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.

The NFL’s decision to remove the slogan End Racism from the end zone during the Super Bowl, coming as it did with Trump’s announcement that he will be attended the game, has half the country in an uproar.

Exhibit A that racism has not ended is the fact that Trump is again President. Racism is like pornography, you know it when you see it. There’s a lot of talk about how to react to the NFL’s cowardly decision to suck up to Trump.

Many have decided to just not watch the game. Hopefully others will come up with additional ways to let their feelings be known. Much has happened in this country since Colin Kaepernick bravely took a knee in 2016 to protest the treatment of black people by law enforcement.

Now we have a President who pardoned a mob of mainly white people who attacked and beat up law enforcement after he sicced them on the Capitol in an attempt to steal an election and undermine democracy. We have a Supreme Court that has proven to be corrupt. And the world’s richest man, with close ties to Russia and China, has bought his way into dismantling our government and accessing all of its citizens’ personal information.

Like the climate, our democracy seems to be approaching tipping points that we best not ignore. So with much of our country and the world focused on the Super Bowl this Sunday, we ought to do something more than just turn off the TV. For players, it seems like there has never been a better time to take a knee or at least write End Racism on your cleats.

For fans at the game, wear shirts that say End Racism or End Trumpism, give our dear leader the middle finger salute when he is announced or comes up on the Jumbotron. People in New Orleans who aren’t going to the game could get together for a giant rally that will definitely be covered by some of the media (obviously not Fox).

People throughout the country can have their own rallies (large and small) before or during the game. Even one person with a sign can have an impact. Contact your local newspaper or TV station. They might jump on the story.

With the Kansas City Chiefs attempting to win three Super Bowls in a row, a lot of talk in the sports world is about whether quarterback Patrick Mahomes might challenge Tom Brady as the GOAT (greatest of all time). The truth is we’ll never know who the GOAT is because one of the greatest on field quarterbacks, Kaepernick, was blackballed after he took a knee and Trump said get him off the field. What is very clear is that Colin has been the GOAT off the field, far surpassing any of the other famous players in using his fame to promote the social good.

As evidence that perhaps racism has not yet ended, last September Republican Missouri Governor Mike Parson refused to stop the execution of a black man even though the prosecutor in the case said the man might be innocent and the family of the victim asked for the execution to be stopped.

Six months earlier that same governor reduced the DWI charges against the son of Chief’s coach Andy Reid despite the parents of the 5 year old girl who was permanently injured in the accident asking him not to.

We won’t end racism by removing the slogan. And we won’t end Trumpism by just turning off the TV. It’s time for everyone to take a knee or take a stand.

Just before starting to write my lament about what a dramatic step backward the recent campaign for Democratic National Committee chair had been, I opened an Our Revolution email that told me, “We beat back the party establishment at the DNC.”

Now Our Revolution being a direct organizational descendent of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and me having been a 2016 Sanders convention delegate, I feel pretty confident that our ideas of who “we” means are pretty much the same. So what accounts for the widely divergent takes?

For those who haven’t been following this, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was just elected to lead the DNC for the next four years, defeating Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler by a 246.5–134.5 vote margin. There was no contested election four years ago, because by tradition a just-elected president selects the new chair; contested elections generally follow defeats. In the last one, in 2017, former Obama administration Secretary of Labor Tom Perez won the job, beating Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison in a second round of voting, 235--200.

At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign.

Ellison’s candidacy came in the wake of his having been just the second member of Congress to support Sanders in the prior year’s presidential primaries, and the fact that Sanders people harbored serious grievances with the DNC over its perceived favoritism for the ultimate nominee, Hillary Clinton, lent a distinct edge to the election, bringing it considerably more buzz than the one that just occurred. At the time, former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, a vociferous opponent of Sanders’ run—who had once declared, “The most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals... is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year”—now thought there was “a great deal to be said for putting an active Sanders supporter in there,” so as to clear the air “of suspicions and paranoia.” But Clinton and Barack Obama apparently didn’t think so, and Clinton’s past Obama cabinet colleague, Perez, took up the torch in a race that produced a level of grassroots involvement seldom if ever before seen in this contest.

Although the office is traditionally considered organizational rather than ideological and the 2017 candidates did run on those issues, the underlying political differences were obvious to all. This time around, the race was generally understood to involve little if any political disagreement on the issues. By way of explaining its support for new party chair Martin, Our Revolution characterized runner-up Wikler, as “an establishment candidate backed by Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, and bankrolled by the billionaire class.” We understand that election campaigns are about sharpening the perception of differences between the candidates, but still this seems a rather thin, flimsy basis for hailing the vote as an anti-establishment triumph, given that Martin has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the party to take money from "those bad billionaires" only from "good billionaires;”and one of the two billionaires who gave a quarter million dollars to Wikler’s campaign was George Soros—probably the DNC’s model “good billionaire.” Besides Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg probably aren’t thinking of donating anyhow. Oh, and Chuck Schumer actually supported Ellison eight years ago.

Actually, “we” did have a horse in the race—2020 Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir. Shakir, who has been running a nonprofit news organization called More Perfect Union, dedicated to “building power for the working class,” argued that Democrats needed a pitch for building a pro-worker economy to go with their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy proposals. His viewpoint presented a serious alternative to that of Martin, who told a candidates forum that “we’ve got the right message... What we need to do is connect it back with the voters,”—seemingly a tough position to maintain following an election in which NBC’s 20-state exit polling showed the majority of voters with annual household incomes under $100,000 voting Republican, while the majority of those from over-$100,000 households voted Democrat. But even though Shakir was a DNC member and thereby able to get the 40 signatures of committee members needed to run, he entered the race far too late to be taken for a serious contender and ultimately received but two votes.

