I recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Working Families Party, entitled Winning Back the Working Class. Everyone attending seemed to share the view that the working class has drifted away from the Democratic Party and that Democrats must change their messaging in order to win these voters back and prevail against MAGA Republicans.

The presenters provided sophisticated polling analyses, looking closely at the issues that matter most to working-class voters and what turns them off about the Democratic Party. The bottom line was that the Democrats needed to put forward a strong, progressive economic-populist agenda.

While I share the desire to derail MAGA in the coming elections, I find the “winning back” framework problematic. For starters, why do Democrats need to be convinced that a progressive economic platform should be adopted? A party that was truly in tune with the working class should arrive there on its own. And clearly it has not. Why?

In this case, the obvious answer may be the right one: the Democratic Party establishment does not believe in progressive populism. It is not comfortable, for example, with forcefully attacking job insecurity by guaranteeing a job at a living wage for everyone who wants to work and cannot find employment in the private sector. It does not want to provide universal health insurance or dramatically facilitate union organizing in order to empower working people.

Ideologically, Democratic leaders are more comfortable with a liberal version of trickle-down economics—one that lets corporations play the central role in the economy. It expects rising prosperity to flow from government policies that enhance private investment and profits. Getting rich is shared value and woven into the party’s culture as thousands of consultants, pollsters, and operatives compete for a share of the billions of dollars spent during each election cycle.

At best, the populist economic messaging is just a tactic for gaining votes. Working-class voters know it and look elsewhere.

Given that the Democratic Party is not fundamentally a working-class party, how will the adoption of more populist messaging change its character? It won’t—and, again, working-class voters know it.

In fairness to these progressive analysts, they understand that much more is needed. They want Democrats to recruit and run more working-class candidates, which would demonstrate a deeper commitment to working-class concerns. Over time, more working-class candidates could help transform the party into something closer to a working-class party and help solve the “winning back” problem. But everyone knows it won’t happen anytime soon.

The Working Families Party has been recruiting and supporting progressive candidates in Democratic Party primaries for many years. The party sees its mission, as best I can tell, as transforming the Democratic Party by advancing a working-class agenda within the Democratic Party and in state legislatures. It has been effective in states such as New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, helping secure increases in the minimum wage, paid family leave legislation, and higher taxes on millionaires.

But something important is missing from its reliance on polling-and-messaging. If the Working Families Party were a working-class party, then its working-class base—not pollsters—would be developing its platform through some kind of bottom-up, face-to-face process. One can imagine dozens of grassroots meetings during which working people discuss and debate the issues they want their party to fight for. Polling can certainly play a role in testing issues with a wider electorate and bringing new concerns to the base for discussion. But the workers in the Working Families Party should be shaping the agenda.

Perhaps I am being naive or nostalgic, but isn’t that what progressive populist parties should do?

There is also the question of where the “winning back” should occur. Transforming the Democratic Party is only possible where the party actually exists. In vast areas of the country, it has withered away, making “winning back” impossible.

I took a quick look at nine Great Plains and central states: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.

• In 1990, these states still retained elements of a progressive-populist tradition, and 10 of their 18 U.S. senators were Democrats. Today, none are.
• Of the roughly 1,400 state legislative seats in those states, Democrats do not even field candidates in approximately 40 percent of them.
• Nationally, there are about 130 U.S. House districts where Democrats routinely lose by 25 percentage points or more.

In these places, there is no party to win the working class back to.

One option is simply to concede roughly half the country to MAGA forces. But it would be a grave mistake to abandon the tens of millions of working-class voters who live outside blue and purple areas. Many of them may have voted red in the last election, attracted by populist rhetoric designed to attract them, but at the end of the day, they’re not going to be satisfied by what the Republicans deliver. Where do they go?

That leaves another option: build a new party of working people that concentrates on the red areas where Democrats have abandoned the field. Such an effort could begin with candidates like Dan Osborn, who has stepped into the working-class political vacuum in deep-red Nebraska. He ran well ahead of Kamala Harris in 2024 and is currently polling competitively against Pete Ricketts. There is room for many more candidates like him in these one-party states.

Building something new is a heavy lift, to be sure, and it will take time. But the discussion about why and how to do it must begin now. We need to remove the blinders that prevent us from seeing that an alternative to the Democratic Party must be built—a new party, of and by working people, is needed to fill this vast political vacuum.

