On January 20, the fate of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border was abruptly changed as U.S. President Donald Trump announced new executive orders further dismantling the right to asylum.

That morning, the patients I saw in our pop-up clinic at a migrant shelter were full of apprehension about the threatened Trump policies, but a sense of hope remained. One young man told me he was so excited he could barely sleep because his CBP One appointment, which would allow him and his family to request parole to enter the U.S. while they applied for asylum, was scheduled for the following day.

By noon, the tone had changed. People tried desperately to log in to the CBP One app but were given error messages. Cancelation notices arrived in the email inboxes of those who had already been granted appointments. One patient who had left his country fleeing political violence and had been waiting for eight months at the border for the appointment, frantically held his phone up to show me the email. “Now what are we supposed to do?” he lamented, “We have nowhere safe to go.”

There is much work to be done now to uphold human rights in the U.S. But we must not forget the people who are desperate for relief at our borders.

Indeed, the end of the CBP One appointment program has effectively closed the door on asylum seekers at the U.S.’ southern border. With the ongoing restrictions of the asylum ban and border closure rules put in place during the Biden administration, there are now no viable legal pathways to entry for the hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking safety at the border.

The effect on our patients waiting in Mexico has been devastating, and it’s only going to get worse. Patients came into the clinic reporting depression, panic attacks, and despair. Some had just narrowly survived being kidnapped, beaten, or raped, and were petrified about being targeted again by the organized crime groups that prey on migrants in Mexican border cities.

Over the years in our clinics, we have seen that increased restrictions in border policies—such as Trump’s Remain in Mexico—increase danger, injuries, mental health problems, childhood developmental problems, and untimely death for asylum seekers trying to make it to the U.S. Most recently, these issues had still been occurring given the long waiting periods of the CBP One system, but now they will undoubtedly worsen.

Being stranded leads people to make impossible choices. Some families will risk (and some lose) their lives trying to cross the swift currents of the Rio Grande or the harsh landscape of the desert. Some families choose to send their children over the border unaccompanied, taking on the trauma of family separation because they see no other way for their child to escape from danger and have a better life.

President Trump says we shouldn’t care about the plight of immigrants and should instead focus on American citizens’ needs—of which, undoubtedly, there are many. But such perspectives miss the bigger picture, and are, in fact, woefully inaccurate. Not only are we able to support immigrants, we desperately need to, for the sake of all of us. Without immigrants, we’d be facing a home care crisis, an agricultural crisis, and our economy would suffer. What’s more, the plight of migrants in transit impacts our communities in the U.S. I have patients at my primary care clinic in Massachusetts who have fallen into a deep depression or whose blood pressure has skyrocketed when a loved one of theirs is lost along the migrant route or is assaulted on the journey. Let alone our international and domestic legal obligations that require us to recognize and honor the right to seek asylum.

As our patients at the migrant shelter reeled from the news of the cancelation of CBP One, one man was still smiling. “I believe the new president will have compassion for us,” he said, standing outside his tent and nodding toward his wife and small children inside. “He has a family too. I pray that he will be able to understand that we need safety for our kids.”

It would be nice. But in the absence of that change of heart, our communities need to take action. Elected officials, civil society, and our communities must band together to resist the current assaults on asylum, and push for humane and welcoming border policies. There is much work to be done now to uphold human rights in the U.S. But we must not forget the people who are desperate for relief at our borders—it’s our obligation, and it’s a matter of life and death.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which reverses the push for paper straws in favor of plastic ones—based on the claim that paper straws don’t work (which, by the way, isn’t true)—is about way more than just straws. It is designed to undercut the Biden administration’s 2022 initiative to phase out single-use plastics, including straws, containers, and bottles, from federal buildings by 2032.

While the administration’s EO focus might seem to be shining a light on a seemingly trivial issue, it is a symptom of a much larger, and much more alarming problem: plastic pollution and its impact on all of us. Plastic is a human health crisis in the making and this decision is more than absurd—it’s actually dangerous.

Firstly, while banning plastic straws specifically is not all about saving turtles and trashing the ocean—we are in fact by using them helping to trash the oceans.

This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil.

Plastics have become a pervasive pollutant with 8 million tonnes of plastic dumped in our oceans every single year, killing marine life, including whales and seabirds at an alarming rate. One million sea turtles alone die every year from ingesting plastic trash. That represents 10% of the entire global population.

Researchers estimate there are around 199 million tonnes of plastic contaminating our marine environment already, and every year we do not take action and instead back plastic, that number rises.

Much of this largely single-use plastic, like straws, eventually breaks down into microplastics, smaller than a grain of rice. So, when we eat fish, we are consuming all the plastic junk and chemicals they have been ingesting too.

Which might help to explain why scientists have found plastic particles in human brains, lungs, hearts, and even placentas. We are poisoning our own babies with plastics, even before they are born.

These microplastics are harmful in their own right but, they also leach out toxic plastic chemicals, like Bisphenol A and phthalates, both known endocrine disruptors. Exposure to these chemicals in early development can have lifelong effects on a child's health, from developmental delays to ADHD, autism, and increased risks of certain cancers. These chemicals are even linked to miscarriages and infertility.

We already know that babies and infants appear to be ingesting high levels of microplastics because a study by scientists from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland discovered they had over 10 times higher rates of microplastics in their feces samples than adults.

From the moment we wake up to the time we go to sleep, we are being exposed to microplastics—whether through the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe.

The harmful effects of plastics on human health should be a primary concern for any administration that claims to value human life. So, the president’s focus on supporting plastic straws is worryingly indicative of a disregard for the growing scientific consensus on the dangers of microplastics and the chemicals used to make plastics in general.

This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil. Why? Because plastics are made from petrochemicals, this order therefore supports the fossil fuel industry. An industry already wreaking havoc on our planet by fueling climate change.

If we are serious about safeguarding human health, we must shift away from our throwaway plastic culture that has dominated our society for decades. The impacts of plastic pollution on our health, and our babies’ too, are far-reaching and catastrophic. It's time for our leaders to prioritize the health of people, not the interests of the plastic industry.

As the debate over plastic straws continues, which it will, we need to refocus the conversation on the real, life-threatening dangers posed by plastic pollution. It is time to recognize that this is not a fight over a straw—it is a fight for children’s health.

Which is why EARTHDAY.ORG is running an End Plastic Initiatives—so we can continue to drive public support around making a stand against plastic pollution and in the process protect our planet—and more importantly our health—for generations to come. The fight continues. Plastic is Toxic. DON’T GO BACK TO PLASTICS!

On February 10, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, filed suit for damages against the Trump-Musk-DOGE cartel. The lawsuit, which EPIC filed before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, calls for damages on behalf of tens of millions of government workers and Americans resulting from the administration’s illegal breach of personal privacy and its threat to national security.

“These basic security failures have resulted in the unlawful disclosure of personal data—including social security numbers and tax information,” reads the complaint.

EPIC is claiming the data incursion—among many other violations—is illegal under the Privacy Act of 1974. “Plaintiffs have a constitutional right to the privacy of their information… Defendants have violated and continue to violate that right by unlawfully disclosing extremely personal information about plaintiffs and millions of others to unchecked actors in violation of law,” the complaint states.

The courts (and hopefully Congress) are catching up to public opinion, which has taken a drastic turn since Musk began violating the privacy rights of millions of people.

EPIC urges the court to compel defendants to “delete all unlawfully obtained, disclosed, or accessed personally identifiable information from systems or devices on which they were not present on January 19, 2025.” It calls on the court to award plaintiffs statutory and punitive damages “in the amount of $1,000 per each act of unauthorized inspection and disclosure.” That’s a sum that could add up to trillions of dollars in damages given the scope of DOGE’s breach.

The law is catching up to Elon Musk. The EPIC suit is just one of many that have been filed since U.S. President Donald Trump was sworn in and Musk and his DOGE crew infiltrated several key federal agencies and their extensive public records.

On February 7, a federal judge issued an emergency temporary restraining order (TRO) against DOGE after 19 state attorneys general filed a complaint also alleging that DOGE had violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and other laws. The TRO blocks Musk et al. from accessing Treasury systems and requires they destroy any material downloaded.

On filing their case for the TRO, New York State Attorney General Letitia James said: “President Trump does not have the power to give away Americans’ private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress. Musk and DOGE have no authority to access Americans’ private information and some of our country’s most sensitive data.”

The largest data breach in U.S. history

During a Free Press webinar held prior to EPIC’s filing, the organization’s chief litigator, John Davisson, called the DOGE incursion into federal agencies like the Department of Treasury “the largest and most consequential breach of personal information in U.S. history.” To make matters worse, Davisson noted, “it’s being led by malign, unaccountable forces from both without and within the government.”

Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert led the very first suit against Trump’s second administration. Since then, the organization has filed several other suits against the Trump White House and its operatives, with most focused on pushing back against the DOGE power grab. “What really stands out is the corruption implicit in Musk being at the helm,” Gilbert said during the Free Press webinar. A Public Citizen report from October found that three of Musk’s businesses—SpaceX, Tesla, and X—face at least 11 criminal and civil investigations at the federal level.

“The biggest risk of all is the risk to democratic governance,” said Davisson. “The folks involved here—these bandits, these hijackers—have correctly assessed that the systems in federal agencies are critical levers for how they carry out the functions Congress has assigned.” Davisson added that the massive DOGE data breach empowers Musk’s unaccountable team “to exert all sorts of pressure on federal employees and people at large on people they disagree with politically and that is something we should be very, very worried about.”

The groundbreaking reporting of WIRED’s Vittoria Elliott has exposed the relatively inexperienced team of techies that has accompanied Musk into these federal agencies to access massive troves of personal data. “One of the biggest issues is the lack of transparency,” she said during the webinar. “We don’t know what systems they’re accessing. We’re not given transparency about their roles… The consequences of [Musk’s team] getting it wrong are so dire for so many people.”

Sowing the Seeds of DOGE’s Downfall

One of the things that stands out to Davisson is just how many mistakes DOGE has made since it began its work. Musk and his team have left themselves vulnerable to the sorts of lawsuits being filed by EPIC, Public Citizen, and state attorneys general, he said. “They’ve aggravated a lot of stakeholders; they’re in the process of aggravating the courts. They’ve embarrassed themselves in many ways; they’ve drawn the eye of the public. I think in many ways they have already sown the seeds of their downfall.”

Congress has reportedly been inundated with calls from people who are deeply unhappy about Musk’s raid on government agencies. “It is a deluge on DOGE,” Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.) told The Washington Post. “Truly our office has gotten more phone calls on Elon Musk and what the heck he’s doing mucking around in federal government than I think anything we’ve gotten in years… People are really angry.”

People must share their concerns with their lawmakers and call on Congress to act against the incursions. But that’s just a start.

“There is broad public dislike for Musk,” Davisson said during Monday’s webinar. “And we should continue to find ways to leverage that... This is going to require many small—sometimes unsatisfying—actions by a lot of different people in a lot of different places. This assault on democracy is vulnerable to that.”

Turning Anger About Musk Into Action

There are productive places to channel outrage, said Gilbert. “There have been some really effective engagements and protests and people are ginning up for the next phase of resistance... There are some places where we can win things,” she added, pointing to the upcoming budget fight in Congress.

“There’s a battle to be had, where everyone's senators and members matter,” she said. “Knowing that and knowing that there are places where constituents can weigh in hopefully changes the calculus a little bit when folks are feeling like there’s nothing they can do.”

And indeed Musk may be popular among the extremist MAGA crowd, but voters in general aren’t on board with the DOGE team’s privacy violations. A new Hart Research survey indicates that his popularity is in rapid decline as people learn more about his efforts to compromise our data.

The Economist/YouGov conducted a poll finding that the billionaire is falling out of favor with voters, including Republicans, who say in increasing numbers that they want him to have little-to-no influence over the way the government conducts its business.

The wins against DOGE are just the beginning, Davisson said. The legal strategy is “going to be important for staying grounded through what is going to be a very long and difficult fight. So I encourage everyone to celebrate the wins when they come.”

The courts (and hopefully Congress) are catching up to public opinion, which has taken a drastic turn since Musk began violating the privacy rights of millions of people. With continued public pressure and legal challenges, it’s possible DOGE’s days may be numbered.

Is the Rule of Law one thread that might draw Americans together? Here is a perspective drawn from recent conversations among four elders from different backgrounds—one over 90, two in their early 80s, one in his mid-70s.

We are at present a divided nation, although an elder account might identify many divisions that have been overcome, some against great odds. The advantages of being old are distance from the demands of public life and the privilege of looking at it with a wide lens. Elders can take the long view, sitting in the balcony, looking at a story unfolding on stage now. No dispute, it is one that causes much sorrow and concern.

Each of us has loved ones in intense disagreement, in some cases having cut off contact. In perhaps a grandfatherly way, we feel a responsibility to do what we can to help heal relationships that are off course.

When our promises are broken and are no longer deemed trustworthy, everything collapses: government, marriages, friendships, work relationships.

Every play has a stage setting, an agreed upon backdrop against which the story is played out. When the drama becomes heated and intense, with new and surprising events unfolding moment by moment, it can be easy to lose sight of the shared agreements that make the story possible.

From our balcony perspective, the Rule of Law is one of those core shared agreements. Ours is a story of a 250-year-old experiment in self-governance. Never perfect, always in need of improvement, ours is nevertheless an extraordinary tale of how vast differences can be safely managed.

Promises made and promises kept. That’s how healthy marriages, families, and institutions work. Let’s keep our promises to each other. We can disagree passionately, reform and repeal laws that no longer serve, vote officials out of office who have lost our trust, and elect new ones that earn it. But let’s not give up on the Rule of Law. It anchors our relationships with each other. That’s the governing story we inherited from our nation’s founders and that our ancestors struggled and died for. That’s the promise that we’ve made to each other.

Faithfulness to our covenant with each other codified in law, from the Constitution to safe driving laws, as well as other measures, mostly implicit but followed 99% of the time. These must govern our actions. They are the promises we make to each other and they form the core assumption underlying the functioning of this nation.

When our promises are broken and are no longer deemed trustworthy, everything collapses: government, marriages, friendships, work relationships. Trust in that covenant with each other is the glue, the “be all and end all,” the heart of the matter, the centerpiece of our society.

That’s how it looks to us, elders with a balcony perspective. We see a family in pain, living out a drama, a family that is dangerously close to abandoning the script. Let’s honor the Rule of Law and the democratic structures we’ve worked so hard to build. Let’s listen to our better angels as Abe Lincoln advised us to do at an earlier time of crisis.

The time is now to cast our eyes upward toward a unifying cause rather than downward toward divisiveness, mutual recrimination, and disabling antagonism. We have come this far. It would be a devastating blow to all in this country, and in fact to all the world, if we can’t find a path we can walk together.

Advocates have long warned about the interconnected threats to both education and democracy, but the lightning speed at which these attacks are unfolding under the Trump administration is astonishing. This intentional campaign of shock and awe is meant to send the administration’s opposition into submission—or, a tailspin. It is also meant to signal strength, power, and action to its supporters across our communities.

And so in just a handful of weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has already signed executive orders impacting nearly every aspect of public education in the U.S.—from illegally attempting to dictate classroom curricula (“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”), to undermining protections from discrimination by reverting to 2020 Title IX enforcement based on “biological sex,” to prioritizing privatization initiatives that intentionally divert funding from public schools.

Our aim must be to reach the other side of this administration with the core functions of this country’s democratic institutions and the promise of public education both intact.

This barrage of executive actions is an intentional mix of impulsive and arbitrary power grabs—and initiatives clearly rooted in Project 2025 and the American First Policy Agenda, both of which are the fruits of a vicious entanglement of white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, and white Christianity. The president’s allies have worked tirelessly over the course of the last four years to create division and conflict in school districts across the country. From book bans and efforts to rewrite U.S. racial history in school curriculums, to policies targeting transgender and LGBTQ students, they are intentionally undermining parents’ trust in public schools to pave the way for funneling taxpayer dollars from public education into private hands.

This agenda extends far beyond efforts to dismantle public education. There’s mounting evidence that we’re entering into a full-blown constitutional crisis, wherein the intended checks and balances between our branches of government are not holding up to the administration’s unbridled assertions of power. The federal government is out of balance and increasingly leaning toward an executive branch that has engaged in unconstitutional overreach from day one.

Yet, we must remind ourselves that this surge of executive orders is a reflection of the administration’s weakness—not its power. If the administration felt it could succeed in meaningfully restructuring the government via legislative action—the kind of action that would be both constitutional and lasting—it would be working with Congress to enact those changes. But instead with slim majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and the lowest inaugural approval rating since 1953, the administration is left signalling its power with the hope that we’ll concede to it.

We will not. Our aim must be to reach the other side of this administration with the core functions of this country’s democratic institutions and the promise of public education both intact. We are crystal clear about what the administration’s underlying motives and limitations are because we understand what time it is. The promise of so much that we care about—from the promise of our public schools to build productive, civically engaged, and healthy futures for each of our children to the promise of our democracy to represent and respond to the needs and will of our diverse communities—is at stake.

Most Americans want an end to the polarizing and ideologically driven attacks on our schools. We are not seeking needless strife. Life is already full of very real struggles to find well-paying jobs; to pay mounting bills; and to cover the costs of childcare, basic life necessities, and access the healthcare we need to stay or get healthy. We understand that our public schools play essential roles in our communities, from educating our children to serving as gathering points where we vote and set our town budgets. We understand that we pay taxes into a system of government whose sole purpose is to serve us, the people. And we understand that our schools and our government more broadly are imperfect because they are led by people. And just as we strive as individuals to continually do better and learn, we expect the same from our schools and our government. Most Americans want improvement. And, we want to be heard and better served.