Mind you, none of this critique comes as a criticism of the work of the two state party chairs who were the principal contenders. Martin touts the fact that Democrats have won every statewide election in Minnesota in the 14 years that he has chaired the party, and anyone who understands the effort that goes into political campaign work can only admire that achievement. Nor is Our Revolution to be criticized for taking the time to discern what they thought would be the best possible option in a not terribly exciting race that was nevertheless of some importance.

At the same time it’s hard not to regret the diminished DNC presence of the “we” that Our Revolution spoke of, after “we” legitimately contended for power in the last contested election. Certainly this lack of interest was in no small part a consequence of the extraordinary circumstances that produced a presidential nominee who had not gone before the voters in a single primary—for the first time since Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who believe that the structure and history of the American political system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic Party—uncomfortable and unpleasant as that may be at times. As the social scientists like to say, politics abhors a vacuum, and absent a national Democratic Party presence for the perspective that motivated the Sanders campaigns, people seeking action on the big questions on the big stage may start to look elsewhere. And elsewhere always looms the possibility of the cul-de-sac of yet of another third party candidacy that holds interesting conventions and debates, but ultimately receives only a small share of the vote, but a large share of the blame for the election of a Republican president.

At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to make it our business to find one.

Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”

“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.

“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.

Indeed, war unites us... in hell.

The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.

The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”

While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?

Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.

Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?

The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”

The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?

And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.

Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.

All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.

And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.

But the U.S. had to defend itself!

This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.

About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then—in football and America.

The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.

Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.

Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.”

But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.

Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.

The contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.

We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.

By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.

Back in those mid-20th-century years, the United States overall rated as a much equal place than the nation had been during the NFL’s early years in the 1920s. One key reason: The tax rate on income in the top federal tax bracket had jumped from 25% in 1925 to 91%.

Only a relatively few of America’s deep pockets—like the oilmen H.L. Hunt and Bud Adams, another of the AFL’s original franchise owners—could manage to end run those stiff top rates, thanks to generous tax loopholes like the infamous oil-depletion allowance.

But by the early 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution’s onset, the distribution of America’s income and wealth was sliding rapidly back to the top-heavy levels of the 1920s. Tax rates on top-bracket income would bottom out at a mere 28% by Reagan’s last full White House year in 1988, and the United States would soon be experiencing an explosive growth in billionaire fortunes.

The number of U.S. billionaires—only 13 in the first Forbes 400 count in 1982—jumped to 66 in 1990 and 298 in 2000 and then all the way up to 404 in 2010 and 614 in 2020.

All these billionaires desperately needed new high-profile playthings. Many found them in NFL franchises. In quick order, teams that had been selling in the tens of millions began going for hundreds of millions and then billions. In 2018, the hedge funder David Tepper spent $2.2 of those billions buying the Carolina Panthers. Four years later, Robson Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, led an ownership group that shelled out $4.65 billion to take possession of the Denver Broncos.

Do these sorts of outlays amount to just an innocent deep-pocket hobby? Not given the impact on average taxpayers.

Billions of average taxpayer dollars, a CNN analysis has shown, are “subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League.” Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.” Owners have saved billions more by financing stadium construction with tax-free municipal bonds, a tax-runaround “originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.”

U.S. corporate executives, meanwhile, get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses.

Average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites. They essentially don’t get to sit anywhere in NFL stadiums. In the 2024 season, the average cost for a family of four to attend an NFL game ran $808.

At Super Bowl time, ticket costs soar considerably higher. The face-value price on a single Super Bowl ticket for this year’s game ranges from $950 to $7,500. But no face-value tickets ever go on sale to the general public. The only way for anyone in that public to see the Super Bowl in person? Buy a seat on the secondary market. For Super Bowl LIX, secondary-market tickets are averaging $8,000 each.

Our Super Bowl may now stand, in effect, as our nation’s most visible symbol of plutocratic excess, or, as the sportswriter Sally Jenkins once put it, a “divorced-from-reality debauch.” We still don’t know, Jenkins added, where the “pain threshold of the average NFL fan” sits.

“Thirty-two owners digging relentlessly in our pockets,” she observed some years back, “haven’t found the bottom yet.”

Those billionaire owners still haven’t—and their upside remains enormous. Just between 2020 and 2023 alone, MarketWatch noted last month, the NFL’s cumulative franchise values rose 1,108%.

This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We’ve been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That’s how it’s been with the group we call “Group” (or sometimes “A Closed Group with No Name”). We’ve seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.

We’ve been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the “Global War on Terror”), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we’re facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group’s latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump’s new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days, and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.

Finally, I thought: If I can’t talk about him with these women I’ve known for more than 40 years, who can I talk with? I watched them, sitting in that living room nibbling on corn chips and guacamole, and finally asked, “Do you think we’ll look back on this time and know that it was the beginning of the end?”

The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat.

I didn’t even need to say the end of what: of American democracy; the rule of law; and the hopes of people of color, women, and queer folk? “The end” alone signified all of that and so much more.

“Absolutely we will,” was my partner’s instant response. The other women agreed that Trump’s second term represents a genuine break with the democratic history of this country; that yes, it’s as serious as that. We sat for a moment in overwhelmed silence.

It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important—say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.

A Paradigm Shift?

Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late. This was the experience of many German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. For at least a century, their forebears had been assimilated into German life. It took time to recognize the individual stages of an extermination plan whose full horror only came into focus over a period of years.