The call to “win back the working class to the Democrats” needs to be turned inside out. The working class deserves its own political organization, independent of the Democratic Party, in order to win back its rightful place in our political system. Only then can working people speak in their own voice about how to build an economy that serves people rather than wealth—one that attacks runaway inequality and job insecurity.

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The questions raised in this essay are explored in much greater depth in my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power.

The book examines why so many working people have abandoned the Democratic Party, why independents are now the largest political bloc in many states, what voters in the heartland actually want from politics, and whether a new working-class political organization can be built without acting as a spoiler.

Drawing on new polling and historical research, it argues that working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

If these arguments resonate with you, I hope you’ll take a look at the book.

Simon Kuper is 56 now. His first memory of a World Cup, if not his first-ever vivid memory—for many of us who grew up outside the United States, the two are often the same—was the 1978 final between the Netherlands and Argentina. “I recall that night as vividly as almost anything else in my childhood,” he writes in World Cup Fever. “A World Cup is like Proust’s Madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.” The book is a history of the World Cup through a few dozen madeleines.

For Americans, it’s as good a guide as any to a tournament of paradoxes, this too-big-to-fail quadrennial festival of corruption, cheating, profiteering, nationalist chauvinism, and mostly crappy soccer that nevertheless can hypnotize and transport to a utopia of competition as idealized and convincing as Pelé’s deification of the sport as “the beautiful game.” I think we watch not so much for the thrill—you have to admit that most games at this watered-down level are snoozfests (“such a party off the field but so dull on it,” as Kuper writes) but for the nostalgia of a game that never existed, but that we reimagine with every match.

“So much of a modern World Cup is repetition, especially as you grow older,” Kuper writes. “After decades of tournaments shown live on TV, each new France-Brazil or England-Argentina or Holland-Germany is just a repeat of earlier versions. Each victory or red card or controversy is a quotation of past ones. A match can never mean as much as it did the first time around. Win or lose this one, you know it isn’t the end of the story: At some point in the next few decades, there’ll be a replay. Repetition turns down the emotional dial of World Cups.”

He’s right, with a caveat: The World Cup is like Jorge Luis Borges’s idea that we rewrite every story every time we read one. The very same game will be remembered a billion different times in a way that the World Series or the Super Bowl or cricket’s World Cup never could be, because no other sport has the World Cup’s reach. No other event, short perhaps of a nuclear war or a comet strike, could bring the entire planet together.

It exists to transform illusion into reality. The illusion is that we are one world playing the same game, speaking the same language, respecting the same rules, existing on a level playing field regardless of origin, race, religion, even fifa ranking.

So just as the tournament is a paradox of beauty and foulness, we all have paradoxical relationships with it, even those of us who don’t follow it. Our refusal to follow it is itself a statement, like the citizen who snubs the ballot box on election day. They, too, are making a statement. Like it or not, the World Cup reminds us that we are on the same planet, that we all share the same blood that kicks a ball the same way, but with a billion splendid variations.

No two soccer fans will see the same game the same way or ever agree about anything soccer, just as I had my differences with Kuper’s book and some of his interpretations: “And once your country has won the World Cup once or twice, it’s generally enough. The more you win, the less it matters.” Tell that to the winners. But he’s better placed than most to guide us. His lineage reads like a demographic World Cup. He was born in Uganda to South African parents, spent his early years in England as a British citizen, moved to the Netherlands when he was 7, studied in England and the United States (Oxford, Harvard), was naturalized a French citizen, now living in Paris with his French wife and raising French children who identified as French, and spent most of his career covering soccer for the London-based Financial Times.

The 1978 World Cup was the first of his innumerable crushing disappointments, as World Cups always must be for 95% of fans. Every four years there’s only one winner out of 195 nations. That one stung Kuper more because the Dutch lost the final for the second time in a row, having lost to Germany in 1974. This time they were playing in Argentina, whose team had blatantly cheated its way to the final. It wasn’t unusual for a tournament stitched in fraud and corruption since its first edition in 1930. It still is, fawning to authoritarian regimes, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy to the junta’s Argentina, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, dictatorial emirs’ Qatar the last time around, and now Donald Trump’s diminished America. Thankfully Canada and Mexico are here to redeem this World Cup, which they also share.