We will not concede. We will show up for our public schools. We will show up for each other and our future.

We also understand that the administration’s best hope at consolidating the unconstitutional power it seeks is by intimidating lawmakers so they bend to its will and the rest of us to preemptively concede our rights and be silent in our opposition. We will not concede. Instead, we will be clear-eyed, focused, and undeterred. Together, we will protect and continue to advance the promise of both our public schools and democracy in this country.

Here are the actions you can take:

1. Do not preemptively silence your voice of opposition. Self-censoring in conversations with friends and neighbors, or holding back on submitting letters and op-eds to local papers, speaking up on radio shows, or showing up at community rallies all mean relinquishing fundamental rights you still have. Keep asserting them.
2. Call on congressional leaders to show up for public education. Reach out to your representatives to share the importance of public schools to you and your community, and the need for them to hold firm against the administration’s proposals and exercise their voice to advocate for the funding and policies schools need.
3. Help state leaders understand and act on their vital role in protecting and supporting vulnerable students to learn and succeed. State boards of education and administrators should take steps to shore up school resources and civil rights protections, including by connecting schools to sanctuary state and local efforts. Look to the Los Angeles Unified School District; the city of Portland, Maine; and New Jersey for ideas on what those steps can look like.
4. Support school board members and local education leaders to push back against censorship and voucher programs that undercut their decision-making authority and make it harder to provide rigorous and engaging learning experiences for students. The growing number of school boards that passed resolutions to combat school vouchers make clear that community-driven, grassroots initiatives can have a powerful impact.
5. Join other students, families, educators, and advocates mobilizing for a system of public education that supports every student, family, and community to thrive. Tapping into state and national networks can amplify the impact of local advocacy and provide avenues to mobilize against other harmful measures as a united front. Last year in Kentucky, students did exactly that to defeat Amendment 2, a ballot measure that would have allowed public tax dollars to be used for private schools. Students mobilized against the measure by elevating their concerns in the media, educating their local communities, and organizing a bus tour to get the word out across the state, proving the power of networks in the face of harmful bills.

The threats facing public education and democracy in this country are profound, but they are not insurmountable. Privatization efforts and ideological attacks demand sharper focus, stronger connections, and a unified approach to meet the challenges ahead. Each obstacle we confront in the fight for public education is deeply interconnected with the broader fight for justice and inclusion in our society and our democratic institutions.

Democrats say they’re overwhelmed by all the outrageous policy changes and executive orders Trump is cranking out. But there’s no evidence that they’re actively resisting anything at all.

The post We Have Found the Anti-Trump Democratic Resistance and They Are first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post We Have Found the Anti-Trump Democratic Resistance and They Are appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.

For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.

The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.

Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)

Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.

Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.

Along Came Anduril

Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).

From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.

In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.

Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”

To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.

Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.

After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.

Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes.

The Replicator Initiative

Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.

“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”

As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.

Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”

Enter the Trumpians

Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.

In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.

Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.

Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”

His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. “We are committed to delivering the world’s most advanced aircraft — the F-35 — and its unrivaled capabilities with the government and our industry partners,” Lockheed declared in response to Musk’s tweets. Over at the Pentagon, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had this to say: “I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer. He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.” He then added, “I don’t see F-35 being replaced. We should continue to buy it, and we also should continue to upgrade it.”

President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.

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Should we like our children like we like our livestock: free-range?

Older Americans, who grew up before electronic trackers/devices and helicopter parenting, remember childhoods with much more independence than many kids get today. In the 1970s and 1980s, when “The TMI Show”’s Manila Chan and Ted Rall came of age, it wasn’t uncommon for the under-18 set to take mass transit by themselves and disappear for hours between meals with little accountability. It was riskier. But it also made for bigger lives and bigger imaginations.

Joining us is a leading pioneer of today’s “free-range parenting” movement. Writer Lenore Skenazy is a writer and blogger famous for her 2008 article “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.” In 2017, Skenazy co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow to make it “easy, normal, and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident and happy adults.” In 2018, Utah became the first state to pass the Free-Range Parenting bill, assuring parents that they can give their children some independence without it being mistaken for neglect, for which the Washington Post credited Skenazy’s 2008 column as a contributing influence. Similar laws have since been enacted in Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and several other states have relaxed laws regarding some aspects of childhood independence.

The post TMI Show Ep 76: Make Our Kids Free Again? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 76: Make Our Kids Free Again? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.

But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”

These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.

The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are countless other defenders of America’s democratic faith.

We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”

“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”

The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.

One by one, the federal agencies that keep our nation running have been falling — with the full backing and blessings of Donald Trump — under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”

Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts against the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.

But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.

Our single best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis from long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer — and that action is also building.

Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”

“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”

As the Trump-Musk administration takes an axe to the federal government’s budget and personnel, the Democrats have an opening to raise an issue that Musk will hate but Trump can’t ignore—private sector mass layoffs.

Right now, as Acting President Musk goes after agency after agency in the name of cost cutting, the Democrats are focused on public sector job cuts. As they should, tens of thousands of jobs are at risk.

But those numbers pale in comparison to the 1.8 million private sector workers who lost their jobs in December of 2024 due to involuntary layoffs. For the past several decades, more than 20 million jobs per year have been taken away from workers who did nothing wrong.

It won’t be easy to convince private sector workers that cutting federal government costs is a mistake. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you don’t want your tax dollars squandered, and USAID., to many, sounds like a money pit.

If the Democrats act forcefully to defend working-class jobs, they should have better chance to win back Congress from Trump in 2026.

But private sector workers do care about their own job insecurity, and Donald Trump knows it. He has spoken forcefully about keeping worker jobs from migrating to Mexico and elsewhere, and he could take actual action to make that happen with one simple Executive Order:

Corporations that receive taxpayer money via federal contracts and tax subsidies shall not lay off taxpayers involuntarily.

More than $750 billion in contracts for materials and services are made each year by the federal government. Many of the corporate recipients have had no qualms about laying off workers and using the savings to enrich their investors via stock buybacks, and there have been no effective rules to prevent this. (A stock buyback is when a corporation repurchases its own shares, thereby raising the price of the stock without improving the company in any material way.)

Taxpayers know there is a great deal of waste built into federal contracts, especially those massive purchases involving defense and advanced technologies.

It turns out that Musk’s companies, reportedly, have received $20 billion in federal contracts, with $15.4 billion coming to Tesla and Space X in the last decade. Last year, Tesla laid off more than 14,000 workers, and Space X has announced that this year it will lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, about 6,000 jobs. Imagine if Musk were not allowed to stuff himself with taxpayer money unless he refrained from involuntary layoffs?

To get there the Democrats, for the first time in memory, would need to care about greed-driven private sector layoffs.

That will be difficult because the Democrats are more in tune with highly educated, upper middle-class federal workers. These are the kind of voters who have been trending Democratic while the party has shed the working class. And the Democrats see the federal agencies in which these voters work as part of their legacy, often created and enhanced by legislation they spear-headed. Federal workers are their people, doing the work that the Democrats care most about.

Not so much the private sector, where voters have been drifting away from the Democrats in large numbers for decades, especially in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As I show in Wall Street’s War on Workers, since 1992, as a county’s mass layoff rate has gone up, the Democratic vote has gone down, even as these voters have grown more liberal on social issues.

The Democrats have been losing these working-class voters because they have failed to interfere in private sector layoff decisions, even when job destruction became a campaign issue.

For example, in the run up to the 2024 election, John Deere and Company announced they were shipping more than 1,000 jobs to Mexico while recording $10 billion in profits and conducting $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. Trump immediately called for a 200-percent tariff on all Deere imported goods if they didn’t rescind their layoffs.

The Democrats didn’t say a word about how to stop this needless job destruction and instead attacked the tariffs. Deere’s stock buybacks and profits proved the company had more than enough money to offer voluntary buyout packages for all their workers, not just the executives. But the Democrats did not speak up.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Democrats also remained silent when the Mylan Pharmaceutical plant in Morgantown, WV, moved to India. Workers there begged the Democrats to use the Defense Production Act to keep open the facility, which made generic drugs. If Biden could do it for baby formula, why not for badly needed pharmaceuticals?

But not one Democrat came out in support of these workers, and 1,500 jobs with an average wage of $70,000 per year were tossed away.

Clearly, the Democrats have been pulling away from the working class. Why help these workers, some are saying, when they’re more than likely to vote for Republicans? And why challenge corporate power when you’re trying to win over highly educated executives and financial leaders?

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is up and arms these days about the attacks on federal workers, was very honest about this switch in 2016. I’ve quoted him again and again because he tells us precisely what the Democratic strategy has been all about:

"For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio & Illinois & Wisconsin."

At the launch of a second Trump presidency, Schumer’s political acumen has not aged well.

Nor has Ken Martin’s, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, who has made it clear that billionaires are welcome.