The expression “paradigm shift” derives from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn’s pioneering analysis of the way scientific disciplines change over time. As he saw it, a paradigm is a shared fundamental understanding of how a complex phenomenon (physics, biology, a nation) works. A paradigm shift represents the abrupt replacement of one theory (like Newton’s theory of gravity) with something profoundly different (Einstein’s theory of relativity).

The point is that a paradigm shift in this country wouldn’t just be a tweak to business as usual like a change in the way the filibuster works in the Senate. It would be a wholesale upending of the constitutional balance of powers. In this case, it would potentially mean relocating the power to make, assess, and execute the law (powers now resting in three distinct branches of government) all in the person of the president. It would be a change from democracy to autocracy, or as President Donald Trump has implied, to dictatorship. And it’s happening now, in front of our very eyes.

Moving toward dictatorial control is the fundamental purpose of issuing a seemingly endless series of executive orders that clearly violate existing laws—for example, those governing the firing of inspectors general. It’s certainly true that Donald Trump doesn’t like the very idea of inspectors general. We should remember that from his first term. He wants a free hand to run all the federal departments and agencies without watchdogs getting in the way. But far more importantly, that executive order violated the 2022 Inspector General Act, as a former Pentagon inspector general under Trump told National Public Radio:

Well [Trump’s order] didn’t follow the Inspector General Act, which requires the president, if he wants to remove an inspector general, which he’s allowed to do, but he must give Congress 30 days notice before the removal, and the substantive rationale with detailed and case-specific reasons for each removal.

The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat. Similarly, he has used executive orders to attempt to freeze funds already approved by Congress under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. As the Senate Committee on Appropriations has pointed out, it is Congress, not the president, that holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. In its 1975 decision in Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court denied presidents the power to impound funds Congress has appropriated.

The same logic applies to Trump’s order, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to impose a 90-day halt to all U.S. foreign aid, civilian and military, except to Israel and Egypt. Again, this is an arrogation of congressional power by the president, and its point was undoubtedly as much to assert presidential power as to effect some as-yet-undefined foreign policy goal.

And that logic will undoubtedly apply to a flood of other previously unimaginable actions Trump will most likely take between the writing and the publication of this article.

The Great Trumpian Litany

The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer contains a long prayer known as the Great Litany. A litany is a ritual petition to God, a list of actions congregants “beseech” God to take. The Great Litany is most often recited during Lent, a 40-day period of reflection leading up to Easter. If you’re standing or kneeling, it can seem to go on forever. And just when you think you might be nearing the end, along comes a whole new section requiring a whole new response. As time passes, you may find yourself covertly glancing at your watch. It’s hard to stay focused through it all.

English speakers also use “litany” in a secular sense, as a metaphor for a long list of anything, especially when recited or recorded. We speak of “a litany of grievances,” “a litany of excuses,” or even “a litany of gripes and grudges,” which was how Vanity Fair described some of Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks.

In the single week since that inauguration, observers have already produced excellentlitanies of his many distressing actions. Although lists of these are available online, there is no space to catalog them all here. In fact, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because the list grows by the day, even the hour. Since I sat down at my desk this morning, Trump or his appointees have fired attorneys who worked with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on criminal cases against him, rescinded job offers to 200 bank examiners who were to have been employed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC, which insures our bank accounts), and launched an investigation into the prosecution of the January 6 rioters. And that’s just in the last six hours.

The Episcopal Great Litany, a long list of human concerns, leaps from topic to topic, petitioning for benedictions ranging from protection from “lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine” to a request that God “illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly.”

Some might argue that this last request was at least partially fulfilled in the sermon of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the first woman elected to her position, who, at the ecumenical service held on the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, had the effrontery to address the new president in these words:

Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.
And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

Trump, of course, instantly demanded an apology.

In another bit of the Great Litany that seems particularly apt at the moment, supplicants plead with the Divine, “so to rule the hearts of thy servants, the President of the United States, and all others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth.”

If only.

Flooding the Zone

The list of Trump’s post-election actions is its own kind of litany—not of benediction, of course, but of horror. Like the Great Litany, it, too, leaps from topic to topic. To name just a few:

• The nominations to positions of power of the manifestly unfit (remember Matt Gaetz, the ethically-challenged), or the frankly vicious (Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer), or indeed of candidates combining both qualities (Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabard).
• A spate of executive comments, orders, or presidential decrees displaying an imperial greed for territory that would have seemed like so many jokes just a few weeks ago. (Watch out, Panama, Canada, and Greenland!)
• The fulfillment of the Israeli fascist right-wing’s dearest desire: a proposal to cleanse Gaza of its more than 2 million Palestinian inhabitants, in order to make way for the development of what Trump has labeled “a phenomenal location,” where “some beautiful things can be done.”
• First steps in keeping his vow to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States, including a Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operation, which included an “embedded” Dr. Phil—further proof, should we need it, that the strategy is to enforce the authority of any decree, no matter how bizarre.
• Elon Musk’s seizure of access to the records of all federal employees and control of the Treasury Department’s disbursement process.

Any one of those actions would have been sufficient to fuel a whole news cycle on its own. But that’s now inconceivable because before we, or the media, can focus on one Trump absurdity, another takes its place in the battle for our attention. To wit: in the last 15 minutes (while I was writing this), The Washington Post reported that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ordered a freeze on all federal grants, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” And now, in a head-snapping twist, the OMB seems to have rescinded the order—for the moment.

The Cambridge Dictionary offers an additional definition of litany: “a long list spoken or given to someone, esp. to someone who has heard or seen it before or finds it boring.” Taken together, this apparently endless flood of outrages reflects the infamous observation of Trump’s adviser (and exoneree) Steve Bannon during his first administration: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

And indeed, the litany of Trump’s autocratic actions has already flooded the zone with shit. The question is: How are we to navigate all that excrement? Can we do more than simply hope to stay afloat? Is there any way we can actually dam the floodtide? Or will we sigh and say we’ve seen it all before and find it boring?