The murderous military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla showcased the 1978 World Cup the way Adolf Hitler showcased the 1936 Olympics, as a distraction masked in bogus legitimacy. Videla had the “disappearance” of some 30,000 dissidents to his name by the time he was done, and that night watched the final alongside Henry Kissinger, a fellow criminal against humanity, who had also helped Videla rig a match to ensure Argentina’s appearance in the final.

I remember that final too. It was my second. My first was Germany-Holland in 1974, my one and only memory of watching with my dad, who died two years later. We watched Argentina-Holland live, my mother, my grandmother, our Dutch Catholic priest, and me on our black-and-white TV in the dining room of our house in Hamlaya, a tiny village in the mountains of Lebanon where we thought we’d escaped the war and where the signal from Cyprus was always clear. Father Niederer didn’t have a TV. He spent the evening with us and his high hopes, especially after the Dutch managed to hold Argentina to a tie through the first 90 minutes. In the 90th minute a Dutch striker had almost won it, hitting the goal post instead. Extra time briefly ended Father Niederer’s faith as Argentina scored once, then again to take the title in a 3-1 match. The junta won. All those masses for nothing. Kuper had also watched with his grandparents when he was 8 in Leiden, the smaller town between Amsterdam and The Hague. For Kuper, the next two decades were all TV watching, then as an in-person spectator until he started reporting about the World Cup for the Financial Times in 1994, the first the United States hosted (with Kissinger’s help). This year will be his ninth. He now proposes to tell you A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, as goes the book’s subtitle, by synthesizing four decades of his reporter’s notebooks. (The English edition calls it A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments: Snobs would have you believe that calling it anything but football is a misnomer. I don’t play that game and use the terms interchangeably.)

Wisely, Kuper is not interested in recounting matches. Football matches are like military battles and soap operas. “There’s nothing deader, for a writer, than a dead football match. I’m sorry, but you really had to be there,” he writes. Kuper is interested in the unexpected insights into national character that an improvised dance party might reveal; in the endemic corruption of a tournament that turns us all into addicts every four years; in the failed promise of economic booms that leaves the poor in host countries like Brazil, South Africa, Qatar, and Mexico as exploited as in colonial times. The colonist is fifa, the dictatorial soccer federation expecting to reap $14 billion from this year’s tournament.

Kuper describes the exploitation in South Africa, Brazil, and Qatar, the regressive, repressive American ally that spent more than $200 billion preparing for a 2022 tournament built on the graveyards of imported labor working in near-slave conditions and without rights. “Under Qatar’s traditional ‘kafala’ system, migrant workers were practically the property of their employers,” Kuper writes. “A boss could deport an employee for no reason, or hold their passport and keep them in Qatar against their will.” Qatar had promised to reform the kafala system. The moment Argentina hoisted the 2022 trophy at Lusail Stadium, all promises vanished. Now Saudi Arabia, an even more regressive, undemocratic country with its own kafala system, is set to host in 2034.

The book at first felt disheveled, jumping from one scant segment to another like so many rapid passes in a game, as if Kuper was eager to throw in every anecdote he could find in his notebooks. Kuper’s interview with Diego Maradona, one of the game’s greatest players and one of its most distasteful characters, is pointless other than to show Kuper scored the five-minute encounter.

European journalists have no problem buying access, either, or accepting lavish gifts: “I flew to the Chelsea-Manchester United Champions League final in Moscow as a guest of UEFA, the European football authority. I had a fabulous room in the five-star Marriott Grand Hotel. (Did UEFA corrupt me? I don’t think so.)” He never makes the connection between that sort of payola and the buying of referees and game-fixing he documents so well.

Some of his insights are no more penetrating than comparing Germany’s emerging prosperity on and off the pitch in 1990 to a bus driver’s “villa with a veranda in a spotless village,” or telling us that “A World Cup can’t change a country. But it can divert an individual’s life path,” as if there were anything comparable between France’s decline into riots, fading power, and economic stagnation after the 1998 World Cup with his decision to quit the Financial Times and become a French citizen. As all World Cup books must, this one pays homage to cheaters like Maradona, biters like Uruguay’s Luis Suárez, criers like Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, and charisma-challenged virtuosos like Messi, now hobbling through his last show.