“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money, but we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires,” Martin said recently.

It is doubtful that Martin ever gave one second’s thought to the fact that most, if not all, of these “good” billionaires that “share our values” have grown wealthy from, to some significant extent, stock buybacks funded through mass layoffs.

The country needs the Democrats to go from defense to offense. If the only activity is mounting a resistance movement to Trump, the odds are slim that enough new voters will be gained to win back the House or the Senate in 2026.

Every elected Democrat should be demanding that no taxpayer dollars go to corporations that lay off taxpayers involuntarily. They should put that message on social media, old media, even billboards all over the swing states. They should challenge every Republican candidate to take a stand on it. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer one dime, but it can protect the livelihoods of millions of working people every year. Or, at least, give them leverage while working out their severance.

Every day Democrats should be asking Trump to sign the order. Does he really want to be seen giving our tax dollars to corporations that lay off taxpayers and funnel the savings to the rich?

And wouldn’t it be good for our weary souls to see Musk squirm because he wouldn’t be able to sup at the federal trough while casually laying off his employees?

You have to wonder if the Democrats are capable of such a move, or anything remotely close to it. Only if they truly are willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class. They need to believe, not just mouth the words, that they will fight the wealthy to protect the livelihoods of working people.

If the Democrats act forcefully to defend working-class jobs, they should have better chance to win back Congress from Trump in 2026. But in the short term, pushing Trump to defend his populist flank might help put a wedge between Trump and his billionaire bros, and get some relief for workers from financialized layoffs.

But don’t hold your breath. All those “good” Democratic billionaires might get upset.

Harvard's decision to impose the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, definition of antisemitism on its campus underscores the university's complete failure to rise to the occasion of opposing Israel's crimes against humanity, its subservience to the Israeli lobby, and its actual complicity in the mass killings carried out by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not only does Harvard refuse to examine its likely investments in companies profiting from the destruction of Gaza (those investments are secret). But it actively silences opposition to that killing by large numbers of its own students through punishments and suspensions. How times have changed since a previous Harvard administration finally listened to the cries of its students for divestment from the white racist apartheid South African regime in the 1980s! The days when Harvard would welcome a Nelson Mandela to its campus to sing the glories of its protesting students who helped to end apartheid are over because of Mandela's outspoken championing of Palestinian rights during his whole political life.

Even though American Jews are among the leaders of the opposition to Israel's crimes against Palestinians, Harvard will now label these vast numbers of Jews as antisemites because of the loud opposition they are organizing against Israel's indiscriminate attack on Palestinians, against the calls of Israeli leaders to destroy Palestinians through starvation and onslaught, and against Israeli apartheid and denial of basic rights to Palestinians and their parents who once called the land their home.

Is Harvard really concerned about antisemitism? Or just policing its students' language and actions to undermine opposition to the atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza and now in the West Bank?

The issue here is far beyond free speech. It is about playing a major role in silencing opposition to monstrous murder and destruction. In all its expressed concern about what it labels antisemitism and about the discomfort of some of its students who support the Israel's war, there is no mention at all about the reason that so many of its students condemn Israel's actions in Gaza—where it will take years just to remove the bodies of thousands of Palestinians buried under the rubble of their homes, schools, and hospitals. It is as if Israel's policies in Gaza are irrelevant to the upheaval that the Harvard administration seeks to crush. Harvard students were risking their futures not primarily for their rights to free speech but to maintain a semblance of integrity and as an expression of their grief while their own country provided Israel with full-throated support for its attack on Palestinian children.

Antisemitism is a centuries-long curse that must be opposed and challenged whenever it rears its ugly head. The Holocaust is a crime that stands out against all others in the modern age and whose lessons must never be forgotten. One of those lessons is "never again." And that is the lesson that the vast majority of young Jews who condemn Israel for its deliberate destruction of Palestinian society are acting on—as their forebears condemned white South Africa for its brutal apartheid system. The vast movement against Israel's racism and killing is not calling for Israelis to be murdered or driven into the sea. The call is for an end to the war on Palestinians and for equal rights for both peoples whether in the same country or in separate independent states. To pervert the fight against antisemitism into a weapon to be used to subdue opposition to what we have seen each day in Gaza is morally reprehensible. A principled leadership of Harvard and of all the other great universities of this country should be giving leadership and effective direction to the movement against this war on a people—not figuring out how to destroy it.

Why is the assertion by large numbers of American Jews that "the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor" labeled antisemitic? It may be true or it may not be true. But why is it antisemitic? Why can a student at Harvard say that the United States is a racist endeavor without being charged with racism? They can certainly be challenged, but what does racism have to do with such a claim? Why would drawing a comparison between the brutal October 7 Gaza uprising and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis be considered antisemitism? It may be right, wrong, or partially wrong. Let the facts speak. But why is it antisemitic? "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" is wrong. But why is it just fine for Israelis to deny Palestinians that same right without being called on the carpet for doing so? The chant "from the river to the sea" may be mistakenly experienced by many Israelis as calling for the violent destruction of Israel. Clearly the violent destruction of any people cannot be tolerated. But why was it just fine when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party enshrined the same slogan in its documents in the not too distant past? And why is the call by millions of Israelis today for the expansion of the state of Israel into wider areas of the Middle East—even beyond the river to the sea—just fine with our country's leaders?

When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its legal ruling that "Israel's occupation and annexation of the Palestinian territories are unlawful, and its discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinians violate the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid," is that antisemitism? Or just a statement of fact? When the ICJ preliminarily ruled that South Africa (now joined by Ireland) had made a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, was that because Ireland and South Africa are antisemitic? When the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, were they motivated by antisemitism or by the facts of the matter?

We applaud Harvard's commitment to oppose antisemitism whether directed against Israeli Jews, Zionist Jews, or anti-Zionist Jews. Would that Harvard was just as concerned about the pervasive doxing and harassment of its students for their support of Palestinian life by pro-Israel zealots—in some cases with dire consequences for those students' careers.

So the question is: Is Harvard really concerned about antisemitism? Or just policing its students' language and actions to undermine opposition to the atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza and now in the West Bank?

Harvard University should be faithful to its better angels. To oppose antisemitism and Islamophobia, of course. But to jettison its imposition of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on its faculty and students. To insist that the rights of all its students be respected. But also to stand, as it has at times in the past, on the side of justice. There is a monstrous crime that poses a threat to the very existence of a people that must be ended. There are hostages on both sides that must be released. Let's hope that this first phase of the cease-fire in Gaza can be turned into the beginning of a necessary process that brings immediate peace, food, and medical care to the people of Gaza; ends land seizures and attacks in the West Bank; begins the reconstruction of Gaza; allows self-determination for Palestinians as well as Israelis; and even moves toward the reconciliation of two peoples who wish the same things for their children and who, some day, can do great things together.

There’s an insidious blame game occurring on social media. Whenever U.S. President Donald Trump takes one of his outrageous actions, Arab Americans are subjected to a flood of abusive messages. The “nicer” comments simply blame us for Mr. Trump’s victory, but others are punctuated by obscenities, vulgarities, and threats. There appears to be a concerted effort to absolve the Biden White House for their failed policies and the Harris presidential campaign for their bad political decisions and instead blame Arab Americans for Trump’s victory.

Being threatened or targeted for blame is nothing new for Arab Americans. For decades now, we’ve had to fend off abusive comments holding us responsible for everything from the 1973 Oil Embargo to terrorist attacks, whether here in the U.S. or in the Middle East.

I have experienced this personally. In the last two decades there have been four convictions for these kinds of threats directed against me, my family, or my staff. During one two-year stretch, between 2015 and 2017, we received 772 outrageous email threats accusing me of planning, training, and funding dozens of acts of violence.

Given the fact that Arab Americans and their concerns were given such short shrift by the Harris campaign, it is wrong to hold them responsible for the loss in November.

What’s happening today is different in two ways. Instead of being accused of terrorism, we are being held responsible for Trump’s victory. Some of those targeting us with abuse aren’t mentally deranged individuals who hover about on the right wing of U.S. politics, they are from the left. And while some of those blaming us for Harris’ defeat are unbalanced hate-filled characters, other accusations come from seasoned liberal political operatives or mainstream pundits who ought to know better.

To even suggest that Arab Americans are responsible for this election’s outcome is false, foolish, and irresponsible. In the first place, the Harris campaign didn’t need any help, they lost on their own. They may continue to maintain that their campaign was “flawless,” but if that’s the case, why did Democrats lose 45% of the Latino vote, or a significant share of Black males, or get wiped out among the white working-class?

These failures can’t be pinned on Arab Americans. They were the result of a failed campaign strategy designed and executed by consultants who are unprincipled, out of touch with the changing electorate, risk-averse, and unimaginative. Instead of understanding the changing contours and growing diversity of the Hispanic, Asian, and Black communities, they either took them for granted or approached them with decades-old “one-size-fits-all” messaging. Added to this was their failure to address the economic insecurity of the working class of all races, and the misguided attempt to replace voters they were losing by winning moderate Republican-leaning, white suburban women by campaigning with former Congressman Liz Cheney (whose policies are neither moderate nor appealing to suburban women).