Fools for Freedom

At least we can try to build that dam. A few weeks ago, I wrote about some national organizing we could join or support, efforts that are crucial because—yes!—we have to think big. But we also have to think small. I’ve been surprised by how many writers have responded to Trump’s reelection by urging people to strengthen their own local connections with friends, neighbors, and family, while focusing on those among us who are most in need of protection from immediate attacks. In a way, that’s exactly what the members of my group of lesbians have done for each other all these years. It’s what the members of my own household of chosen family do for each other daily, when we leave gifts of food or books, when we plan together to protect immigrant friends at risk of being scooped up on the way to work.

All of that effort, big and small, must be sustained by hope. How do we keep hope alive once we’ve truly grasped the danger(s) we face?

I now ponder that question daily. This morning, one answer arrived in a newsletter by email, from a group called the Faithful Fools. The Fools live in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where they accompany the other residents in their daily lives in a neglected and despised neighborhood. Being Foolish, they don’t ask whether they can be of any use or recognize the puniness of their efforts compared to the edicts of a president who would be king. This morning’s newsletter brought me these words:

Plenty of people have asked the question, “After all these years, what keeps you going?” And we say, “Well, we keep going because we are Fools, of course.” This isn’t to say that our work is ridiculous or without foundation. It’s to say that we understand how uncertain the future is and we can’t lose our way when the road gets rocky and tiresome…
We aren’t foolish enough to believe that hope alone carries the day or soothes the soul. No, we believe it’s the other way around; we believe that actions driven by justice, solidarity, and compassion are what sustain hope. Small gusts of good will are acts driven by justice and compassion and solidarity, and they are what soothes our broken hearts.

In short, in the age of would-be King Donald Trump, we sustain our own hope by doing the small, essential things that sustain the hope of others.

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Is this the end of the American experiment? Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his administration are flouting the Constitution and making a mockery of the checks and balances that have kept U.S. democracy going over nearly a quarter millennium. Congress has signaled that it does not plan to rein in the president so it’s mostly up to the Supreme Court. With governing norms demolished, will we still be able to say this is a nation of laws?

Editorial cartoonists and best friends Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) draw on history to forecast what appears to be a rapidly growing constitutional crisis.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 192: Trump Trashes Checks and Balances first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 192: Trump Trashes Checks and Balances appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.

To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.

In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress. The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.

While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.

Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.

Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.

When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk.

Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.

Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.

Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!

When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.

Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.

What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs. They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children. Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.

Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.

Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.

The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.

The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.

The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.

The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.

The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult. Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.

Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.

When I was 17, I was charged with a crime I didn’t commit.

During an argument, I was arrested and wrongfully accused of threatening someone with a firearm, which I hadn’t done. My bail was set impossibly high, far beyond what I could afford, especially as a father to a newborn son. Forced to wait for my day in court behind bars, I came to a heartbreaking realization: If I or someone in my family had been wealthy, I could have walked free. Instead, I was denied my presumption of innocence and ripped from my family because I couldn’t pay for my freedom.

The American criminal justice system, which promises equal justice under the law, punishes poverty, tears families apart, and devastates communities like mine.

We need a system where release is based on case-by-case assessments of safety, not wealth.

Sadly, my story isn’t unique. It reflects a system that routinely prioritizes wealth over justice, especially for Black Americans. As someone who personally faced the burdens of cash bail and now works to alleviate that burden for others through The Bail Project—a national nonprofit providing free bail assistance and pretrial support to thousands of low-income people every year—I firmly believe that we have two systems of justice: one for the wealthy and one for everyone else.

This system incarcerates over 60% of people arrested before trial simply because they can’t afford bail. Safety, not wealth or race, should determine who is held or released before trial. Yet, wealth often dictates freedom. Many accused face nonviolent, low-level charges and pose no risk to public safety, but the unforgiving reality of cash bail transforms “innocent until proven guilty” into “guilty until proven wealthy.”

When someone is arrested, a court can impose a cash bail amount: a sum of money required for their release before trial. If you have the funds, you’re released from jail, no matter the circumstances. If you don’t, you’re locked up. Sometimes for weeks, months, or even years.

Judges tasked with setting bail often make these critical decisions in less than five minutes, relying on limited information and implicit biases that disproportionately affect Black defendants, during hearings that rarely require evidence, and often proceed without legal counsel for the defendants. As a result, Black defendants are detained more often than white defendants facing the same charges. On average, courts impose bail amounts nearly $10,000 higher for Black individuals than their white counterparts.

This disparity has devastating consequences, especially in communities of color. Being jailed before trial makes it harder to fight your case, leading many to plead guilty, even if they’re innocent, just to get out. It risks jobs, housing, physical health, and child custody while exposing legally innocent people to unsafe and traumatizing jail conditions.

Consider Christopher, a Black Gulf War veteran who was arrested for alleged possession of a controlled substance. His bail was set at $1,000: an insurmountable sum for him. Christopher was forced to wait in jail for six weeks before his case was dismissed. During that time, he lost his job as a house painter and his PTSD worsened. All of that suffering, and it was for nothing.

Then there’s Ashley, a Black woman eight months pregnant when a scheduling error led to her arrest for a nonviolent misdemeanor. Unable to pay a $11,500 bail, Ashley spent three weeks in a filthy, overcrowded jail cell, sleeping on the floor without a mattress. She lost her job, her apartment, and was forced to sleep in her car with her newborn daughter after giving birth.

