a half hours I fielded 125 calls from people who needed a free ride to the polls, regardless of their circumstances or political affiliation. When I finally sat down to watch the results come in that night, I should have known what the next day would bring. I feel foolish now not to have known.

We can’t afford to continue to make these same mistakes. We must do what Americans seem so loathe to do—stop and reflect. I know there is an immediate battle ahead, but we must assess how we lost this one first. Because we did lose. We did fail. This is no one’s fault but our own. This is not Trump’s fault. This is not the fault of those who voted for Trump. This is our fault. We didn’t listen. We presumed we knew better.

I wrote a poem a couple days after Trump’s victory and Harris’s loss. In writing through my sorrow, anger, and pain, I was able to hear the voices of those my party is meant to represent, protect, and listen to. We must do better.

Election Day

I wake early, phone lines opening at 6:30.
140 miles north
cars idle on the streets of Philadelphia—ready.
If you want to vote today, we’ll get you there.

For twelve hours, call after call after call.
The sick, the elderly, the infirm.
Disabled, addicted, blind, homeless.
Some broken, some lonely.
Some desperate for an opportunity,
any opportunity.

A woman who speaks little English
knows two words very well
and repeats them emphatically:

“No Trump. No Trump. No Trump.”

A couple at a crappy motel outside the city,
snipe at each other as we talk.
They’ve been travelling too far, are too tired,
have been looking for a ride for too long.

“I think I got to get into this mess today.
Gotta jump into this voting thing,”
a blind man tells me.
“But can’t drive myself, now can I?”

A soft-spoken girl asks,
“Can my driver please be a woman?
I need it to be a woman.”
So, when the next young woman calls
I make sure to ask if she needs any
special accommodations,
“No,” she laughs embarrassed,
“I just don’t have no money.”

The moment I hang up,
the next call comes in.
One after another after another
after another after another
after another.

Until they stop.

The next morning the sun inexplicably rises,
shining down on a state awash in red—
the City of Brotherly Love,
a blue bruise in the corner.

We failed.

We failed Auntie Audrey, 102,
whose niece didn’t own a car.
She’d seen so much in her lifetime,
but not a president that looked like her.

We failed the homeless mother of two,
desperate to traverse the city from her shelter.
“The car needs to be big enough for all of us.
I need to bring my kids.”

We failed because someone forgot.
Forgot who we were fighting for.
Forgot who needed protecting.
Forgot our soul.

They forgot those five men
at the inpatient addiction facility
who needed a second chance.

They forgot that damn couple
in that crappy motel
who went from yelling at each other,
to yelling at me
because their ride hadn’t shown up.
They were hungry. They were done.

We all need to remember.
Because when we forgot,
we didn’t just fail Philadelphia.
We failed our entire country.

The right to seek asylum or refuge from danger is a fundamental human right. It’s protected by both international and U.S. law.

But U.S. President-elect Donald Trump wants to eliminate that right, including for the most vulnerable: children. These children are often forced to cross the border without their parents to try and claim asylum in the United States.

I spoke with Arlene Rodriguez, Esteffany Luna, and Esther Ramos, who provide legal and social services to unaccompanied migrant youth in Texas. They gave me a glimpse into the daunting obstacles faced by young asylum seekers.

We’ll need to band together and advocate for local and state governments to pass legislation defending immigrant communities—and for President Joe Biden to take steps to protect migrants before Trump takes office.

Nearly a third of new cases in immigration court are minors, I learned, with 1 out of 8 being 0-4 years old.

But these children are expected to navigate the same complex processes as adults. “They have to sign their own agreements and applications, present themselves in court, and answer the judges’ questions,” said Ramos. “They’re treated very adversarially—not much different from adults.”

“Sometimes they’re so young they don’t understand what they’re being asked to do, or what is being asked of them,” Luna added.

Asylum applicants have to undergo “credible fear” screenings to convince authorities that it’s unsafe for them to go home. In interviews, documents, and court appearances, children are required to repeatedly disclose trauma, which takes a toll. “For older kids who are more conscious of the bad things they’ve experienced, it’s difficult to deal with having someone else know about it,” Rodriguez told me.

Unaccompanied minors with legal representation are nearly 100 times more likely to be granted relief than those without. But unfortunately, there’s no right to an attorney in immigration court, and pro bono legal services are scarce. And the few hard-won protections minors do have are at risk of being undermined as Trump retakes office.

During his first term, President Trump tried to terminate the 1997 Flores agreement, which set standards for the care and release of children in federal immigration custody. He gutted asylum qualifications, removing domestic and gang violence as reasons to obtain protection. And most notoriously, his “zero-tolerance” policy forcibly separated over 5,000 children from their parents in immigration custody.

Under a policy called Title 42, many asylum applicants were turned away altogether, violating their due process. Under “Remain in Mexico,” applicants including children were forced to await asylum hearings in Mexico, exposing many to danger. And courts were hostile and caseloads were rushed through.

Ramos put it bluntly: “Immigration law has always been hard—attorneys call it a dumpster fire. Under the Trump administration, it was like trying to put out a dumpster fire with a liter of gasoline.”

For children seeking asylum, the mental and emotional toll of these legal procedures is compounded by language barriers, social marginalization, and fear of deportation.

These fears can also deter their sponsors, the relatives or volunteers who take them in while their case proceeds—and who are often undocumented themselves. It can even discourage them from accessing medical care, educational services, and food banks due to fears of arrest.

The three experts I spoke to all agreed our immigration system is outdated and inefficient—but said reform should make it more welcoming, not restrictive.

Until then, we’ll need to band together and advocate for local and state governments to pass legislation defending immigrant communities—and for President Joe Biden to take steps to protect migrants before Trump takes office. You can also help by donating to organizations that support immigrants.

Asylum is a matter of life or death for these kids. If we truly care about the safety and dignity of children, our immigration policies must reflect that commitment.

For a century, the Equal Rights Amendment—or ERA—has symbolized hope and justice. Drafted in 1923, the ERA declares, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Approved by Congress in 1972 and ratified by the requisite three-fourths of states—culminating with Virginia in 2020—it has met all constitutional requirements to become the 28th Amendment. Yet its certification has been unjustly delayed.

President Donald Trump ignored it, and President Joe Biden now has the opportunity to address this injustice and reaffirm his commitment to equality and the rule of law by giving notice of its passage to National Archivist Colleen Shogan to publish the ERA.

The Constitution evolves to reflect America’s progress and values. Certifying the ERA would mark a historic step in rectifying the foundational omission of gender equality. Opponents argue that Congress’ seven-year ratification deadline and rescissions by six states invalidate the ERA. However, the American Bar Association (ABA), representing over 400,000 legal professionals, rejected these claims in a 2023 resolution. The ABA asserts that Article V of the Constitution prohibits Congress from imposing deadlines or states from revoking ratifications.

The Equal Rights Amendment is more than legislation—it promises that America values all citizens equally.

Recognizing the ERA honors the constitutional amendment process and sets a precedent for advancing democratic principles. By certifying it, President Biden would reaffirm the Constitution as a living document and uphold the rule of law.

Although the United States is seen as a global leader, it lags behind 76% of countries that guarantee gender equality in their constitutions. Enshrining the ERA would signal America’s commitment to justice and human rights. A 2016 ERA Coalition survey found that 94% of Americans support a constitutional amendment ensuring gender equality, highlighting the widespread public mandate for this change.

President Biden has long championed equality, from his work on the Violence Against Women Act to advancing gender equity through executive actions. Certifying the ERA would cement his legacy as a president who expanded civil rights and upheld fundamental freedoms.

Current federal and state laws against sex discrimination are inconsistent and subject to change. Recent Supreme Court decisions embracing originalism threaten decades of progress in gender equality. By enshrining the ERA in the Constitution, President Biden can ensure permanent protections that surpass the vulnerabilities of statutory laws.

Certification would fortify gender equality as an unassailable right and inspire progress in other areas of civil rights. The ERA offers a foundation for broader justice, creating a ripple effect across communities.

Current federal and state laws addressing gender discrimination, pay disparities, violence against women, and discrimination against pregnant individuals are inconsistent and vulnerable to shifts in political and judicial interpretation, with recent Supreme Court decisions embracing originalism threatening decades of progress. By certifying the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as part of the Constitution, President Biden can establish permanent, unassailable protections against such injustices, ensuring that gender equality is enshrined at the highest legal level. This action would safeguard the progress made and provide a foundation for advancing broader civil rights, creating a ripple effect of justice and equity across communities.

The Equal Rights Amendment is more than legislation—it promises that America values all citizens equally. As we celebrate 100 years since its inception, the time has come to fulfill that promise. The ERA has met all constitutional requirements, and the American people overwhelmingly support its inclusion in the Constitution.

President Biden must seize this moment to notify the National Archivist, ensuring the ERA’s certification as the 28th Amendment. This is not just a legal or political issue but a moral imperative. Certifying the ERA would reaffirm America’s dedication to equality, justice, and the rule of law.

By taking this bold step, President Biden would inspire future generations, honor those who fought tirelessly for equality, and secure a brighter, fairer future for all. Let this act of leadership define his presidency and the nation’s commitment to its highest ideals.