When tallying the “strategists’” failures, we must add former Vice President Kamala Harris’ failure to meet with Arab American leaders, demonstrate any distance from former President Joe Biden’s disastrous blank-check support for Israel, and the campaign’s refusal to allow a Palestinian woman, who had lost family in Gaza, to speak at the Democratic convention. All of these failures took a toll on Arab American support for the Democratic ticket.

Having witnessed the traumatizing genocide that unfolded in Gaza and the enabling role played by the Biden administration, Arab Americans were in a bind. Although for the past two decades they’d voted for Democrats by a two-to-one margin, many found it difficult to support campaigns that ignored them and their pain. They asked for gestures of support and got none. And so, in the end, instead of the 60-30 margin won by Biden in 2020, Trump and Harris split the Arab American vote, with a small percentage supporting a third-party candidate, and a larger than average number not voting at all.

Given the fact that Arab Americans and their concerns were given such short shrift by the Harris campaign, it is wrong to hold them responsible for the loss in November. There’s a bit of racism at work here. If the concerns of any other group (ethnic, religious, or racial) had been so ignored, would they be scorned for abandoning the party that offended them? And when Trump started mass deportations, I haven’t seen Latino voters blamed or targeted with hate because 45% of them didn’t vote for Harris. And of course, they should not be because instead of blaming the people they let down, the campaign needs to look in the mirror and find fault with itself. I would simply have hoped the same courtesy could be extended to my community.

Early on, I warned the Biden-Harris campaigns that they were at risk of losing Arab Americans. My concerns were shrugged off with, “When it comes down to a binary choice—us versus Trump—they’ll support us.” I told them that was insensitive to my community’s pain and politically stupid. They were wrong and I was right.

Despite all of this, I was disturbed when some in my community endorsed Donald Trump, or when others began beating the drums for an unserious third-party candidate. I went to Michigan and joined several Arab American leaders for a Harris endorsement event. While I too was angry at Biden and deeply disappointed by the Harris campaign, I felt strongly that the dangers to our community, our allies, and our country’s democracy were too great to let Trump back into the White House. I understood my community’s pain and anger, but felt that it was important for us to rise above our hurt and consider how much worse it would be if Trump won—worse not only for us, but also for many other vulnerable communities here at home and abroad. As we can see from the new outrages being enacted daily, these fears were justified.

But despite this debate internal to my community, when all is said and done, I insist: Don’t blame Arab Americans. Blame the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. Don’t make us scapegoats, because even if Harris had carried the Arab American vote in Michigan and won that state, she still would have lost the other six battleground states and the election. And even if every Arab American voter had turned the other cheek and cast a ballot for Harris, she still would have lost the popular vote.

Forty years ago I was sleeping on a mattress in the catwalk of an overcrowded cellblock in the old Public Safety Building in downtown Syracuse. I had just been sentenced to prison for my public refusal to register for the draft. On February 4, 1985, I walked into the Federal Courthouse in Syracuse. Having recently turned 24, I was a bit nervous about my future, but buoyed by the support of a broad community, including my family. Standing up for my deeply-held belief that war threatened the future of humanity eased my anxiety. Judge Howard Munson sent me to prison for six months, to be followed by 30 months of probation and a 30 month suspended sentence.

These days I’m reflecting on that chapter of my life, and the lessons that are useful as we face a White House seeking to undermine democracy and concentrate power in the hands of an autocrat. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration was engaged in its own deception, illegal activity, and attacks on working people. However, I believe that the current moment is, without a doubt, the most dangerous time for our nation during my lifetime. U.S. President Donald Trump’s nomination of highly-unqualified cabinet picks and efforts to dismantle the federal government seek an unprecedented level of executive power and blind obedience.

Without sustained, persistent, and bold grassroots organizing and resistance, they will be able to carry out many of their anti-democratic schemes.

Although I was sent to prison for refusing to sign a piece of paper (the draft registration form), the larger issue was my belief that war is an immoral and destructive way to solve problems. In court the month before, I argued, “I have an obligation to uphold international law based on the Nuremberg Accords, which were initiated by the United States following World War II. I have an obligation not to participate in, ‘Planning, preparation, initiation or, waging of war,’ even if in order to uphold those agreements, I need to break the laws of my own country.”

I stood alone before the judge and jury during the trial and the sentencing, but was joined by a courtroom packed with supporters and hundreds outside demonstrating their commitment to move our nation from a foreign policy based on war and bullying to one based on diplomacy and international cooperation.

Before my sentencing I read excerpts from a Solidarity Statement signed by over 2,600 people,

The case of the United States against Andy Mager is also the case of the United States against each of us and against many others who are not here today… We ask, if you convict Andy Mager, that you convict all of us, that you imprison all of us, or none of us.

The time in prison included some very challenging moments, but was a powerful learning experience. I saw firsthand what happens to so many millions of people caught up in our criminal legal system. As a white person from a privileged background, this glimpse into the lives of people who are marginalized and forgotten has continued to inform my organizing work.

From court, I was taken to the public safety building in Syracuse, where I was held for 10 days before transfer to the federal prison system. Within a couple of days, I was part of a hunger strike to demand better treatment and conditions. The strike was clearly inspired in part by my resistance and the publicity my fellow prisoners had seen it garner. Those involved crossed many of the boundaries which keep people divided in prison and throughout our society and included at least one person who told me he agreed with his father that “they should take people like me (anti-war protesters) out behind the barn and shoot them.”

I received support from people who fully supported my political perspective, and respect from others who disagreed with me on those issues but understood the importance of standing up publicly for one’s beliefs. When I left Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp, my resolve to continue organizing for peace and justice was firm.

The four decades since then have offered many lessons which are instructive in our current situation. We are just a few weeks into an administration which is seeking to sow chaos and division. The Trump regime hopes to overwhelm us with so many outrageous actions simultaneously. Their goal is to create fear and hopelessness, enabling them to greatly concentrate power and move forward with their authoritarian plans.

Without sustained, persistent, and bold grassroots organizing and resistance, they will be able to carry out many of their anti-democratic schemes. Each of us has a responsibility to reach inside and find the courage to do what we can in our individual lives; where we work, study, pray, or recreate; and through coming together collectively. Here’s my best thinking right now, based on over four decades of community organizing, including my refusal to cooperate with draft registration:

• Don’t act out of fear and panic—we need to be thoughtful and strategic, while also acting quickly to intervene. The impact of the organizing on my draft resistance case was much greater because of the planning over many months.
• Learn from the development of fascism in other countries—Germany, Italy, Chile, Hungary, and elsewhere—and from the resistance movements.
• Join or initiate collective campaigns to stand up for democratic values; protect those most targeted; and work for equity, justice, and a sustainable future. The hunger strike described briefly above is an example of people with many differences coming together over shared concerns to take action.
• There are many specific issues under threat, from the human rights of immigrants to a quickly warming planet to efforts to repair the harm from centuries of racism. Focus your energy where you feel the most passion and believe you can best contribute. In the 1980s as someone directly affected by draft registration, I was highly motivated to work on that issue, and was effective because I could speak in the first person about my choices.
• Lend support—emotional, practical, and material to people in your community. Practice mutual aid. Listen to the pain of immigrants facing deportation or trans youth in fear, and offer assistance as you are able.
• Pressure public officials—demand that they protect their constituents and stand for justice, let them know when you’re upset by their actions and that you appreciate it when they do the right thing. Call them, write letters, send emails, visit their offices.
• Participate in demonstrations, marches, boycotts, and nonviolent direct action. Visible, public opposition is important, and gathering together in solidarity helps us maintain our spirit and commitment in difficult times. The support demonstrations at my trial and sentencing, including two small groups who engaged in nonviolent direct action after my sentencing, engaged many more people in the work, increased public attention, and strengthened my capacity to resist.
• Organize support for candidates in local races who will work with us to protect democracy and our communities.
• Speak up in solidarity when you hear attacks on other people or repetition of lies and disinformation.

The coming months and years will be difficult, and there will be continued, and in some cases escalating, suffering. As I learned 40 years ago, “Together We Are Strong.” We can’t stop all of it, but if we pull together and act out of love and compassion we can defend much of what is important and lay the foundation for more transformational change in the years and decades to come.

Veterans For Peace strongly objects to the Trump administration’s racist campaign of mass deportation of undocumented workers, who are our friends, neighbors, and even our fellow veterans. We condemn the violent raids that are sowing fear and terror in communities across the United States. As veterans, we are particularly opposed to the misuse and abuse of U.S. military personnel, including their illegal deployment to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Since U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, about 1,000 U.S. Army personnel and 500 Marines have been sent to the border, in addition to 2,500 National Guard members already there. Helicopter units are being sent along with U.S. Air Force C-17 and C- 130 aircraft; and Stars and Stripes reports that 20-ton Stryker armored combat vehicles may also be shipped. The number of U.S. military personnel on the U.S.-Mexico border may rise to as many as 10,000, according to the Defense One newsletter.