We need a system that ensures fairness and protects safety for everyone. We need a system where release is based on case-by-case assessments of safety, not wealth.

Fortunately, alternatives to cash bail exist and work. Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail in 2023, and judges now determine who needs to be detained pretrial based on risk to others, not money. This shift has kept communities safe while reducing the number of people needlessly incarcerated pretrial. Nationally, more than 30 cities have safely minimized the use of cash bail, according to research from the Brennan Center for Justice.

This Black History Month, as we reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go to achieve racial equality, let’s not overlook the urgent need for bail reform. Ending cash bail is more than public policy; it’s a moral imperative.

It’s time to put an end to cash bail and write a safer, fairer future for everyone.

The Musk-Trump administration has made its agenda perfectly clear: dismantle the government, then loot and privatize it. It is executing a carefully planned oligarchic coup, illegally firing workers, freezing funds and exerting power. Yet for several weeks, most congressional Democrats are operating as if it’s business as usual. It’s become clear that it’s up to us to push our leaders to defend our food, water, climate and democracy.

What the Musk-Trump administration is doing is totally unprecedented. Trump has empowered the richest man on earth to - without congressional approval or oversight - take over and shut down entire agencies. Musk and his team have taken control of key processes and data at the Office of Personnel Management (the HR department for the federal government), the Treasury Department and at General Services (federal buildings). And Musk-Trump is illegally shutting down congressionally-approved programs like USAID, with even more far-reaching plans targeting the Department of Education, FEMA and more.

On issues that impact our food and water, Musk-Trump has encouraged the resignation of all federal workers charged with food inspection and water safety. And it froze huge amounts of federal funding, causing chaos before a federal court intervened. They have also used manufactured public concern about DEI excesses to gut all environmental justice programs. This includes dismantling the environmental justice units at the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Climate Corps and the USDA Forest Service Climate Change Resource Center. They have also scrubbed hundreds of pages of information from websites related to food, public health, and the environment.

It may feel overwhelming, but all well-meaning people who care about the future of the country and the planet must engage now.

These are extreme, rapidly unfolding and unprecedented actions. They require a forceful, unified and powerful Democratic response—one that says this is totally unacceptable, and that every tool in the toolbox will be used to block, delay or otherwise obstruct the Musk-Trump destructive agenda. But with a few exceptions, Democrats have so far been muted, divided and ineffective, doing little to stand in the way of this terrible agenda advancing.

For example, the same day that Trump announced the federal funding freeze, the Senate confirmed Treasure Secretary Bessent with just 29 Democrats opposing him. Days later it advanced Interior Secretary Burgam with just 17 Democrats in opposition. On the same day that Musk’s team gained access to the federal payment system at the Treasury Department, Senate Democrats on the Agriculture Committee unanimously voted to advance Rollins for Secretary of Agriculture, and seven Democrats (plus independent Angus King) voted to confirm fracking industry CEO Chris Wright as Energy Secretary.

This is not how an opposition party should operate in the face of an unfolding crisis of democracy.

The threat to our democracy is too great. Bold action is required now.

Clearly we can’t wait for Washington Democrats to lead the path forward—it’s up to us. It may feel overwhelming, but all well-meaning people who care about the future of the country and the planet must engage now. We need to organize in states and congressional districts across the country to pressure members of Congress to stand up to the Musk-Trump agenda. This means pressuring Democrats and also Republicans. We must reject business as usual until they stop their illegal and unprecedented actions.

Food & Water Watch has been on the ground already numerous rallies in recent weeks, generating thousands of emails and phone calls, and achieving impactful media coverage. And we aren’t alone - there are other organizations mobilizing actions across the country as well. This is all really important, and more is needed.

As the protests have ramped up, we have begun to see some Democratic leaders stepping up to organize rallies in front of the federal agencies being gutted and using measures to delay the appointment of nominees. But it is not nearly enough and we must continue to push them to do even more. The threat to our democracy is too great. Bold action is required now. It’s on all of us to provide the required leadership if we’re going to protect our food, water, climate and the country we all love.

“There is something sick and rotten about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.” —Pankaj Mishra, January 30, 2025

At a February 4th, 2025, press conference in Washington, D.C., President Trump, standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, announced U.S. intent to turn the Gaza Strip into something that could be phenomenal…the Riviera of the Middle East.

Reading from prepared notes, he stated “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” He said Palestinians in Gaza would be relocated to other countries, and he later questioned why they would ever want to return. He went on to say that he would decide about Israeli annexation of the West Bank in the next month.

According to international law, forcibly transferring people from their land is a crime against humanity. Annexation violates people’s right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of international law.

States and societies around the world harshly condemned President Trump’s total disregard for international law. And yet, every member state of the United Nations General Assembly has a duty, now, under international law, to abstain from any actions enabling the Israeli military to continue its illegal occupation of the Occupied Palestine Territory.

This means every state must stop shipments of weapons to Israel. The U.S., for instance, is required not to send the one billion dollars’ worth of bombs, rifles, ammunition, and Caterpillar bulldozers which President Trump had readied to send Israel.

In the past, Democrats in positions of power allowed President Biden to provision Israel with massive arms sales, enabling a killing spree, over the past 15 months, which has left Gaza in ruins. In June, 2025, Biden moved forward on a $18 billion arms sale to Israel.

Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, sadly describes the bleak reality of international weapon peddling. “There is something sick and rotten,” Mishra writes, “about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.”

Throughout the world, grass roots groups struggle to uphold international law and resist governments which support the wholesale Israeli slaughter and destruction of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestine Territory.