By Ralph Nader December 6, 2024 For decades consumer groups have been sounding clarion calls for action against the “silent violence” causing massive casualties that arise from the unbridled power of corporate greed, criminal negligence or indifference. They cite statistical and case studies that the media and lawmakers mostly ignored or relegated to low levels…

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has shocked the nation, not because of the killing itself, but rather due to the widespread and gleeful public reaction to it. As the manhunt continues, social media and mainstream media comment sections are full of horror stories of desperately-ill people and their loved ones attempting to navigate a byzantine health insurance system designed to thwart easy access to medical care and payments to doctors.

Co-host Manila Chan is out today, suffering from pneumonia as well as the vicissitudes of the healthcare system—she got worse because she couldn’t get easy access to antibiotics. Holding down the fort with co-host Ted Rall is TMI Show producer Robby West, who “enjoys” a front row seat amid the chaos and cruelty that is America’s healthcare system.

The post TMI Show Ep 33: “Deny, Defend, Depose”: Health insurance Horror Stories first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 33: “Deny, Defend, Depose”: Health insurance Horror Stories appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Two main lessons are to be drawn from the fall of Michel Barnier’s government in France.

The first is that talk of Europe massively rearming itself and substituting for the U.S. as the chief backer of Ukraine while maintaining existing levels of healthcare and social security is idiocy. The money is simply not there. The second is that the effort by “mainstream” establishments to exclude populist parties from office is doomed in the long run, and in the short run is a recipe for repeated political crisis and increasing paralysis of government.

Two countries are central to the European Union, the European economy, European defense, and any hope of European strategic autonomy: France and Germany. Within a month of each other, both have seen their governments collapse due to battles over how to reduce their growing budget deficits. In both cases, their fiscal woes have been drastically worsened by a combination of economic stagnation and pressure on welfare budgets with the new costs of rearmament and support for Ukraine.

Large parts of the European foreign and security establishments write and talk as if none of this were happening; as if in fact these establishments had been permanently appointed to their positions by Louis XIV and Frederick II, and given by those sovereigns an unlimited right to tax and conscript their subjects.

In both cases, fiscal crisis has fed into the decay of the mainstream political parties that alternated in power for generations—a phenomenon that is to be seen all over Europe (and in the U.S., insofar as President-elect Donald Trump represents a revolt against the Republican establishment). This decay is being fed by the growing backlash against dictation by the E.U. and NATO that is occurring across wide swathes of Europe.

In the French presidential elections of 2017 and 2022, President Emmanuel Macron defeated the Front National (now the Rassemblement National) of Marine Le Pen by essentially uniting the remnants of all the centrist parties in a grand coalition behind himself. The problem with such grand coalitions of the center however is that they leave opposition nowhere to go but the extremes of right and left.

In the case of France, economic stagnation and resistance to Macron’s free market and austerity measures led in June of this year to crushing defeat for his bloc in European parliamentary elections. Macron then called snap French parliamentary elections in the hope that fear of Le Pen and the radical left would terrify French voters back into support for him. The result however was that Le Pen won a plurality of the vote, and while electoral deals with the left gave Macron’s bloc a plurality of seats, they are heavily outnumbered by deputies on the right and left.

Macron then ditched his left-wing allies and stitched up an agreement whereby Le Pen would support a centrist-conservative government under Michel Barnier in return for concessions on immigration policy and other issues. Bizarrely however, this was combined with continued “lawfare” against the Rassemblement National, with the prosecution of Le Pen for allegedly diverting E.U. parliamentary funds to support her party’s deputies. This is something that looks rather like a technicality or peccadillo, given what we know of the past behavior of E.U. parliamentarians—but would mean that, if convicted, she would be barred from running for the presidency in 2027.

This of course gave Le Pen every incentive to bring down Barnier’s government in the hope that it will bring down Macron with it, and thereby lead to early presidential elections; and when Barnier’s austerity budget (pushed through by decree against parliamentary opposition) infuriated the left, Le Pen seized her chance. Given the string of defeats that Macron has now suffered (and remembering that the far greater Charles de Gaulle resigned in 1969 after a far lesser defeat), it would make sense for Macron to step down. This would most probably lead to a presidency of the Rassemblement National; but then again, this is also probable if presidential elections take place on schedule in 2027.

German politics are in certain respects tracking those of France, but some years behind. Not long ago one would have said a generation behind, but European political change is clearly speeding up. After the 2021 general elections, the decline in support for the Social Democratic party, and the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative fuer Deutchland (AfD) and the left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) forced the Social Democrats into an uneasy coalition with two deeply ideologically opposed partners, the Liberals (FDP) and the Greens.

As Germany’s economic position worsened, internal battles over the budget also worsened until the coalition eventually collapsed. Opinion polls indicate that the centrist conservative Christian Democrats will come first in elections due in February, but will be far short of an absolute majority. The result will be a grand coalition with the Social Democrats; but if that also falls short of an absolute majority, and the Liberals fail to pass the 5% threshold to enter the German parliament, then (assuming a continued determination to exclude AfD and BSW), the Greens will have to be included.

Not only will this replicate the internal weaknesses and divisions of the last coalition, but it will mean that if Germany’s economic woes continue and the coalition parties’ popularity slumps, AfD and BSW will be the only place for discontented voters to go. These parties, being newer, are not yet nearly as popular as their French equivalents. AfD still has to go much further in the process initiated by Le Pen in the Front National, of purging its more extreme elements; and of course there is the special German historical fear of the radical right. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to think that the future German trajectory will resemble that of France.

Meanwhile, large parts of the European foreign and security establishments write and talk as if none of this were happening; as if in fact these establishments had been permanently appointed to their positions by Louis XIV and Frederick II, and given by those sovereigns an unlimited right to tax and conscript their subjects.

Thus in an article this week for Foreign Affairs, Elie Tenenbaum of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris and a colleague declare that in response to Trump’s election and in order to block a peace deal disadvantageous to Ukraine and “impose conditions of its own,” Europe must “force its way to the negotiating table.” A European coalition force of “at least four to five multinational brigades” should be deployed to eastern Ukraine to guarantee against further Russian aggression. European combat air patrols could be deployed “while the war is still underway.” And “if Russia remains unyielding, Europe must bear the bulk of the financial assistance to support Ukraine in a protracted conflict.”

Where the money and the public support for such a program is to come from is nowhere indicated.

I don’t know an appropriate and printable French response to these daydreams, but the Kremlin may reply with an old Russian saying: “Oh sure—when crabs learn to whistle.”

Had Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic nomination and gone on to defeat Donald Trump — as most polls suggested he had a better chance of doing than Hillary Clinton, the actual nominee — he would be now entering his lame duck period, and perhaps Donald Trump might not figure in the current discussion much at all. (Alternately, had the party poobahs not closed ranks behind Biden with lightning speed to deny Sanders the nomination in 2020, he might have just completed his campaign for a second term — which he clearly would have been fit to serve.)

Eight years on

Sanders did not succeed in bringing democratic socialism to the White House, of course, but he did deliver the message to quite a number of other households during the Democratic nomination debates. As a result, two presidential cycles on, democratic socialists have now run and won races all the way up to the U.S. House, and democratic socialism has now become a “thing” in American politics. Not a big thing, really, but most definitely a thing. Between the Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporate newsmedia, it’s a thing that certainly draws more negative mention than positive — but given that its critique of American society pointedly includes Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporations that own the news media, we could hardly expect it to be otherwise.

During this time, self described democratic socialists have been elected and they’ve been unelected. They’ve exerted influence beyond their numbers; and they’ve also struggled with the hurly burly of political life. Some have been blown away by big money; some have contributed to their own downfall. In other words, they’ve run the gamut of the electoral political world — if still largely at the margins. Any thoughts of a socialist wave following the first Sanders campaign or the election of the “Squad” soon bent to the more grueling reality of trying to eke out a new congressional seat or two per term — or defend those currently held, with efforts on the other levels of government playing out in similar fashion. But at the least we can say that the U.S. has joined the mainstream of modern world politics to the point where the socialist viewpoint generally figures in the mix — albeit in a modest way.

Lesser of two evils?

The 2024 race stood out from the presidential election norm both for the return of one president, Trump’s return being the first since Grover Cleveland’s in 1892 — also the only other time a president reoccupied the White House after having been previously voted out; and for the withdrawal of another president, Joe Biden’s exit from the campaign being the first since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. And, just like Hubert Humphrey in 68, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee — without running in any primaries. Both of them inherited, and endorsed the policies of the administration in which they occupied the number two office, which included support of a war effort opposed by a significant number of otherwise generally Democratic-leaning voters.

In Johnson’s case, the withdrawal of his candidacy had everything to do with that opposition, and the shock of Minnesota Senator Gene McCarthy drawing 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote running as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. But when Humphrey won the Democratic nomination and the equally hawkish Richard Nixon took the Republican slot, the substantial number of war opponents felt themselves facing the prospect of choosing the lesser of two evils. The dismal choice presented in that race soured untold numbers of voters on the left who came to consider a choice between two evils to be the norm for presidential elections. Over time, the hostility faded, with most coming to judge the choice offered less harshly, now more one of picking the less inadequate of two inadequate programs — until now. The intensity of opposition to the Biden-Harris support of Israel’s war on Palestine has certainly not approached that shown toward the Johnson-Humphrey conduct of the American war against Vietnam. But for a substantial number of people who considered it criminal to continue supplying 2000 pound bombs to Israel’s relentless ongoing disproportionate obliteration of Gaza in retaliation for an atrocity that occurred on a day more than a year past, this was a “lesser of two evils” choice, to a degree unmatched since the bad old Humphrey-Nixon days.