The use of active-duty military personnel for domestic policing operations is strictly forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act, and legal challenges are being mounted. President Trump says he may invoke the Insurrection Act, which effectively overrides Posse Comitatus by allowing the Executive to declare a national emergency requiring the domestic deployment of U.S. troops. But using the Insurrection Act to override the protections of the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy U.S. troops within the United States to investigate, detain, and remove illegal immigrants would be an unprecedented use of presidential power and misuse of the military, according to a recent report by the New York City Bar.

Just because the president says so does not make it legal.

What we have here is a U.S. president who is willing to engage thousands of U.S. military personnel in what appears—among other atrocities—to be a profit-making scheme based on a contrived border crisis. According to Customs and Border Protection data, monthly migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border between December 2023 and December 2024 were reduced dramatically from 249,740 to 47,326 apprehensions. Nevertheless, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reportedly want to build four new detention centers with 10,000 beds each, along with 14 smaller facilities that each contain around 1,000 beds each. According to the American Immigration Counsel, “That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies,” at least one of whom, CoreCivic, donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.

Trump is also calling for 30,000 immigrants to be detained at the notorious U.S. gulag at Guantanamo Bay, where U.S. laws and protections do not exist. This would also be another slap in the face of Cuba’s sovereignty over its own territory.

Tragically, this bogus campaign is terrifying, and profoundly disrupting the lives of millions of peaceful, extremely hard-working, tax-paying members of U.S. society. Even as the U.S. government is complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians from Gaza, it is now “cleansing” the U.S. of immigrants, many of whom are Indigenous to North America. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the “border deterrence” policy—now being carried out with soldiers and Marines—causes the death of more than 2,500 migrants per year, as they are intentionally forced onto the most perilous routes.

These abuses of U.S. law and human rights put U.S. military personnel in a very difficult position. What can active-duty military and National Guard members do when they do not want to be used in an illegal and immoral campaign against their neighbors, or even their own families?

Veterans to GIs: We Will Support You When You Refuse Illegal or Immoral Orders

Just because the president says so does not make it legal. You swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. You have the legal right and obligation to do so. Veterans For Peace supports U.S. military personnel who choose not to participate in the U.S.-Mexico border deployment, or in sending weapons to Gaza, or in other questionable military activities around the globe. We will put you in touch with trained counselors and lawyers who can advise you of your legal rights.

You can start by calling the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487. You can legally contact your congressional representatives to tell them your concerns by utilizing the Appeal for Redress. And be sure to check out the recently updated Know Your Rights guide from the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

As veterans of illegal, immoral U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and too many other places, we understand that you are in a tough place. But you do have options—you are still the boss of your own life. When you follow your conscience and stand up for what is right, you will have the support of Veterans For Peace.

It comes in a box with a picture of a fire extinguisher on the front. Below it the words: Guaranteed to stop wildfires. But when you open it up there’s a chainsaw inside. Tucked beside it is a piece a piece of paper saying, “Now without citizen overview!”

That’s the Fix Our Forests Act, a logging bill disguised as a firefighting bill. The tell is in the numerous and creative ways it would obstruct citizen input, from delaying citizen review until after the trees are cut to reducing the statute of limitations for filing lawsuits from six months to 120 days, seriously straining the ability of small citizen groups to apply legal restraint. It waives National Environmental Policy Act protections on fire-sheds as large as 250,000 square acres and allows loggings to proceed even if courts find the logging plan violates the law. There are no limits on the size and age of trees that can be cut, and the language is so vague that even clear cuts could qualify as “fuels treatment.” If passed, it would open millions of acres of forests to logging without scientific review or citizen input. A better name for this legislations would be the Fix It So We Can Log Without Citizen Oversight Act.

Introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), and having passed in the House, it’s now being rushed through the Senate in an attempt to capitalize on the heightened fire concern surrounding the tragic LA fires. A vote is expected any day now.

If our forests are broken, might it be the successive rounds of logging trucks and roads, chainsaws and feller bunchers, herbicidal treatments and industrial replanting of greenhouse-grown monocrops that did the breaking?

The bill claims to “protect communities by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration projects.” But if protecting communities were really the goal, this bill would pour resources into the only methods proven to do that: hardening homes and defending immediate space.

Most homes don’t catch fire directly from flames themselves, but from embers blown ahead of a fire. Simple measures like screening vents, covering gutters, and pruning vegetation directly around buildings dramatically improve their fire resilience. Thinning vegetation in the immediate surroundings, within 100 feet or so of the dwelling, can also help. These were among the recommendations of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. But rather than heed those recommendations by investing in boots on the ground to harden homes and educate communities, the bill diverts resources to backcountry logging.

The U.S. Forest Service has spent years making the argument that “mechanical treatment” of forests reduces wildfire. Independent research, however, comes to different conclusions, that thinning harms the forest and actually increases the very conditions that favor fire—heat, dryness, and wind. The reasons are fairly obvious. For instance, removing trees makes it harder for forests to slow wind, increasing the wind speeds of potential fires and thus the speed of spread. It also allows more sunlight to reach the forest floor, heating up the ground. Even more importantly, trees don’t just stand around soaking up sunlight, they also cool and hydrate their surroundings. It’s called transpiration, and can be understood as a kind of sweating, just like we do to keep cool in the sun. A single tree can have the cooling power of up to 10 air conditioners.

But that really is just the beginning. Those trees also help make rain. By sweating water vapor they not only cool the air, they deliver water vapor to the sky, feeding the formation of clouds. Even more remarkable, they seed that vapor with biochemicals such as terpenes (the forest scent) and other bits of biota that provide the grains for eventual rain drops to condense around. Forests make clouds. Those clouds then rain down, watering other forests, hydrating soil and vegetation, and increasing resilience to wildfire.

In other words, what the Fix our Forests Act calls dangerous fuels are also air conditioners and humidifiers, rain makers and rain catchers, as their needles gather and slow the falling of rain, allowing it to seep into the ground and make its way to aquifers, which will prove critical during the dry season. Of course, older, deeply rooted trees are best able to tap this water, but there are no protections for them in the Fix Our Forests Act.

Given that the concern is fire, it’s remarkable how little this legislation ever mentions water, its antidote. Though I did find, in section 119, under “Watershed Condition Framework Technical Corrections,” calls to strike the word “protection” from watershed provisions in a previous, similar bill, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, under George W. Bush. (To see a short, simple demonstration of how plant moisture effects flammability, watch this.)

Perhaps the problems with this bill are explained by the first word of the bill’s title: “Fix.” You can fix a car. You can fix a broken plate. But can you “fix” a forest? Can you “fix” a living ecosystem of infinite complexity? Such language represents an outdated way of thinking about the living world around us, and marks the very kind of thinking that’s gotten into this mess in the first place. And one needs to ask: If our forests are broken, might it be the successive rounds of logging trucks and roads, chainsaws and feller bunchers, herbicidal treatments and industrial replanting of greenhouse-grown monocrops that did the breaking?

Yes, there are instances where careful thinning of small trees and undergrowth is indicated, such as right around built communities or in industrial plantations planted too densely. But such measured action doesn’t need this bill, and this bill isn’t about such measured action. Rather, as put by Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations with Defenders of Wildlife, the bill “will do little of anything to combat fires and instead plays favorites with the timber industry which is hungry to consume more of our forests—removing large fire-resilient trees and devastating the lands and species which call them home.”

As mentioned, the bill is moving quickly. Last minute citizen outcry is the only thing standing in its way.

The following Senators have been identified as key votes: John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Angus King ((-Maine), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), and John Fetterman (D-Pa.)

It’s hard to see articles about the “move fast and break things” approach of the Trump administration without also hearing about the hovering presence the world’s richest man, technocrat extraordinaire Elon Musk. The mainstream media likes to describe Musk primarily as an oligarch. His involvement—which now includes having a desk in the White House—is a rather alarming event and something hardly anyone expected. Unfortunately, most media reports are lacking an important perspective about this unexpected bestowal of political power to him and other technocratic oligarchs. Is this a deliberate omission or do many media outlets simply have blinders on because, in their perception, Big Tech is now fundamental to Wall Street’s economy and national security?

Musk is a true technocrat and represents the forefront of a new technocratic form of government that we are hurtling toward at light speed. However, the notion of technocratic governance is simply not on the radar screen of the MSM, various political think tanks, and Congress. In the case of the media, journalists often appear to be enmeshed in worldviews more appropriate to the late 90s than the complex and often baffling world picture we see today. Many articles about Musk focus on such issues as the legality of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the serious conflicts of interest that exist. Then, of course, there’s the sheer insanity of handing over the keys to the kingdom to a small group of computer tech bros inexperienced in matters of state who appear to have not been properly vetted or advised of existing privacy law and national security protocols. The idea that these individuals now have access to troves of the personal data of U.S. citizens is simply beyond comprehension. Still, while these are legitimate concerns, the larger implications for technocratic management are getting bypassed.