In Ireland, activists across the country hold weekly demonstrations insisting Ireland must not allow use of Shannon Airport for transport of weapons or equipment to Israel’s military.

A flier announcing an upcoming action at Shannon airport on February 9, 2025 calls for protest against “the use of Irish airspace to deliver arms, tech and logistical support to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel that has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians over the past 15 months, including more than 17,000 children, while more than 100,000 have been maimed. In the West Bank, more than 800 people have been killed, and Israel’s brutal illegal occupation continues...”

European human rights activists emphasize that the European Union is Israel’s biggest trade partner, accounting for 28.8% of its trade in goods in 2022. Israel is also among the EU’s main trading partners in the Mediterranean area.

Now, a coalition of over 160 human rights organizations, trade unions, and civil society groups is calling on the European Commission to take immediate action to ban all trade and business with Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The coalition’s demand follows a landmark advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024, which reaffirmed that:

“Pending an end to Israel’s occupation, third states must immediately stop all forms of aid or assistance that help maintain the unlawful occupation, including halting arms transfers to Israel and ceasing all trade with illegal settlements.”

Robert Jereski, an attorney in NYC, works with Code Pink and a coalition of activists campaigning for UN member states to suspend Israel from the United Nations because it has murdered Palestinians and driven them off their land. Jereski and his colleagues note that Israel’s renewed offensives in the West Bank mark a shift in the tactics of genocide rather than an actual ceasefire. Israel’s bombing of Jenin has led to the forced displacement of 26,000 Palestinians. The Israeli military has escalated widespread arrests and restrictions while settlement expansion continues at an unprecedented pace, with frequent approvals for new outposts and housing.

Trump’s most recent statements, coupled with his withdrawal this week of the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, underscore the urgent need for the United Nations General Assembly to hold an emergency meeting. The UNGA should judge whether the United States fails to be an impartial arbiter and is, instead, party to the genocide in Gaza. Further, the UNGA should decide whether to suspend the U.S. veto power at the Security Council visavis matters pertaining to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Mindful of Pankaj Mishra’s observation that there is something sick and rotten in the act of enabling and profiting from mass killings, we must vow never to stop clamoring for the United Nations member states to fulfill their obligations under international law and live up to the UN’s founding mission: to eradicate the scourge of war for future generations.

In the wake of the 2024 election and U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to power, we have heard many suggestions for how progressives should regroup and respond. Some activists have argued that we need to prepare for mass protest and civil disobedience against the horrific policies the administration is bound to implement, such as mass deportations and the rolling back of labor rights—with some organizers, following United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, going so far as to suggest that a general strike could congeal by the end of Trump’s term. Others, citing feelings of “protest fatigue,” are instead using the moment to build communities of care and mutual aid. A third group has pushed for a revival of base-building and community organizing. And still others have looked to electoral campaigns and legal action at the state and local level as a bulwark against federal hostility.

In early December, the Ayni Institute convened a summit in Boston where organizational leaders and veteran activists came together around a different proposition: namely, that none of these strategies, by itself, is sufficient. Rather, movements gain strength when they can find ways for many approaches to work together.

The fortunes of social movements depend on the dynamic relationships that exist within the ecosystem of groups pursuing political transformation.

At the gathering, some 70 participants representing movements around climate, criminal justice reform and prison abolition, immigrant rights, and economic justice, as well as leaders in philanthropy, engaged spirituality, and local government, shared learnings and strengthened ties as a community of practice dedicated to creating healthy social movement ecosystems. These practitioners held in common the belief that defeating the forces of white supremacy and creeping authoritarianism, while winning true economic justice and multiracial democracy, is not a matter of finding one “right” strategy for change. Rather, social movement success is predicated on appreciating the varied contributions of groups pursuing different theories of change and crafting complex collaborations between them.

By finding ways to manage the tensions that commonly arise, while rejecting the idea that diverse initiatives should be seen as being in competition with one another, movement organizations can emerge with greater strategic clarity and a stronger sense of common purpose. The discussions taking place at the summit offered some key insights into how.

Social Movements as Ecosystems

The Ayni Institute describes social movements as “multi-strategic.” As the organization explains in a video introducing the model of social movement ecology, “This means that they implement many different strategies towards creating social change simultaneously, whether they are conscious of it or not.” Varied theories of change are embodied by organizations in different parts of a movement ecosystem. In principle, these can be complementary. In the moments that movements are most successful, it is generally because groups with different organizing traditions and strategic approaches have been able to come together or play off of one another in constructive ways. Yet often these different approaches come into tension. Crucial to managing the conflicts that emerge is clarifying the divergent assumptions and organizational practices held in the distinct segments of the ecology.

We have worked with Carlos Saavedra at Ayni to develop a framework that classifies movement organizations based on their primary approach to making change, dividing them into five categories. The first category is perhaps the most mainstream and accepted within U.S. society: the inside game. Here, advocates lobby policymakers, enter into electoral contests, file lawsuits, or otherwise work within society’s existing dominant institutions.

Two other approaches also try to influence these dominant institutions, but do so by wielding power from the outside. Practitioners of structure-based organizing work to build durable membership organizations, such as unions and community groups, that can leverage the influence that comes from a unified base to extract concessions from corporations, landlords, politicians, bureaucrats, and other powerholders. A separate approach, mass protest, uses large-scale demonstrations and escalating campaigns of civil resistance to alter the limits of political debate. Such campaigns allow mobilized communities to create urgency around an issue and shift public opinion, “changing the weather” around their issues and producing more favorable conditions for all the other strategies. At its most potent, mass protest uses the disruptive power of widespread noncooperation to suspend the ordinary workings of mainstream institutions and thereby force concessions from those in power.