And yet, while we don’t know how many opted not to vote for president at all, we do know that those who did vote almost all did make that choice. Even with a Democratic nominee preferring the campaign companionship of former third-ranking House Republican Liz Cheney to that of Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian democratic socialist, third party votes did not prove to be a factor. There was no blaming Jill Stein this time.

Democratic Socialists of America

Organizationally, the greatest beneficiary of the Sanders campaigns has been the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Ironically, while Bernie has been the nation’s twenty-first century avatar of socialism — generally understood to be a philosophy of collective action — he himself is not a joiner, being a member neither of the Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination he has twice sought; nor DSA, an organization he has long worked with. With about 6,000 members, the pre-Sanders campaign DSA was the largest socialist organization in an undernourished American left. In the minds of some long time members, their maintenance of the socialist tradition bore a certain similarity to the work of the medieval Irish monks who copied ancient manuscripts whose true value would only be appreciated in the future. But when the post-Sanders surge came, there DSA was — popping up in the Google search of every newly minted or newly energized socialist looking to meet people of like mind. Membership mushroomed to 100,000. Organizational inflation on that order that does not come without growing pains — the sort of problems that any organization covets, but problems nonetheless.

DSA’s very name reflects the troubled history of the socialist movement. In the minds of early socialists the term “democratic socialist” would have been one for Monty Python’s Department of Redundancy Department. The whole point of socialism, after all, was to create a society that was more democratic than the status quo, extending democratic rights past the political realm into that of economics, and the difference between socialism and communism was pretty much a matter that only scholars concerned themselves with. But with the devolution of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism, “communism,” the word generally associated with the Soviet Union, came to mean the opposite of democratic to much of the world. And in the U.S. in particular, “socialism” too seemed tainted, to the point where socialists felt the need to tag “democratic” onto it.

DSA was an organization, then, where people most definitely did not call themselves communists. It was not the place to go to find people talking about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “vanguard parties,” or other phrases reminiscent of the 1920s or 30s left. Among its members, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, while certainly considered interesting and significant — fascinating even, were not events to look to for guidance in contemporary American politics.

And then the expansion. A lot of previously unaffiliated socialists, pleasantly surprised — shocked even — to find the idea entering the public realm, decided it was time to join up and do something about it. The curious also came, eager to learn more of what the whole thing was all about, maybe suffering from imposter syndrome: “Do I really know enough to call myself a socialist?” And then there were the already socialists who would never have thought to join DSA in the pre-Sanders inflation era, some with politics that DSA’s name had been chosen to distinguish the organization from. The expanded DSA was a “big tent,” “multi-tendency” organization. Soon there was a Communist Caucus in DSA — along with a bunch of others. Whether the internal dissonance can be contained and managed long-run remains to be seen, but then what is politics but a continuous series of crises? It’s to the organization’s credit that it has held itself together thus far, but for the moment some hoping to grapple with the questions of twenty-first century socialism may encounter local chapter leadership still finding their guidance in reading the leaves in the tea room of the Russian Revolution. Initial stumbles in the organization’s immediate response to the Hamas attack in Israel prompted a spate of long-time member resignations — some with accompanying open letters — but the trickle did not turn into a torrent.

In the meantime, DSA, now slimmed down to 80-some-odd thousand members, has also struggled with the more immediate, public, and arguably more important question of working out a tenable relationship with those members holding elected political office. While the organization encourages members to seek office and benefits from their successes, it understandably does not want to be associated with public figures with markedly divergent politics. At the same time, office-holding members are answerable to their electorate, not DSA. In the light of some recent experiences on this front, Sanders’s non-joiner stance starts to look somewhat prescient. DSA’s long-term relevance will depend on its ability to carve out a meaningful role as a socialist organization that is not and does not aspire to being a political party.

2028 and beyond

Much of the post-election Democratic Party fretting has quite appropriately centered on the degree to which it has lost the presumption of being the party of the working class. One solution to the problem was succinctly, and improbably, formulated by the centrist New York Times columnist David Brooks: “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.” By Jove, you’ve got it, Mr. Brooks: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable! But Brooks goes on to fret, “Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this?”

Can students, teachers, suburbanites and hipsters “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption?” Well sure, quite a few have already done so — twice now. The roadblock clearly does not lie there. The real problem is those uncomfortable with the idea of a Democratic Party no longer aspiring to the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire financiers. For a look into the void at the core of the Democratic Party we need only think back to that moment in February, 2020 when it began to look like the “Bernie Sanders-style disruption” just might pull it off and the party closed ranks, with candidates Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer scurrying out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden in a matter of just six days. None of this underscored the party’s determination not to turn its back on the billionaires so clearly as the fact that at the time of his withdrawal Bloomberg was in the process of spending a billion bucks of his “own money” in pursuit of the nomination. Obama’s fingerprints were never found on these coordinated withdrawals but most observers draw the obvious conclusions. And we know that the prior nominee, executive whisperer Hillary Clinton, was certainly all in on the move. Herein lies our problem, Mr. Brooks.

But how? And who? The how is the easy question in the sense that Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate — even when the Democratic Party establishment pulls out all the stops to block them; and even if succeeds in doing so. At the same time, the difficulty in winning and holding congressional seats shows that, while self evidently necessary in the long run, those campaigns do not have the same galvanizing potential. Who? At the moment, the only person whose career thus far suggests such potential is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. But then a lot can happen in four years. And Donald Trump’s reelection portends four years of American politics bizarre beyond anything we’ve seen before.

Trump may force a second civil war on America with his plan to use the military to round up at least 11 million undocumented people inside the United States — even if it means breaking up families — send them to detention camps, and then deport them.

As well as his plan to target his political enemies for prosecution — including Democrats, journalists, and other critics.

What happens when we, especially those of us in blue states and cities, resist these authoritarian moves — as we must, as we have a moral duty to?

What happens when we try to protect hardworking members of our communities who have been our neighbors and friends for years, from Trump’s federal troops?

What happens when we refuse to allow Trump’s lackeys to wreak revenge on his political enemies who live within our states and communities?

Will our resistance give Trump an excuse to use force against us?

This is not far-fetched. We need to answer these questions for ourselves. We should prepare.

A civil war is not inevitable. We must do what we can to protect those who are most vulnerable to Trump’s fascism.

Trump has said he’ll use the Insurrection Act — which grants a president the power to “take such measures as he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

He’s also said he’ll use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to end sanctuary cities. Such cities now limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner that “we can do things in terms of moving people out.”

The Enemies Act states that “Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government … and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”

The Enemies Act was part of a group of laws enacted at the end of the 18th century — the Alien and Sedition Acts — which severely curtailed civil liberties in the young United States, including by tightening restrictions on foreign-born Americans and limiting speech critical of the government.

Would Trump essentially declare war on states and communities that oppose him?

When he was president last time, he acted as if he was president only of the people who voted for him — overwhelmingly from red states and cities — and not the president of all of America. He supported legislation that hurt voters in blue states, such as his tax law that stopped deductions of state and local taxes from federal income taxes.

Two Americas

Underlying Trump’s dangerous threats is the sobering reality that we are rapidly becoming two Americas.

One America is largely urban, college-educated, and racially and ethnically diverse. It voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris.

The other America is largely rural or exurban, without college degrees, and white. It voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Even before Trump’s win, red zip codes were getting redder and blue zip codes, bluer. Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super-landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80 percent of the vote — jumped from 6 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2020 and appears to be even higher in 2024.

Just a dozen years ago, there were Democratic senators from Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana (two!), and West Virginia.

Today, there’s close to a zero chance of a Democrat being elected to the Senate from any of these states.

Surveys show that Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values.

Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. Forty-two percent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil.”

Almost 40 percent would be upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party.

Even before the 2024 election, when asked if violence would be justified if the other party won the election, 13.8 percent of Democrats and 18.3 percent of Republicans responded in the affirmative.

Red states are becoming even more reactionary.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade left the issue of abortion to the states, 1 out of 3 women of childbearing age now lives in a state that makes it nearly impossible to obtain an abortion.

Even while red states are making it harder than ever to get abortions, they’re making it easier than ever to buy guns.

Red states are also banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in education. Florida’s Board of Education prohibited public colleges from using state and federal funds for DEI. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has required all state-funded colleges and universities close their DEI offices.

In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” were created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, another fallout from Trump’s big lie.

They’re banning the teaching of America’s history of racism. They’re requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that reflect their sex at birth.

They’re making it harder to protest.

They’re making it more difficult to qualify for unemployment benefits and other forms of public assistance.

And harder than ever to form labor unions.

They’re even passing “bounty” laws — enforced not by governments but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — on issues ranging from classroom speech to abortion to vaccination.

Blue states are becoming more progressive.

Meanwhile, several blue states, including Colorado and Vermont, are codifying a right to abortion.

Some are helping cover abortion expenses for out-of-staters.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortion that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from other states.