The first step toward counteracting these trends would be to better educate both Congress and the public about the still poorly understood dangers of a technocratic state which heralds further fusion of corporate and government power.

The advent of the technocratic state poses a clear and present threat to democratic norms. But in the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump has opened the door wide open to its instantiation, first with the public announcement of a $500-billion joint AI development effort with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and AI frontman Sam Altman accompanying him on stage. I’ve written previously about the lack of technological sophistication possessed by the average member of Congress and how this is a deep concern. This knowledge gap creates a power vacuum that’s being fully taken advantage of by wealthy and powerful unelected technocrats who are at the forefront of accelerationist-style AI development.

A Runaway Freight Train

Is there anything that can stop this runaway freight train from running over the needs and rights of the public and constitutional norms? We’re all now highly dependent on phones and computing devices to carry out even the simplest of tasks in the course of everyday life. This life-limiting technological dependency represents a fundamental means of shifting power and control to elites who have the tech-based sophistication and infrastructure to leverage that control for their own advantage, facilitating a behind-the-scenes transfer of money and power up the food chain.

To think that Musk is motivated to “help out” with this internal nation-building would be naïve. As Anna Weiner wrote in a recent New Yorker article, “Tech executives see an opportunity to shape the world in their image.” Musk became the world’s richest individual only through a laser-like focus on self-interest and various questionable vanity projects. What’s also concerning is that this power shift toward a technocratic state is happening merely in the first few months of Trump’s presidency. Was this the president’s Reaganesque answer to making things more affordable or is it a cynical bypass of those campaign promises?

I’m not going to say that AI isn’t interesting and doesn’t have has great potential for positive change, as do many digital technologies—in theory at least. But we’ve already squandered opportunities to shape the internet as a force for social good with Big Tech moving to hijack its capabilities for marketing, advertising, social control, and even psychological manipulation. It’s more than a small concern that AI will follow a similar trajectory. Have we seen many announcements to date where AI will be used to solve global macro-problems such the climate crisis, wealth inequality, poverty, or automation’s negative effects on job markets? More likely, it will only exacerbate these problems. For example, AI’s insatiable need for electric power has been a key factor in the triumphant rebranding of nuclear power as a “green” technology. The most salient example of this is Microsoft’s intent to use the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI farms. As for wealth inequality, it seems clear that AI is already widening the divide between the economic classes. And, domestically and no doubt also in China and Russia, one of the most prominent uses of AI has been to provide new capabilities for drone attacks and nuclear warfare.

Onward Into the Fog

The first step toward counteracting these trends would be to better educate both Congress and the public about the still poorly understood dangers of a technocratic state which heralds further fusion of corporate and government power (historically, a hallmark of authoritarianism). In a way, this is a nonpartisan issue because Democrats have made their own contribution to cozying up to Big Tech’s plans for our future over the years. One possible small step might be for Congress to re-fund the Office of Technology Assessment. While this is hardly a panacea, providing more tech savvy advice to Congress would be a move in the right direction and might serve to balance the advisory data provided to the White House by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). We have yet to hear of anyone in Congress, Democrat or Republican, stepping up to warn about the dangers of technocracy, not just as a political phenomenon but also as a social and quality of life issue. Most likely, both high-profile media outlets and Congress are sidestepping this issue with a kind of strategic incompetence in order to support the powerful economic interests represented by their Big Tech donors.

It’s time to sound the alarm. What Musk is doing is tantamount to hacking the inner core of the federal government and the public trust—a blatant coup and power grab for technocratic ends. Yes, there is a definite case to be made for rooting out government waste, abuse, and corruption. But there’s a better and more measured way to proceed. Finally, it’s worth asking if Donald Trump fully understands the constitutional implications of opening this Pandora’s box. In terms of existing guardrails, he either turned Musk loose knowingly or unknowingly. But it doesn’t matter—both scenarios are equally troubling. Regardless of the outcome of pending and future court cases, we should all be forewarned that 2025 is rapidly shaping up to be the year we lost our civil liberties and protections (and our country as we know it) to AI and the Technocrat-in-Chief, Elon Musk.

So, U.S. Vice President JD Vance is now saying that he and President Donald Trump don’t have to obey federal judges, tweeting, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is how autocrats run things; it’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment.

It was Tuesday, July 17, 1787, and the men writing the Constitution had convened in Philadelphia to debate the separation of powers between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. They drew their inspiration for that day from French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, whose 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws had taken the New World and the Framers of the Constitution by storm.

In it, Montesquieu pointed out the absolute necessity of having three relatively coequal branches of government, each with separate authorities, to prevent any one branch from seizing too much power and ending a nation’s democracy. In The Spirit of Laws, he laid it out unambiguously:

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty… Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.

As the topic of the separation of powers was being debated at the Constitutional Convention that day 29 years after Montesquieu’s book had been published, “Father of the Constitution” James Madison rose to address the delegates:

If it be essential to the preservation of liberty that the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers be separate, it is essential to a maintenance of the separation, that they should be independent of each other...

In like manner, a dependence of the executive [president] on the legislature would render it the executor as well as the maker of laws; and then, according to the observation of Montesquieu, tyrannical laws may be made that they may be executed in a tyrannical manner.

He [Montesquieu] conceived it to be absolutely necessary to a well-constituted-republic, that the two first should be kept distinct and independent of each other… for guarding against a dangerous union of the legislative and executive departments.

If the president were ever to dictate all terms to the Congress, which then became a compliant rubber stamp regardless of how excessive or even illegal the president’s actions became, that, Madison said, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

We’re there now.

In simplified form, the system Madison and his compatriots came up with that summer gave the power to create and fund government agencies (including the federal court system) to Congress (Article I), the first among equals.

The responsibility of the president was to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution); in other words, to manage the institutions of government envisioned, authorized, and funded by Congress.

And the role of the Article III Courts was to make sure neither overstepped their authority, and independently arbitrate disputes between them. Their decisions must be final for the system to work.

This is more correctly defined as a war against America and our system of government than mere politics.

However, as a result of a 44-year-long effort by morbidly rich American oligarchs to corrupt our government to their own gain (the so-called Reagan Revolution, President George W. Bush, Trump, 1,500 radio stations, three television networks, multiple newspapers and other publications, over 200 television stations, hundreds of billions spent to purchase and then elect politicians), all of this American democracy and government—after 240 years—is finally on the verge of collapsing and being replaced by something very much like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

The GOP-controlled Congress has, in both houses, become a pathetic rubber stamp for whatever billionaires, Trump, Elon Musk, and industries like fossil fuels, crypto and tech, and banks want.

The president is nakedly breaking laws and daring both Congress and the courts to do anything about it.

And now JD Vance claims Trump can do whatever he wants and ignore the courts. (Only federal marshals can enforce federal court orders, but they work for Attorney-General Pam Bondi and Donald Trump.)

That is the very definition of a constitutional crisis.

And Republicans on the Supreme Court facilitated the entire corrupt deal by legalizing political bribery in 2010 with their billionaire-funded Citizens United decision.

As a result, every Republican and most Democrats are terrified of Elon Musk or some other billionaire destroying them in the next primary election. The result has been legislative gridlock, a paralysis of the legislative branch.

Going a step farther, Trump has authorized a drug-abusing, Putin-conversing, government-contracting billionaire—his single largest donor who probably was responsible for him becoming president—to access the private information of every American citizen and corporation, dismantle entire agencies created and funded by Congress, and stop multiple investigations into his own business practices.

This is more correctly defined as a war against America and our system of government than mere politics.

A war that must be absolutely delighting America’s enemies, particularly Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Especially now that Musk is calling for the shutdown of the Voice of America that both Putin and Xi hate as much as they both hated USAID.

But it even goes beyond that. Trump and Musk are rapidly moving America—with their attacks on the press, voting, and truth itself—toward the kind of authoritarian police state that several of the men Trump appears to love have established.