The two other approaches to change operate outside of dominant institutions. Activists constructing alternatives attempt to “prefigure” new possibilities for society by building models of social housing, community farms, credit unions, worker co-ops, countercultural arts spaces, and radical schools. These types of alternative institutions provide bottom-up methods for serving the needs of the community while also embodying a set of values distinct from mainstream capitalist accumulation and profit-seeking. Finally, organizations oriented toward personal transformation believe, in Ayni’s words, “that change happens when we better our lives and the lives of others through providing service, improving our health and well-being, or reaching higher levels of consciousness.” Society is transformed as the lives of individuals are improved through spiritual pursuit, education, therapy, or recovery practices, or other one-on-one development and support.

The fact that there can be invaluable work going on in each of the five segments highlights the idea that there is no single correct approach to creating change. Rather, the fortunes of social movements depend on the dynamic relationships that exist within the ecosystem of groups pursuing political transformation.

Mapping the Terrain of Movement Organizations

With regard to its most recent gathering, the purpose of Ayni’s summit was not to introduce movement ecology to new people. Rather, it was to bring together a community of practitioners who have already aimed to implement the framework into their organizing. Participants compared notes about how the tool has aided their work, as well as about how to confront challenges that have gained urgency in the current political moment. To this end, attendees wrestled with issues such as how to make political advances in populist times, how to defend movements against authoritarian repression, how to deal with periods of failure in organizations, how more-neglected segments of the ecology can be integrated, and how to construct more sophisticated collaborations.

In discussions with various organizers, several key reflections emerged about how thinking through the dynamics of movement ecosystems can foster strategic advances.

A first important use of movement ecology articulated by members of the community of practice was as a tool that could help them map the universe of organizations working on their issue areas or within their geographical regions. One participant who described using the framework in this way was Dawn Harrington, who both manages special projects for the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and serves as the executive director of Free Hearts, a Tennessee-based organization led by women directly affected by the prison system.

“These feelings of failure and tension can also birth experimentation—if you’re open to it.”

“We require people that are trying to join the leadership of our organization to do a course in social movement ecology,” she said. “Then during our leadership campaigns and policy meetings, we look all across the state and ask, ‘What are the different organizations and the different theories of change? And where are the gaps? Where do we need more of this or that?’”

Harrington emphasizes that the framework gives shared language to describe strategic differences, and is helpful in navigating conflicts among diverse groups. “We prioritize structure organizing as our core strategy, and so where there were groups doing personal transformation or straight up inside-game, we were having a lot of conflicts,” Harrington explained. “Before, we were thinking, ‘Okay, it’s just personal issues, or we just hate each other.’ But the movement ecology framework helped us to understand that it’s actually our theories of change that are in tension, and it helped us better appreciate the other areas of change.”

Not all experiments with the framework were successful. “When we first got trained in the model, the first thing we did was try to build a cross-theory-of-change coalition across our state,” Harrington said. “It started out really good,” she added, but resentment built when not all groups were equally committed to joint campaign work. Still, “it wasn’t a complete failure, because I think it got us to the point where we know what’s happening across the state with other organizations, and there is more communication.”

In moments when the Tennessee state government has locked in conservative rule and inside-game efforts have been stymied, movement ecology allowed organizers in the criminal justice space to identify opportunities to build power from the outside, Harrington said: “We can see the whole picture of how, even when politically things are getting worse, we’re still building a movement. All the pieces fit together.”

Filling Gaps, Navigating Tensions

James Hayes, co-director of Ohio Voice, an organization dedicated to doing ongoing civic engagement with underrepresented communities in order to win progressive governance, has seen benefits as the framework has gained a foothold among groups in his state. “Movement ecology has been part of our strategic plan since I joined the team in 2017, and we train a lot of people in our space in Ohio on it,” Hayes said. “In large part, it just helps us have shared language to talk about the things that we are seeing and experiencing. So if we have disagreements, we’re using similar terms and coming to a similar understanding of what we’re disagreeing about.”

At the Ayni conference, a variety of representatives from the foundation world who were present argued that movement ecology allows them to identify areas of need and to make a case for dedicating funding to underdeveloped areas. For Hayes’s organization, the framework serves a similar function, helping them to set priorities. “It’s been helpful in thinking about what type of work we really want to support at Ohio Voice—to ask ‘where do we want to focus our resources, our energy, our time?’” he explained. “Part of our analysis is seeing that we had a lot of mass protest energy erupt over the years, but there has been a loss of organizing capacity in that time for various reasons. We saw that we needed more groups doing base building and running issue campaigns at the local level.”

Furthering the point, Hayes argues that an examination of the ecology in a given region can reveal imbalances that are creating weaknesses for movements. “We’ve been able to talk about how people have gotten away from organizing and become reliant on inside-game strategies—and how that’s not working now because gerrymandering has made it very difficult to move anything,” he said.

Hayes also echoes Harrington’s belief that awareness of movement ecology allows groups to better navigate tensions. He mentioned Equality Ohio, which is one of the more powerful organizations working on LGBTQ issues in the state. “Historically, the relationships between more insider groups like Equality Ohio and more radical queer liberation groups have been frayed and tense,” Hayes explained. “The previous executive director a couple years ago told me how grateful she was for the movement ecology framework, because it gave her the tools to talk with her team and her board and also to talk with outside partners about how they can have better relationships.”

This has concrete effects on how campaigns played out, Hayes believes. “There was really powerful work that happened, where people engaging in the State House strategy were open to there being more outside game energy and to some of those types of pressure tactics,” he said. “In general, it just resulted in a growth of capacity, culminating in getting the governor to veto an anti-trans bill that had been passed.”