Trump would like nothing better than a civil war over himself. He loves to be at the center of attention, which is often at the center of the chaos and outrage he has created.

Maryland and Washington have expanded access and legal protections to out-of-state abortion patients. California has expanded access to abortion and protected abortion providers from out-of-state legal action.

After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California enacted a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

California already bars anyone on a state payroll (including yours truly, who teaches at Berkeley) from getting reimbursed for travel to states that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

Where will all this end?

Trump would like nothing better than a civil war over himself. He loves to be at the center of attention, which is often at the center of the chaos and outrage he has created.

Short of a civil war, the gap between red and blue America might continue to widen — roughly analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce and simply drift apart.

But a civil war is not inevitable. We must do what we can to protect those who are most vulnerable to Trump’s fascism. But this doesn’t mean allowing him to goad us into civil war.

President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission has an on-again/off-again relationship with the First Amendment.

Brendan Carr pretends to be a defender of free-speech rights when it suits his right-wing agenda but disappears into the ether when he should be protecting expression that doesn’t align with Trump’s authoritarian aims.

His mind-bending inconsistencies on free-speech rights would sound alarms under normal circumstances, especially for someone tapped to lead the federal agency that oversees the media sector. But these aren’t normal times. And Carr’s dodgy doublespeak on government censorship seems designed to please an incoming president who’s intent on undermining the essential freedoms that flow from the First Amendment.

Carr vs. the facts

During a September hearing before the House of Representatives, Carr refused to speak out against Trump’s suggestion that ABC should lose its broadcast licenses because two of its journalists had fact checked the former president during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. Instead he told members of the House Commerce Committee that the law and the First Amendment guide all of his decisions — an assertion that doesn’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny.

Carr has already weaponized his future role as the government’s top media regulator by threatening to shut down the speech of anyone who questions Trump’s leadership.

In an October Fox News interview, Carr came after CBS for airing an edited interview with Harris during 60 Minutes. Editing interviews is a standard practice of television journalism, but Carr suggested that CBS violated the FCC’s seldom-invoked news-distortion policy, adding that the government could punish the network. In particular, he said that the 60 Minutes interview could factor into the agency’s review of the Skydance-Paramount merger (Paramount is CBS’ parent company).

Carr then took to Twitter to attack NBC after Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live, wrongly calling it “a clear and blatant effort to evade the equal time rule” — even though NBC did provide Trump equal time later that same weekend. Carr suggested on a subsequent Fox News appearance that the FCC should “keep every remedy on the table,” including revoking the broadcast licenses of local television stations owned by NBC and Telemundo, subsidiaries of Comcast.

“The FCC traditionally avoids regulating broadcast radio and television content except in extremely narrow circumstances, such as indecency,” Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González wrote in a commentary for The Hill. “ … Carr has shown that he is willing to break with [this] longstanding and bipartisan FCC precedent to punish Trump’s detractors.”

America’s top censor

In November, Carr went on the attack again. In a letter addressed to the CEOs of the world’s largest technology platforms, he argues that they are facilitating “censorship” by allowing fact checking on their sites — something they as private companies have an unambiguous First Amendment right to do. In Carr’s distorted view, however, such fact checking violated Americans’ right to be misinformed.

Carr is “rushing to be America’s top censor,” Mike Masnick, a widely read champion of the First Amendment, wrote at Techdirt. “Threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over unfavorable coverage is a blatant First Amendment violation. The government cannot use its licensing power to control or punish the speech of private actors. Carr surely knows this but doesn’t seem to care.”

It’s hard to comprehend how anyone who’s read the 45 words of the First Amendment could come away with such a blatant misunderstanding of its intent. Carr’s recent actions have made it necessary to repeat the obvious: The First Amendment protects people from government censorship; it does not protect government actors like Trump and Carr from criticism and fact checking.

Turning the FCC into the ‘roving speech police’

Carr has already weaponized his future role as the government’s top media regulator by threatening to shut down the speech of anyone who questions Trump’s leadership.

But it wasn’t long ago that Carr was preaching from a different pulpit, although with the same aim: to silence opposing views and advance his highly partisan agenda.

In March 2020 — as the global pandemic set in — Free Press called on the FCC to offer guidance on its interpretation of the agency’s “broadcast-hoax rule.” At the time a number of licensed broadcasters had aired false and misleading information about the COVID-19 crisis without providing the kinds of context or disclaimers the rule suggests.

Rather than take up Free Press’ good-faith suggestion, Carr went on the attack, making the false claim that our media-democracy organization “want[ed] to turn the FCC into a roving speech police empowered to go after the left’s political opponents” (emphasis added).

In actuality, the Free Press petition merely asks the FCC to issue guidance on the broadcasting of disinformation about COVID-19 at a time when thousands of Americans had already succumbed to the disease.

Violating his First Amendment oath

Carr auditioned for the lead part at the FCC by repeatedly threatening to do what he once falsely accused Free Press of doing: turning the agency into the “roving speech police.” And his anti-free-speech stridency has captured the attention of Elon Musk, who has leveraged his control of X’s algorithms to amplify Carr’s tweets — while positioning his broadband access company Starlink to benefit from potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants that flow through the FCC.

As Masnick wrote: “Carr is smart and he knows exactly what he’s doing here. He is couching his extreme censorial desires in the language of free speech, knowing that most people won’t know enough or understand the details and nuances to recognize what he’s doing.”

Free Press is tracking Carr’s First-Amendment flip flops very closely, and exercising our right to call out Trump’s pick to chair the FCC whenever he fails to honor his sworn oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Carr is duty bound to ensure that government forces don’t restrict the speech of private individuals and entities. As the recent past shows, however, he routinely fails to protect free speech with any consistency, preferring to wrap himself in dishonest rhetoric about the First Amendment as he pursues his — and Trump’s — desire to censor others.

To achieve a “clean energy revolution,” we cannot replicate the injustices of our current and past energy systems. As the next administration promises massive increases for fossil fuel projects and near total removals of environmental protections and agency functions, we must hold the line and set a standard for the future we need and deserve.

The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 (EPRA) (S. 4753) introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), is being sold as a “necessary” and bipartisan path. But why does it feel so dirty, and so familiar?

Fossil Fuel Racism

We’ve seen this before. There have been multiple attempts to advance legislation that weakens environmental protections and sacrifices vulnerable communities to fast-track energy projects driven by fossil fuel interests. As foreshadowed during previous attempts in 2022, “The industry will keep trying these secretive, last minute efforts to push forward dirty deals.”

Unjust energy policies being marketed as for the “common good” is an age-old practice—as old as redlining, the industrial revolution, and earlier. Our energy systems have long been controlled by extractive, industry-driven forces, resulting in what is known as “fossil fuel racism.” Fossil fuel racism creates disproportionate impacts on people of color from the fossil fuel cycle and requires:

1. Sacrifice zones, where the hazards of energy production and consumption are centered in disadvantaged communities;
2. Disproportionate racialized impacts from climate change driven by fossil fuels; and
3. Outsized industry influence in politics undercutting democratic spaces.

So what’s different about EPRA? Nothing. Not only does it contain goals straight out of Project 2025, the American Petroleum Institute and “two dozen energy companies and trade groups’” lobbying reports mention EPRA by name. Though the bill alleges to improve energy projects’ approval processes, it does so through fossil fuel racism, with giveaways to big oil and gas while hurting vulnerable communities and the environment. Here’s how:

1) Sacrifice Zones and Fossil Fuel Expansion

The Energy Permitting Reform Act continues to exploit environmental justice communities by reinforcing sacrifice zones, which include predominantly people of color and low income, by greenlighting fossil fuel projects. EPRA would undo the Biden administration’s pause on approving Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export projects, overwhelmingly situated in these communities. EPRA would also dramatically shorten time for the Department of Energy (DOE) to perform environmental reviews and mandates automatic project approvals after 90 days, regardless of potential negative impacts. Additionally, modeled emissions reductions used to justify support for EPRA rely on continued use of environmental justice communities as sacrifice zones.

2) Climate Crisis and Public Health

People of color and low income disproportionately experience the worst climate crisis impacts. The modeling that claims the transmission pieces of EPRA would reduce greenhouse gas emissions are cherry-picked scenarios and assumptions, according to and underscored by over 100 scientists. Modeling also ignores localized pollution contributing to increasing health crises. The models’ reliance on greenhouse gas calculations overlooks realities for communities on the ground.

3) Industry Control and Democracy Broken

The bill undermines the ability of communities burdened by pollution to have a say regarding projects that threaten their health and environments. EPRA would reduce the time communities and Tribes have to challenge projects in court from six years to 150 days. It goes further to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act by voiding essential environmental impact assessments for fossil fuel projects.

Environmental Injustice and Community Impact

EPRA sets a dangerous precedent and has serious implications for frontline communities. Zulene Mayfield, of Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) in Chester, Pennsylvania, is fighting a proposed LNG facility in her backyard. Chester—a majority working class, Black neighborhood—is already dealing with a health crisis from trash incinerators and sewage treatment facilities. Community members received no public notice about the project and were locked out of public hearings. With EPRA’s extreme project approval timeline coupled with an intentional lack of transparency, safeguards from hazardous projects are gone.