Further defying the Constitution, Trump has empowered the richest man in the world to attack and possibly destroy multiple federal agencies that were, just coincidentally of course, investigating his businesses:

• The Federal Aviation Administration’s administrator had launched an investigation into SpaceX after a spectacular rocket explosion; he’s now been fired.
• The Department of Justice was looking into possible violations of securities and other laws by Musk and Tesla; it’s probably safe to assume that investigation won’t go any farther.
• The USAID inspector general was investigating how Musk's SpaceX Starlink satellite terminals, purchased with USAID funds, were used in Ukraine’s war to defend itself from Russia.
• The Department of Defense’s inspector general opened a review in 2024 into alleged repeated failures by Musk and SpaceX to properly disclose their contact with foreign leaders; he’s now fired.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector general's office was investigating alleged animal abuse at Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company; he’s been fired.
• The National Transportation Safety Board, overseen by the Department of Transportation, had several open probes into Tesla regarding its remote and self-driving vehicles; odds are they’ll be dropped if they haven’t been already.
• The Environmental Protection Agency had settled multiple lawsuits with Tesla in recent years over Clean Air Act and hazardous waste law violations; now that the EPA is being gutted there probably won’t be any more.
• The National Labor Relations Board, overseen by the Department of Labor, had 17 open investigations against Tesla and SpaceX for alleged unfair labor practices, safety violations, and discriminatory work practices that are probably now moot.
• The Federal Communications Commission was carrying out investigations and had issued court orders related to Musk’s businesses.
• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was overseeing some of Musk’s companies and had a consent decree in place.
• Additionally, the Air Force and the Pentagon’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security launched reviews in November 2024 regarding Musk and SpaceX’s compliance with federal reporting requirements.

Musk’s $277 million investment to get Trump elected—legalized by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court—has, so far, paid off well.

Welcome to Madison’s “very definition of tyranny.”

Now that Republicans control Congress and have surrendered their authority to Trump, the last bulwark against the president converting himself into the sort of monarch we fought the Revolutionary War against is the Supreme Court, which will probably begin weighing in over the next few weeks.

And, in the face of this, the vice president is arguing that he and the president should feel free to ignore court orders.

This attack on our republic represents the most dangerous moment America has experienced since the Civil War.

Neither the Supreme Court nor Congress are entirely capable of ignoring public opinion: It’s vital we all reach out to our elected officials (particularly Republicans) to demand they reclaim their rightful role in our republic and speak out against this illegal, unconstitutional power grab.

It’s also crucial to make our opinions known in every way and every venue possible.

If America is to retain any fidelity whatsoever to our Constitution that was written and survived more than two centuries’ investment of blood and treasure, it’s time to raise absolute holy hell.

It’s a trend that’s been building for a few years now.

Books by predominantly Black authors are being banned around the country. School curricula have been amended to skip the history lesson on slavery and racism. Critical Race Theory (CRT)—and anything that vaguely looks like it—is under attack. And the concept of “wokeness” has been misconstrued and weaponized.

Fast-forward to February 2025 and there’s been a doubling down on these attempts to erase Black history. U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI, anti-“woke” rhetoric has led major companies and even many federal agencies to avoid observing Black History Month.

One thing Black people are going to do is to be Black—and proud. We don’t need a month to know that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

As I consider the president’s campaign promise to “make America great again,” I wonder if he means to make America “white” again.

From failing to condemn white supremacists for their violent march in Charlottesville, Virginia during his first term to blaming “diversity hires” for January’s plane crash in Washington, D.C. this year, Trump and his allies seem to have a difficult time acknowledging the diversity that actually makes this country great.

This has been especially true for Black people feeling the brunt of his Executive Orders. These haven’t just eliminated recent diversity and inclusion initiatives—one even rescinded an Executive Order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to end discriminatory practices mostly aimed at Black Americans.

During a speech at Howard University in 1965, President Johnson said that Black Americans were “still buried under a blanket of history and circumstance.” Following widespread protests, it was Johnson who signed the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. Now both historic milestones are under threat by the attempts of Trump and many others to erode the social and economic gains made by Black Americans.

It’s as if we are reliving a time akin to the nadir of race relations in America—the period after Reconstruction, when white supremacists regained power and tried to reverse the progress Black Americans made after the emancipation of enslaved people.

Today, from the U.S. Air Force [temporarily] removing coursework on the Tuskegee Airmen to orders by many federal agencies, including the military, canceling Black History Month celebrations, these extreme rollbacks will set a new precedent impacting all minority groups.

I can’t help but to return to sentiments shared by The 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones: “The same instinct that led powerful people to prohibit Black people from being able to read,” she wrote, is also “leading powerful people to try to stop our children from learning histories that would lead them to question the unequal society that we have as well.”

There is nothing comfortable about the history of Black Americans—it’s a history that shatters the myth of American exceptionalism. Nevertheless, Black history is American history. Instead of banning it, we must teach it.

It would be impossible to erase the legacy of Black people in this country. Ours is a legacy that endures—one that will continue to endure no matter who’s in the White House.

One thing Black people are going to do is to be Black—and proud. We don’t need a month to know that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Having overcome enslavement, Jim Crow, and more, our striving to thrive in a country with so-called leaders who would prefer to keep us living on the margins only exemplifies the America we aspire to. And it’s a fight that’s made this country better for struggling people of all races.

Like it or not, Black history is every day.

How often do I hear friends and political commentators lamenting America’s polarized culture. “Polarization” is so commonplace that it was Merriam Webster’s 2024 word of the year. Whether it’s Democrats v. Republican, Conservative v. Liberal, Right v. Left, or Red v. Blue, the feeling conveyed is that we’re simply stuck in opposing camps, sharing little common ground.

Yes, of course, these labels capture real differences. But thinking that our opposing “poles” are our real problem can deter us from seeing solutions or even believing positive change is possible. The truth is, we’re less divided than we imagine ourselves to be.

Plus, “polarization” feels fixed—discouraging us from probing deeply the forces that underlie our differences—forces that we can indeed address.

When we dig in, our hunch is that much of today’s painful divide arises from economic forces and realities that aren’t front-and-center in Americans’ view of our nation. Exposing this reality could release energy for much-needed action.

The truth is, we’re less divided than we imagine ourselves to be.

Of course, Americans are aware of class differences, but we assume that they are more-or-less static—just the way it’s long been—and at least close to the norm in other democracies.

Few of us likely appreciate that we are a global outlier in the depth of our economic disparity—coming in more extreme than roughly 120 nations and far below our peers. Consider this: Three Americans control more wealth than bottom half of us which together hold only 2 percent.

Deep inequality threatens democracy itself. History suggests that if wealth is concentrated at the top, the moneyed elite will infect and distort the political process in its favor, thus undermining democracy.

Combine these realities: First, the inherent hardships—daily stress, lack of leisure as well as the real deprivations of so many Americans, including our low-minimum wage, the dangerously poor-quality of our most-affordable diets, and our failure to assure access to healthcare for everyone. Then add to all that the long-sung tune that anyone with drive and decent character can “make it” in our free market system.

And what do you get?

Painful self-blame and fear…and, yes, exhaustion. Understandably, then, we seek someone to blame—a tragic pattern that has been repeated throughout history.

Take the 1863 New York City "draft" riots, during which poor, white (mostly Irish) workers feeling the pressure of exploitation and poverty took their anger out against New York’s Black population in the one of the most significant insurrections in U.S. history. The draft riots are a grave warning of what can happen when two disenfranchised groups are pitted against each other. Division is sowed where unity and solidarity are most needed.

Hitler’s rise to power is another terrifying tale of how scapegoating minority groups can be a potent—and devastating—political strategy, especially during times when citizens are struggling to make ends meet and a country is in a period of unrest.

Today, the president of our nation is successfully casting himself as a big, angry man who names our oppressors and will fight against the bad guys for the rest of us. Trump has targeted immigrants, spreading dangerous lies and authorizing deeply damaging policies. Likewise, he has taken swift action to disenfranchise transgender people, justifying it through harmful rhetoric.

Donald J. Trump’s core demeanor is anger. So, it’s understandable that many believe he’ll use his loudmouth to fight for them. Casting himself as an outsider is brilliant.

Of course, his policies belie his pose. They hurt the most vulnerable and reward the most powerful. Beyond his attacks on immigrants and trans people, here are just a few: Trump's attempted federal funding freeze could severely impede early childhood education, infrastructure projects, and social-benefit organizations. He has also promised to limit SNAP benefits and cut healthcare spending—all while expanding tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthiest. In addition, he’s rolled back environmental protections.

Sadly, Trump’s posturing and scapegoating effectively engage many Americans. But, getting stuck on what feels like an insurmountable chasm does not serve us. Progress comes when we focus on our common ground and go from there.

So what can we do? Remember: We are all influencers. Each of us can share what we know with family, friends, and colleagues. They are likely to do the same. Hey, we never know the ripples of our own courage to speak out.

We can fight destructive disinformation on social media that the president and his now right-hand man Elon Musk have weaponized.

We can reach out to our representatives in government, helping them find the courage to take on the painful realities of extreme inequity and the false messaging pitting us against each other.

Blaming “polarization” is a dangerous distraction. It is a symptom of our real problems. We Americans have an obligation to each other and future generations to take on the root causes behind our suffering.

It’s still a new year. Let’s make it a new beginning as well.

DOGE leader Elon Musk is gutting government agencies, including US-AID. Why do so many liberals and Democrats seem to get more agitated about Trump’s war on DC bureaucrats than capitalism’s longstanding war against ordinary Americans?

The post Elon Musk on the Rampage first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Elon Musk on the Rampage appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.