Among other takeaways from the Ayni conference, Hayes points to discussion of inside-outside strategies. “I think eight or 10 years ago, there would have been huge pushback on the idea that movements doing co-governance was even possible, let alone necessary,” he said. “I think now there’s a huge hunger for it. We’re bringing more people into a conversation about what type of power we need if we’re going to get what we want out of electoral politics.”

Allowing for Both Focus and flexibility

Juan Pablo Orjuela, a community organizer and longtime immigrant rights leader with groups including Movimiento Cosecha, spoke to how an ecological framework can help specific organizations focus on what they do best, while also allowing wider movements to make strategic pivots when circumstances warrant.

“First being introduced to movement ecology, it was like an ‘Aha’! Before, when I was coming into mass protests, it felt like a negation of structure-based organizing, which is the philosophy that I came from,” Orjuela said. “Movement ecology helped me reconcile that these two traditions can exist and work together in some way. And it helped me be less resentful when people didn’t understand where I was coming from.”

Belief that change can be a result of multiple strategies does not mean that “anything goes,” or that all efforts are equally effective. Individual organizations must still make difficult choices about how to focus their work. And when they do choose to situate themselves within a given segment of an ecosystem, they should lean in to maximizing the role they have chosen. While doing this, they can also recognize that, as political circumstances shift, different parts of the movement may temporarily come to the fore while others recede in importance, only to become more significant later on.

We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0.

“I was recently hired to do a strategic retreat with an organization in Los Angeles that was feeling really stretched thin, and we used movement ecology to help them diagnose what they were doing,” Orjuela said. The group’s leaders began to see that they were being asked to operate in many different segments of the ecosystem simultaneously—building alternatives through a land trust, while also running a personal transformation program for tenants, and then still trying to do structure-based organizing with a fiscal sponsor. “They had never broken down their work like that,” Orjuela explained. “And I think it was really helpful for them to realize, ‘we’re stretched thin because we’re working on too many theories of change.’”

The next day they talked about what their priorities were. The conversation allowed the group to drill down into a core strategy that best made use of their capabilities.

In addition to helping leaders focus on the work that they do best, Orjuela has witnessed how movement ecology can allow for greater strategic flexibility at key moments. Previously, he was involved with a campaign in New Jersey to pass a law that allows undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. “This is really important for a lot of people,” he said, because it means that being stopped by police for a traffic violation “doesn’t have to turn into a deportation proceeding.”

Orjuela saw the New Jersey campaign go through several rounds of battle between 2013 and 2019, with activists dealing with feelings of failure and defeat when a given push did not yield success. The first efforts, based in community organizing and inside-game maneuvering, came tantalizingly close. But that made it all the more heartbreaking when they fell short. “In 2015, we had the votes to get it out of committee,” he explained. “But there was an external event—a terrorist attack in Europe—that made anti-immigrant sentiment go up.” In the new climate, the politicians decided to not move forward with the bill. “There was this sense of grief in the base, and a lot of resentment and distrust,” Orjuela said, with many organizers leaving the campaign.

Yet within a couple years, Orejuela found himself drawn back in. “There was a feeling of, ‘We don’t want to fail the same way again,’” he said. This resulted in a hunger for new tactics. And in this context, Orejuela identified mass protest as an organizing tradition that had not yet been significantly deployed. People said to Cosecha, “You need to come here and implement this. It was actually by popular demand. Like we almost felt like we had no choice,” he said and laughed. “We shifted more to getting in the face of politicians and making them answer for why this bill had failed so many times. Instead of lobbying, we would take the tone of demanding.”

The campaign also launched a 300-mile pilgrimage across the state. As Orjuela explained, “It showed the need for driver’s licenses, because to not break the law, we had to walk all the way to Trenton to advocate for ourselves.”

In December 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy finally signed the bill, making New Jersey the 14th state, including the District of Columbia, to expand access to driver’s licenses and state ID cards. The ACLU cited it as a landmark measure, noting that it allows more than 700,000 New Jersey residents to gain the documentation necessary to drive.

In a session at the Ayni summit devoted to how organizers can grapple with the feelings of failure that commonly emerge over the course of movement cycles, Orjuela offered a reflection from the New Jersey campaign: “With grief came a recognition that we needed to try something different,” he said. “These feelings of failure and tension can also birth experimentation—if you’re open to it.”

For Orejuela, the Ayni gathering overall was an opportunity to both share his experiences and build his comfort in working with more people on movement ecology, even if they have never heard of the concept. “I don’t approach it from an academic background. I’m a trial-by-fire kind of person, and sometimes that’s made me afraid to talk about the things that I’ve actually learned about, even if I have the language for it,” he said. “For me, the more I integrate the framework, the more confidence I gain. And it’s cool to talk about it with the level of proficiency that I know I do have.”

Learning Through Practice

The intent of the Ayni summit was not to launch a formal coalition, or even to create full alignment around strategy on how to build opposition to the Trump administration. Instead, by bringing people together who are incorporating an ecological framework into their organizing and who are coming from different segments of the social movement ecosystem, the gathering showed how a model that might otherwise be just a theoretical construct is being made real through practice and refinement.

Far too often, Ayni argues, “social change gets boxed into narrow choices: advocacy, elections, or service work,” when the real change comes just as much from “building alternatives, organizing mass civil resistance, and leading transformative community organizing.” Having a community that has been willing to bring foundational theories of change together, engage with friction and difference, and process the tensions that arise gives hope that the problems that have hobbled movements in the past may have a less pernicious hold.

In this respect, the gathering offered a vital lesson: We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.