Hilton Kelley of Community In-Power and Development Association Incorporated (CIDA Inc.) in Port Arthur, Texas has also been fighting to free his community from fossil fuel racism. As a resident of the “cancer belt,” he is now dealing with two new LNG facilities in his neighborhood.

Voices against EPRA are rising with over 680 organizations opposing the bill. Environmental Justice leaders have spoken out including Richard Moore of Los Jardines Institute: “It [EPRA] is a stark reminder of the priorities of those who continue to put corporate profits above the health and well-being of our communities.”

Finding a Path to True Equitable Energy Reform

EPRA is built on a false policy dichotomy. We don't have to sacrifice environmental protections and communities to fast-track clean energy projects. There are other legislative proposals that are designed to protect communities with significant support, such as the A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act, which was written in partnership with environmental justice communities. This bill would cement key protections including cumulative impacts analysis; first, early, and ongoing engagement models; and civil rights and NEPA requirements. The Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act (CETA) similarly strengthens engagement through environmental justice liaisons facilitating relationships between project sponsors and communities.

Our communities are opportunity centers full of vision, solutions, and wisdom—not sacrifice zones. Our communities are worth investing in to achieve a just, sustainable energy future and address the climate crisis now, if decision-makers would only open their eyes.

Our nation is in the midst of a misinformation crisis. False information spreads faster, wider and more ferociously than ever before, cultivating echo chambers that trap people in political siloes and fuel polarization. And with an incoming administration notorious for weaponizing misinformation and leveraging a surge in unregulated AI technology, this crisis is still in its infancy and certain to explode in just the next few years.

While there has been a range of early thinking on how best to navigate this epidemic, the prescribed solutions have focused almost exclusively on people’s ability to reason. Among other things, experts say we need to improve our critical thinking, write laws that prevent the spread of fake news online and teach people how to assess the credibility of news.

In essence, we are told that throwing correct information at misinformation is the solution. To be sure, these efforts are admirable – and will help to some extent. But they miss the core of the issue: many people aren’t seeking truth; some avoid it fastidiously. Many of us are not reading news or considering issues with the intention of finding facts; we are cherry-picking information that validates our perspectives.

So how do we overcome this fundamental aversion to truth-seeking and fact-finding?

The answer lies at least partly in human emotion. Misinformation is most effective when it provokes and then preys upon a strong emotional response; specifically, when it cultivates fear, anger, or hatred. Fear in particular, often drives people to adopt a closed and defensive crouch against perceived threats – or even novel perspectives.

Some of the most instrumental moments of progress have come through peaceful demonstrations because they trigger transformation in skeptical parties, instead of making them feel defensive.

Unscrupulous leaders and influencers know this quite well, so they promote falsehoods that elicit these emotions and obfuscate people’s search for real information.

The push to vaccinate people against COVID-19 offers a clear case study. Anti-vaccine voices created and the hijacked echo chambers to amplify a mountain of patently false claims and conspiracy theories about the safety of the shots. Millions of Americans latched onto these allegations and refused to get vaccinated.

In response, experts tried to counter with actual information about the safety of vaccines. But an abundance of research proves that facts and data alone often aren’t enough to break through to people in a very emotional state. As sociologist Paul Bramadat and his colleagues wrote in one analysis, assuming that vaccine-hesitant parents are driven by ignorance “will flounder because hesitancy is not a simple product of a cognitive error.”

Rather, part of the solution lies in deeper, more meaningful, and trusted personal connections. Prominent researcher François D. Boucher found that relationships with trusted pediatricians can make a significant difference in people’s willingness to get vaccinated. This trust can dispel fear and allow people to see and accept the truth.

In sum, empathy, shared understanding, and connection can provide a powerful defense against the forces of misinformation.

So, how do we move forward? It’s unrealistic to try to convince bad actors to tamp down their misinformation. But we can create communities that are more resistant to inflammatory falsehoods and hungry for new ideas and alternative, fact-based viewpoints.

It’s by no means a perfect science. And it will be slow progress. But it’s well worth it to create a better America.

First, principled policymakers, advocacy organizations, and activists should combat skepticism with kindness, empathy, and openness. While they can provide some information along the way, their initial and primary goal should be to create real, authentic connection. That can inform emotional responses and equip people to be more willing to seek truth.

Correct information does have a role to play in stopping misinformation. But we also have to create communities that inspire people to seek out the truth.

Faith leaders also have a responsibility to act. They are powerful community leaders deeply connected with people’s core values. They can use their pulpit to encourage people to think beyond their own political siloes, engage with fellow community members, and be open to new thinking.

Importantly, faith leaders can also remind people that the pursuit of truth is most effective through collaborative, nonviolent engagement. Some of the most instrumental moments of progress have come through peaceful demonstrations because they trigger transformation in skeptical parties, instead of making them feel defensive.

Finally, institutions of higher education need to play a crucial role in addressing our misinformation crisis. The best thinking in higher education no longer seeks to dispense isolated facts like candy from a PEZ dispenser. Higher education institutions are uniquely situated to teach people to be open to diverse perspectives so that critical engagement can then follow. People often emerge from these institutions with the tools to evaluate different viewpoints and with a relentless desire to seek truth.

As educators at a seminary informed by interreligious values of peace and justice, we’ve seen how powerful all three of these groups can be. We strive to train our students to engage with different perspectives with openness and kindness. They then go on to apply these skills as activists, faith leaders, educators, and more.

Ultimately, correct information does have a role to play in stopping misinformation. But we also have to create communities that inspire people to seek out the truth. With empathy and connection, we can make that happen.

           As Democrats survey their recent losses in the election, they should avoid drawing conclusions or floating prescriptions for fixing their party’s problems. First, they should absorb the biggest data point that is currently being ignored by both the progressive and the corporatist wings of the party: they haven’t really won a presidential election since 2012. No, 2020 doesn’t count. Not really. Read on.

Democrats don’t yet recognize it, but they have effectively messed up three consecutive elections against Donald Trump. This points less to a divided country wobbling back-and-forth between two parties than to a systemic realignment in favor of the Republicans. For Democrats, this suggests a serious set of systemic problems unlikely to be fixable by nipping and tucking messaging and candidate presentation.

            I am not an election denialist. Trump officially lost in 2020. But Biden, doddering even at the time as he campaigned from his basement, didn’t really win.

            Covid shaped that race in two significant ways. Donald Trump committed political suicide in both. Trump’s unforced errors in 2020 were so easily foreseen and so bizarre that it’s hard to imagine another candidate ever committing political malpractice to such an extreme.  Of course Democrats were able to beat him then.

            It was a weird election.

            First Trump shot himself in both feet with Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership launched between March and May 2020, at the start of the lockdown. Epidemiologists and ordinary citizens alike fantasized about developing a vaccine, but experts cautioned that it would take ages. “Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months,” the New York Times reported on April 30, 2020. “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years—more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.”

            “Never succeed” succeeded. Relying on emergency use authorizations and conditional approvals, the first vaccines became available to the public starting December 11, 2020. By April, anyone who wanted one could get one—a mere year after Warp Speed began.

            This was a miracle. A study by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that the vaccines prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans. They saved the budget $1.15 trillion through November 2022.

            Fast action to develop vaccines, something a more conventional politician like his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton might have been hesitant to approve without additional testing prior to approval, was Trump’s greatest accomplishment during his first term. Best of all from a political standpoint, timing made it the mother of all October surprises—had Trump chosen to run with it. The president could have informed a traumatized electorate a few weeks before election day that they would be inoculated against the deadly coronavirus, not four or more years in the future, but mere weeks or months away.

            Insanely, Trump ran away from his big win. To be sure, Trump did announce that vaccines were on the way. But he did so in an uncharacteristically muted manner. His highest-profile and highest-volume pandemic messaging, influenced by his wacky supporters and political allies, many of whom subscribed to unorthodox medical views including anti-vaxxers and those who thought Covid was a hoax, deteriorated into an incoherent morass that understated the impact, including the number of deaths. “That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on October 24, 2020. “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.” On October 26, he continued to downplay the scale of the pandemic as a “Fake News Media Conspiracy,” saying the U.S. had the most cases on earth only because “we TEST, TEST, TEST.”

            Thanks in large part to Trump, however, Covid vaccines were the fastest ever created. Due to internal GOP politics, however, Trump felt compelled to run away from Operation War Speed and, in doing so, threw away his best issue. An October 2020 Reuters-Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on his handling of the coronavirus crisis, with 37% approving and 59% disapproving. It was though FDR had denied having anything to do with the New Deal when he ran for reelection in 1936 and gotten dinged for making the Depression worse.

            Similarly inexplicable and tied to the vagaries of paranoid right-of-center internecine discussions, Trump repeatedly advised his supporters not to cast an early vote before election day or vote by mail, alternatives that exploded in popularity due to the pandemic lockdown, on the ground that they were rife with fraud. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020. “And, you know, when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple—whether they counterfeit them, forge them, do whatever you want. It’s a very serious problem,” he said in September 2020.      

            46% of ballots were cast via early or mail-in voting in 2020, double the result for four years earlier. But only 62% of Trump voters voted early or by mail, compared to 82% for Biden.

            It was an incredibly stupid mistake. It wasn’t one that the Trump campaign repeated this year.  

            Democrats convinced themselves that their 2016 loss was a fluke attributable to sexism, Russian interference and the novelty of Donald Trump, celebrity and TV star, as their opponent. They took comfort in the fact that Trump had been defeated in 2020 and therefore possibly would be again.

What they failed to grasp what is that the real anomaly here was 2020. Had Trump exploited the triumph of Operation Warp Speed and encouraged his supporters to cast early and mail-in ballots—any vote, any time, is a good vote—he would almost certainly have beat Biden. They foolishly assumed that Trump learned nothing from his previous campaign, that he would not correct his mistakes.

            For the first time since 1892, we now have a presidential candidate who ran in three consecutive elections, largely on the same issues, the border and the economy. Trump won twice and lost once, but that once was due to his suicidal moves. Whatever Democrats decide to do to try to become stronger and more viable going forward, they need to understand that they haven’t had a strong enough candidate to beat a real Republican running a normal campaign in a conventional presidential campaign since Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney.

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

 

The post Democrats Haven’t Really Won a Presidential Campaign Since 2012 first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Democrats Haven’t Really Won a Presidential Campaign Since 2012 appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) dig into the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Does the misery intrinsic to the profit model of companies like United Healthcare justify violent acts like this in a society where there is little recourse for justice? Or is taking the law into your own hands always inherently wrong? And is there any chance that corporate America might start to rethink its rapacious business practices?

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 182: United CEO Killed: Vigilantism or Justifiable Homicide? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 182: United CEO Killed: Vigilantism or Justifiable Homicide? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Yesterday morning the 50-year-old CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot to death on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. Even including the reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s hard to think of another high-profile murder that has been greeted with as much glee and schadenfreude by the American public.

Comments sections in news stories and social media were filled with comments about how Brian Thompson had it coming, hopefully this is the first of many, and countless jokes about the bullet that killed him being a pre-existing condition. Almost no one expressed sympathy. TMI Show co-host Ted Rall and, filling in for Manila Chan, producer Robby West, explore this remarkable phenomenon.

United Healthcare is one of the most hated big companies in the United States, in large part because it denies its customers claims at a higher percentage rate than any other insurer. Thompson, paid over $10 million a year, was a poster boy for an industry whose profit model relied upon making people sick and dead to maximize earnings. The hatred was internal as well as external: even as company executives raised their own pay, they laid off thousands of their own workers.

Adding to the intrigue, Thompson was being investigated by the Justice Department over a $15 million sale of United stock suspected as insider trading, and which caused a selloff.

What was the motivation behind the assassination? Will other healthcare executives reconsider their business practices? Or will they just hire additional security? Could this help to spark a national conversation about for-profit healthcare? One thing is for sure: it is 100% clear of that Americans of all political stripes hate the healthcare industry. Because in America, whether you have insurance or not, you don’t get healthcare.

The post TMI Show Ep 32: Did Brian Thompson Have It Coming? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 32: Did Brian Thompson Have It Coming? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

FBI director nominee-in-waiting Kash Patel writes children’s books in which his character, a wizard, vows to protect “King Donald.” (Patel also peddled pills to reverse the Covid-19 vaccine and produced a song recorded by imprisoned January 6 insurrectionists called “Justice for All.”) Ominous credentials to head the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, one with a history of abuse.

We’ve been vocal about what’s gone wrong at the Supreme Court. It has been captured by a faction of a faction. But if we’ve ever needed an independent judiciary, we need it now. If guardrails crumble and the powerful quail before Donald Trump, the high court may be one of the last — indeed, at times, the only — protectors of the Constitution.

All of which makes the latest revelations about the Court so dismaying — the inside story of how the justices adopted an ethics code that is more loophole than law.

In the past two years, ProPublica and other news outlets have revealed startling misconduct. Justice Clarence Thomas for years had his lifestyle secretly subsidized by billionaire Harlan Crow. The billionaire provided lavish vacations, paid for the education of Thomas’s surrogate son, and even bought and renovated the justice’s mother’s house (with her living in it). If this happened with state legislators in Albany or Sacramento, we’d call it corruption. Justice Samuel Alito, too, took luxury travel from yet another billionaire, also without disclosing it. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society played matchmaker between the judges and the billionaires. ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize for its exposés.

Public outcry was loud enough that the Court last year felt compelled to issue a first-ever code of conduct. The justices explained that this was only to clear up a “misunderstanding” by citizens. Instead of being the only judges with no ethics code, they now had the weakest.

Now The New York Times has revealed the fevered deliberations that produced this result. It reads like the doings of sneaky pols on House of Cards. Justices sent each other memos in sealed envelopes because they were so fearful of leaks. Thomas and Alito “wrote off the Court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable,” write Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle. The liberal justices pushed for a strong code with an enforcement mechanism, such as a panel of retired judges, to no avail.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, the newspaper reported, was most vocal in opposition and judicial self-regard. “The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it,” the article reports. Gorsuch wrote a long memo of complaint as the rules were being drafted.

The result was a tepid code that did little to boost public confidence. It violates a core principle: Nobody is so wise that they should be the judge in their own case. The justices decide on their own when they must “recuse,” or refrain from hearing a case. Nor must they explain why they stepped back, though some justices have begun to do that. Most important, there is no mechanism for enforcement.

So the Court has served up mush. But the story need not end there. Congress has set rules for the federal courts throughout history, as envisioned by the Constitution. Samuel Alito has waxed indignant about this. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” he told The Wall Street Journal. Justice Elena Kagan felt compelled to respond publicly. “It just can’t be that the Court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else,” she said. “We’re not imperial.”

This again shows why the Court needs fundamental reform. An 18-year term limit for justices would make the Court much more accountable. It accords with a fundamental American precept: Nobody should hold too much power for too long. It’s also widely popular. The most recent Fox News poll on the issue showed that 78 percent of respondents backed term limits — in other words, strong majorities of Republicans and independents as well as Democrats.

In recent years, congressional Republicans have been hostile to Supreme Court reform. With Congress in Republican hands for the next two years at least, there’s an opportunity to deepen support among conservatives and liberals, legal scholars, bar leaders, and others. It’s an idea whose time has come.

We need a strong, independent, principled Supreme Court. The ruling last summer granting vast criminal immunity empowers the president to law-break with impunity. Major rulings are due on vital issues — including the oral arguments today on state laws banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Civil liberties violations likely to accompany mass deportation of noncitizens will surely reach the justices. This term will test whether this is a principled Court or, as seems increasingly likely, a MAGA Court.

No, Kash Patel is not a wizard. The justices wear robes, but they aren’t either. They are powerful government officials with a duty to stand up against abuse and for the rule of law. They claim they are independent. Will they act? The backstage saga of their ethics code doesn’t augur well.

Count on one thing: the next four years are going to be tough. If you can muster the energy for political action while Donald Trump and his minions rule Washington, it will have to be channeled in two ways: first, resisting the worst excesses of him (and his party of billionaires); and second, keeping up the effort to make life truly better for everyone, especially the most vulnerable among us.

Or wait. Should it be the other way around? Could a good offense be the best defense?

At the moment, it’s a question that’s not getting much attention. It may seem all too obvious right now that resistance has to be the top priority. Who could have been surprised by the impassioned pleas to resist when Trump won?

That reflex couldn’t be more natural. No matter how old you are, for as long as you can remember, every president’s critics have focused on resisting the dangers they saw in him, while his supporters hailed him as strong enough to resist the dangers they saw threatening the nation.

Such strength was apparently just what voters wanted in 2024, too. As a New York Times headline summed up the outcome right after Election Day: “America Hires a Strongman.”

Why?

As former President Bill Clinton once explained, “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made the point in a more colorful fashion: “When Americans are scared,” she wrote, they want their president to be “the strong father who protects the home from invaders.”

What dangers? What invaders? Every winning candidate for president gets to fill in those blanks in whatever way he (and yes, it always has been a he) thinks will get him the most votes, any connection with reality being purely optional. So, while Kamala Harris offered quite realistic warnings about threats to democracy, Trump traded on fictional images of “illegal” immigrant murderers and rapists, “big bad” transgender girls threatening oh-so-pure “real” girls, and the “Marxists” heading up the Democratic Party. And, of course, we know who won.

Many voters were clearly scared and insecure. In a recent survey, roughly 80% of Harris’s supporters chose “we must find a way to embrace each other” as their highest priority, while about 70% of Trump’s chose “to protect ourselves.” As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it, Trump voters have “a deep wellspring of anxiety about their ability to predict their security into the near and distant future. Trump has given [them] a way to direct that anger and that anxiety… in a toxic direction.”

As political scientist Bruce Cain noted, “In the choice between safety and every other policy goal, safety usually wins. In the choice between hope and fear, fear has proven to be more powerful even when the basis for it is grossly exaggerated.” Many reports showed that Trump voters were indeed angry, but after talking to hundreds of people in focus groups, the New York Times’s Patrick Healy concluded that anger and anxiety “were one and the same” emotion.

So, as usual, many fearful voters chose the candidate they saw as strong enough to protect them. Reporter David Corn heard one message over and over from crowds at Trump rallies: “The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.” And Corn sensed what increasingly fearful Americans want: a version of “strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior.” Trump typically claimed that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” When he listed the ways he would change America in his speeches, making it “strong” and/or “safe” usually came before “great again.”

But it wasn’t just the policies he proposed like “peace through strength” or even the words he used that his voters cared most about. (Trump consistently outperformed Republicans running for Congress who took similar positions and used similar language.) It was the way he projected a mean and nasty personality. When he first ran for president, Trump said, “Every time things get worse, I do better. Because people want strength. We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty.” And that was indeed the image his campaign projected in its advertising. Since the hunger for a strongman only grows in wartime, the Trump campaign happily made the election look like a war, while he even posted a prayer and picture on social media identifying himself with St. Michael battling the demons.

Pundit William Galston notes that the Trump campaign was “convinced that Trump’s intense personal bond with his supporters would do most of the mobilizing work.” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini thinks that he forged that bond not with his policies but through “his unique style, his unique aesthetic.” (Yes, ugly can be an aesthetic.)

Of course, gender played a role, too. Every dictionary includes the word strongman, but when was the last time you saw strongwoman? And that tells you so much. One study showed that a belief in “hegemonic masculinity” — the idea that men are stronger than women and so should dominate — was the most accurate predictor of who would vote for Trump.

From FDR to Trump

Trump is perhaps the ultimate American politician who has traded on fear and insecurity to look strong and get votes. But the sad fact is that American presidents have been teaching the public to feel threatened and insecure for a long time — at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 and made it a command center for resisting catastrophe in the midst of the Great Depression.

FDR admitted privately that his New Deal aimed to protect the capitalist system by resisting the threat of socialism, but he couldn’t say that out loud. He felt he could win the public’s confidence by staving off immediate disaster (as he indeed did). In the 1930s, that meant keeping as many Americans as possible out of dire poverty. Two prominent historians have labeled his approach “crisis management,” though he favored the word “security,” which is why the checks we retired folks now get from the government are called “Social Security.”

Once Hitler’s armies had conquered most of Europe, FDR announced that the great threat to national security was no longer the Depression at home but the enemy abroad, though he faced a public reluctant to get involved in war until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Throughout World War II, he would be seen as the strong father protecting the home from invaders.

Ever since, presidents have tried to take on that role. Lyndon Johnson warned that if we didn’t fight the communists in South Vietnam, we’d end up fighting North Vietnamese invaders in San Francisco. George W. Bush warned that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear arsenal that, if we didn’t take out Iraq first, could someday be used on American homes.

Almost every president since FDR has made the mantra of “national security” the nation’s highest value and insisted that staving off the threat of evildoers was the path to such “security,” no matter the price.

In 2016, Donald Trump paved his way to victory with similar language. His innovation (and it was a big one) was to refocus on the “enemy from within” — the immigrants, the transgendered, and above all, the liberals.

When Kamala Harris began her abbreviated campaign, it looked like she might break out of that mold. Her “politics of joy” seemed like a politics of confidence. She spoke and looked like a woman who was afraid of nothing, certainly not Donald Trump.

Yet in the last weeks of the campaign, as hers seemed to be stalling, she turned to the same old story: there’s a danger out there named Donald Trump and you’d better vote for me to protect yourself. Harris was, of course, correct, but the election results tell us that Trump did a better job of convincing voters that he was the one who could best protect our homes from invaders.

If Harris had focused more on bringing positive improvements to the lives of all Americans… who knows?

The Perils of Resistance

On Election Night, as the depressing results rolled in, the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart cautioned that those of us who see Trump as a great danger should move beyond resistance: “We have to continue to fight and work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible.” That’s good advice for a lot of reasons.

It may be that simply resisting the world of Donald Trump and trying to prevent the very worst will indeed seem like a full-time job over the next four years, but do we really want to exhaust ourselves that way? Worse yet, the message resisters send is ultimately a negative one: Whatever we may be, we are not that. So, in the years to come, a politics of resistance runs the same risk that befell the Harris campaign. As Harvard pollster John Della Volpe put it: “’Not being Trump’ was never going to be enough.”

What’s more, resistance is all about stopping change. Yes, sometimes change is dangerous and needs to be stopped, but that still makes such resistance inherently conservative. A devotion to preventing the worst will allow the other side to look like the force for change and so define the terms of debate.

Yet, by definition, liberals and progressives are supposed to be that force. Do we really want to cede that to — yes! — Donald Trump?

For now, at least, the lesson of Election Day 2024 is that, in a contest over which party can best protect Americans, the current version of the Republican Party is likely the winner. We’ve learned in the hardest way possible that the Democrats can’t “out-Republican the Republicans,” as Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put it.

A politics of resistance could end up merely reinforcing the fear driving MAGA-ism’s longing for a strongman. It’s simply not the right message to send to Trump voters if you wish even a small slice of them to change their minds two to four years from now.

It may feel good to focus on Trump’s evils and exclaim, as poet Walt Whitman did about President Franklin Pierce: “Such a rascal and thief in the presidency. This poor scum — the shit-ass! God damn him! — eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on the states.” But to focus solely, or even primarily, on such anger means making Trump the center of our attention. (Exactly what he wants, of course!) Hasn’t he gotten enough attention already?

And do we want to carry all the anger that full-time resistance is likely to breed? Do we want to let Donald Trump rob us of our capacity for happiness for the next four years? We could at least balance our outrage with the sentiment Whitman expressed about President Benjamin Harrison: “I think him mainly a gas bag, the smallest potato in the heap. As long as he remains in office, the aura of the presidency will give him prominence — but after that — oh! what will be his oblivion — utter!”

As the Italian revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously put it, in the years to come we could use more “pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will.”

Alternative Vision and Action

Of course, we need to keep up some significant degree of resistance. (I’m definitely not among the astounding 28% of Democratic voters who claimed, in a post-election poll, that they would “support” Trump’s presidency.) But we should heed the words of Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes: “Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on what we stand for. We need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.”

Even the New York Times editorial board, hardly the most progressive group around, got the point: “A threat to democracy does not exempt leaders from giving voters a plan for the future that reflects the America they want to live in.”

And we can do more than envision a better future and plan for it during the next four years. Though things may be dreadful in Washington, state and local governments still have significant power to pursue policies to make life better. In my Colorado town, for example, there’s a strong effort to push the city council to raise the minimum wage, a measure our county commissioners, under public pressure, already endorsed. Denver is not only preparing to resist the deportation of undocumented residents but offering them access to city services, modeling what a humane government, one that cares about all its people, actually looks like. And even when politicians won’t act, many states allow citizen-initiated referenda like the ones that secured abortion rights in my state and many others.

Then there’s an endless list of things we can do as individuals. Think of it as “prefigurative politics.” As Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day put it, the energy we would burn up trying to tear down an oppressive government can be better used by ignoring that government and building “a new civilization within the shell of the old” — new institutions that genuinely serve people.

It also means building new feelings and attitudes. As we face a nightmarish four years of a federal government built on fear and intent on keeping all Americans (other than billionaires) afraid, anything we do to bring more confidence and happiness into our lives is a step in a better direction — for ourselves and the country.

To repeat: Resistance to Trump will certainly be necessary, especially to protect the most vulnerable among us. But any way we can look to a better future and turn that into a present reality is, in a sense, an act of resistance not only to Trump and the Republicans but to the strongman model of politics that led to his recent victory.

Making beautiful art and music, making delicious meals, making friends, making love — those are all ways to preserve the energy we’ll need for political action. They are also ways to show not just the world but ourselves that, whatever the evils from Washington in the next four years, we can continue building the more humane and happier world we want for everyone.

The ongoing war and genocide in Gaza is unprecedented. Nothing that Israel and its supporters can say or do will avoid the historical accountability of the extermination of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

The above assertion is critical, both for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and achieving Palestinian freedom. This is why.

In all past wars and adjoining war crimes, Israel managed to push the reset button in its relationship with occupied Palestinians.

Following each war, the Israeli hasbara, propaganda machine, would start - utilizing the always-willing western mainstream media - to paint Palestinians in a negative light and to present Israel, a country that is supposedly in a permanent state of self-defense, as the victim, or even the lone defender of western civilization.

This campaign is always paralleled with the whitewashing of Israel in popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies to TV sit-coms, to magazine covers with such titles as “Gorgeous Photos Capture The Unseen Lives Of Female Soldiers In Israel”.

Generally, Western politicians of varied ideologies, along with intellectuals, news talking heads and church leaders all praise, in tandem, the miracle that is Israel.

At the beginning of Israel's genocidal war in October 2023, for example, British playwright Tom Stoppard said that “before we take up a position on what’s happening now, we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilization and barbarism.” He, of course, leaned towards the latter.

This Israeli tactic always includes the demonization of Palestinians as well, where the victim becomes the ‘terrorist’ and those under siege become the besiegers. This last claim, in particular, was expressed in the words of former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said, in an interview with NBC in August 2000, that “the Israelis feel under siege from the Palestinian rock throwers and the various gangs that have been roaming around.”

Why will those same Israeli tactics fail this time? Indeed, they will fail, not due to Israel’s lack of trying. In fact, Israel is already bracing for the fight of a lifetime.

One new tactic that Israel is already employing in ‘friendly’ countries, like the United States, is the passing of laws to block the mere conversation on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, so that it will have exclusive access to the American public.

On November 14, the US House of Representatives passed two bills: H.R.6408 and H.R.9495. The latter, in particular, aimed at giving the Treasury Secretary the authorization to revoke an organization's tax-exempt status and decide when the designation would end.

Now, there can be no reset buttons. Rather, the global momentum of Palestine's liberation will accelerate in the coming months and years.

Once these bills pass the Senate and are approved by the president, the most democratic and peaceful expressions of rejecting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and demanding sensible US foreign policy will be equated to a direct violation of the law and, in some cases, to terrorism - as defined by the Department of Treasury, at the behest of the pro-Israeli lobby.

But even these desperate attempts will not quell the anger or distract from the conversation, for the following reasons:

One, not only did Israel commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, but this genocide and extermination are being investigated and are acknowledged by the world’s largest legal institutions, namely the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Two, unlike previous investigations, for example, the Goldstone Report probing the 2008-09 war on Gaza, the international community has already taken some practical steps to hold Israeli war criminals accountable, including an arrest warrant issued on November 21 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Three, those who routinely come to Israel’s defense, the US and other Western governments, are now directly clashing with the very international law they helped articulate after World War II, depriving them of any credibility as ‘neutral’ parties in this conflict.

For example, Biden said that the warrants were “outrageous” while the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs claimed that Netanyahu and other ministers enjoy immunity since Israel is not a party to the ICC.

Four, despite the inherent bias of western media, Palestinian journalists, isolated and killed in large numbers, managed to communicate the genocide to the rest of the world, making it impossible for Israel to hide its crimes.

Five, the impact of the Israeli genocide on Gaza has already penetrated the various layers of public opinion, unprecedented in history.

Typically, the conversation on Palestine is confined to specific strata of society, reaching academics, social justice activists and other groups interested in politics and global issues.

Today, ordinary people have been made aware of the conversation, to the extent that it is widely believed that anger over Gaza has contributed in determining the outcome of the latest US elections.

In Africa, the growing political and public interest in the Palestinian struggle have re-enlivened the spirit of anti-colonial, liberation struggles on the continent, bringing many countries, from South Africa to Algeria, back to the frontlines of global solidarity.

No amount of Israeli propaganda, unjust laws, unfair categorizations of Palestinians or the hardly-clad models of the IDF, will ever succeed in reversing these realities.

Now, there can be no reset buttons. Rather, the global momentum of Palestine's liberation will accelerate in the coming months and years.

The price exacted from the Palestinian people for this earth-shattering moment has been high and painful, but the history of all national liberation struggles, Palestine included, demonstrates that the price for freedom is always high.

While U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appoints a new “government efficiency” committee and threatens to unleash the military in American cities, he is simultaneously pushing policies that will see billions poured into private security and surveillance companies—including those owned by his biggest campaign benefactors, with little or no accountability.

Armed drones, facial recognition, and robot dogs have become a part of popular culture over the past 20 years, with little attention to the violent impacts they have on both the militarization of communities and in all our daily lives. These dangerous products and technologies have served two functions: They are fear-based marketing tools that helped seed the rhetorical ground for the authoritarian backlash that came to full fruition in this election and they actually make the U.S. southern border region exponentially more dangerous for people living, working, and crossing there.

As veterans, we put our lives on the line so that our communities back home can live safe and secure lives. Trump’s cruel deportation plans and suggestion that the U.S. military be used to carry them out for the benefit of his billionaire friends is not what we signed up for.

We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.

Since at least 2001, when the U.S. entered its post-9/11 forever war period and established the “Department of Homeland Security,” a handful of journalists, activists, and migrants have been warning us about the all-too-cozy relationship between weapons manufacturers, tech companies, and the government agencies tasked with immigration enforcement. By 2022, this sprawling border and surveillance industry (BSI) had become a $500 billion business. The U.S. border and immigration enforcement budget under Democratic President Joe Biden exceeded $30 billion this year.

But Americans ain’t seen nothing yet. While this industry, which has used vulnerable populations as a testing ground for over a decade, has been slowly making its way into everyday life, the incoming Trump administration is about to fast track the reach of this violent industry in very intrusive ways into the lives of all Americans as the surveillance industry goes into overdrive.

Trump’s planned enforcement spending will hand billions to his friends in big business. Private prison stocks like Geo Group and CoreCivic nearly doubled in value after he was declared the winner of the November 5 election. This also happened in 2017, when, within a month of Trump taking office, CoreCivic and Geo Group doubled their stocks. The American Immigration Council has put the cost of Trump’s deportation proposals at an estimated $315 billion of taxpayer money, much of which would involve subsidies to industry.

To have the best chance at protecting immigrant communities in the coming months and years, we need to address the real threat to our communities: the billionaires and politicians who use anti-immigrant hate in order to increase their wealth and power.

These billionaires, who thrive on spreading fear, have learned to use the government as a personal piggy bank, while continuing to win delays for things like healthcare reform, poverty elimination, and climate action—endangering us all in the process.

Safety and community security are universal human values. As veterans, we understand how important it is to protect our loved ones from danger. We also believe that fighting for the rights of all our communities, and making climate justice a priority, is what will keep us safe and secure through the coming century. But Trumpism has warped our view of security so badly that many Americans now see billionaires as the answer, rather than the diverse working class people who build our factories, plow our fields, and serve our country so nobly, including in the military.

We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.

Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and far-right political donor, controls companies like Palantir, a data company which sells our personal information to militaries around the world, and Anduril, which builds AI-powered surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border and sells weaponized drones. Google Thiel’s name and you will see a litany of government contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions just in the past year alone, including to the Israeli military for automated targeting of Palestinians in Gaza.

Elon Musk currently holds $3 billion in U.S. government contracts, the bulk of them with NASA and the Department of Defense. Musk took more than $15 billion taxpayer dollars in contracts over the past decade.

We are not going to stand idly by as Trump deportation forces tear our communities apart. The border and surveillance industry, aligned with the dying fossil fuel industry, is intentionally creating a more hostile, insecure environment for all of us just to line their own pockets.

We are going to do what we did in 2016: Roll up our sleeves and get to work. We will rebuild safety and security within our communities by relying on each other to resist the coming federal incursions into our cities and states. We will organize with the migrant justice movement, with climate activists, and with defenders of democracy to protect our neighbors. And we will expose the hell out of the profiteering billionaire enablers of hate in our country.

For as long as we can remember, the end of the calendar year has marked the start of America’s giving season.

The holidays that light up our darkest months also invite us to celebrate (and practice!) generosity. Food banks, youth groups, arts and civic organizations, and community service programs heavily depend on the support they receive in November and December.

Year-end giving is big for tax purposes, but many people donate without regard to whether they’ll get a deduction. In fact, fewer than 10% of donors claim a tax deduction for charitable giving.

So, big donors: You want a tax break? Make sure the money gets to a working charity—and fast.

The super-wealthy, who do take advantage of itemizing their tax returns, give differently. They give more to large hospitals and universities, where you can get your name on a building. That kind of giving can be valuable too.

But a less visible difference is crucial to recognize.

Increasingly, wealthy donors are parking money in entities they control, like private foundations and donor advised funds (DAFs). These intermediaries then, in theory, donate money to working charities.

But private foundations are only required to “payout” 5% of their assets a year to these other charities. And DAFs have no requirement to payout at all. So wealthy donors bank their tax break immediately, but the donated funds may remain sidelined for decades.

According to a new report we co-authored, Gilded Giving 2024: Saving Philanthropy from Wall Street, over 35% of all charitable donations now go to one of these two intermediaries.

There’s now $1.7 trillion parked in private foundations and DAFs—money that could be flowing to working charities in a timely way to solve problems. We estimate that by 2028, half of all donations will go to private foundations and DAFs.

As wealth has concentrated in fewer hands over the last four decades, so has this kind of dubiously “charitable” giving—a trend we call “top-heavy philanthropy.” And it’s increasingly profitable for financial advisers to the ultra rich.

Wall Street financiers promote DAFs as a way for donors to receive immediate tax reductions in the year they give, but then they sit on those funds and collect wealth management fees. The financiers have no financial incentive to ever see the money go to a mental health center, food bank, community theater, or other working charity. It’s more profitable for them to keep assets under management.

The rest of us subsidize this system. For every dollar a billionaire donates to charity, including to their own foundation or DAF, the rest of us chip in up to 74 cents in the form of lost tax revenue.

So how did we get a charity system that works for multi-millionaire donors and wealth managers but not for nonprofit charities, small donors, and the taxpaying public? In part, it’s because lobbyists for the financial industry and DAF sponsors fight vigorously against any change.

But a growing coalition of donors, nonprofit charities, and people who care about tax fairness are pushing back. They point out that lawmakers could easily fix the rules to increase the flow of charitable funding, increase transparency, and shut down the tax avoidance and self-dealing practices currently corrupting philanthropy.

The message is getting across. A 2024 Ipsos poll found that 71% of respondents believe Congress should raise the annual payout rate for private foundations and require the same for DAFs. Across the political spectrum, a clear majority of Americans believe if a donor gets a tax break, they should move the money in a timely way to a working charity.

So, big donors: You want a tax break? Make sure the money gets to a working charity—and fast. You want other taxpayers to subsidize your giving preferences? Tell us where the money’s going.

Don’t like these rules? Then don’t ask the rest of us to subsidize it. Let’s make sure the season of giving actually centers on giving, not hoarding.