Soon you get used to the Kuper style. It has the verve of 1970s Dutch football—total football, as they called it—placing every element of the game in service of the story without letting judgments necessarily mar the exuberance. Yes, the game is corrupt—there’s a hint that even Nelson Mandela had a part in the $10 million bribe disguised as a cultural gift that bought the World Cup for South Africa—but there was that priceless moment when the Japanese let loose on their own soil at the Japan-Belgium match in 2002 and showed the world a joy we’d rarely seen. There may have been hooliganism in the past, but in pubs and on trains fans from opposing teams typically drink and dance together. Kuper unfortunately doesn’t venture into calculating the demographics of World Cup-conceived babies every four years. I suspect the cross-fertilization is as rich as during the Crusades. But he documents an alarming incidence of heart attacks during every tournament.

Another paradox: World Cup play is inferior to anything you’ll see in club football in top leagues in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France: Any of those countries’ top clubs could beat all but the four or five highest ranked national teams at the World Cup, if not even them. Any league match is technically more proficient and cohesive than a World Cup match. Any league match lacks those ridiculous disparities we’re going to see when, say, Spain plays Cape Verde or Germany plays Curaçao, that Caribbean Dutch protectorate with the population of Flagler County (think Ronald Reagan’s Marines invading Grenada).

Just 16 countries traveled to Germany when I watched my first World Cup in 1974. The format went to 24 in 1982, then 32 in 1998, and now 48 countries—a quarter of the planet’s nations. There’s really nothing wrong with that. Elitism is over. We can’t democratize the world. We can democratize the World Cup, though there’s no doubt fifa expanded the thing to shake down more cash even as it dilutes and cheapens play. The federation’s mercantilism handed Mexico and Canada only 13 games each, compared to 78 in the United States, an imbalance as insulting as our president’s attempts to destroy both countries’ economies while ridiculing one and reducing the other to a mass of criminals, and getting a fifa “prize” for it.

Still, we look past the absurd. “Most football fans took it for granted that FIFA was corrupt,” Kuper writes, needlessly capitalizing the federation’s acronym the way some media still capitalize “covid.” Diseases should not so blithely be respected. “They’d heard the stories of officials stashing bribes in secret bank accounts. However, fans care more about what happens on the field. Once we start to doubt that the matches we are seeing are real, the emotion we invest in World Cups becomes pointless.” In the spirit of magic realism, why not give Curaçao and Cape Verde a chance on the same stage as the greats? It’s not as if the American team belongs there, either, if it’s quality we’re looking for. But there they are.

We’re mostly missing the point if we watch the World Cup for quality. Like the Olympics but without the frazzle of a zillion sports scattered like so many pixels on our screens, it’s our quadrennial dreamland on these simple, perfectly groomed fields where cubism and leaves of grass meet so the world’s teams kick around a planet-shaped sphere as luck and fate outscores the best of them.

“The World Cup exists to transform reality into illusion,” the Mexican novelist Juan Villoro wrote in an article for The New York Times this week. I think of it more in reverse: It exists to transform illusion into reality. The illusion is that we are one world playing the same game, speaking the same language, respecting the same rules, existing on a level playing field regardless of origin, race, religion, even fifa ranking. The reality is that for those five weeks, away from the dingbattery of dignitaries and fifa’s sycophantry, away from the tensions between Canada, Mexico, and the United States—on the pitch, in pubs, in living rooms, in street parties, in the palmed stadiums of our smartphoned hands and maybe even in our hearts, despairing as we are the rest of the time—that illusion may well be true.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has begun on American soil, the first time the United States has hosted the tournament in 32 years. When it concludes, the country will begin preparing for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In exchange for the privilege of hosting the world’s two largest sporting events, and the enormous revenue they generate, a host nation should ease its visa policy to the fullest extent consistent with ordinary security interests.

Previous World Cup host nations made this the norm. South Africa in 2010 created a dedicated events visa and waived normal fees entirely for ticket holders. Brazil in 2014 created a fee-waived visa category tied directly to match tickets. Russia in 2018 abolished visa requirements entirely for Fan ID holders. Most recently, Qatar in 2022 created a universal entry document for all fans and loosened its terms further mid-tournament.

Instead, the United States has adopted the widest nationality-based exclusion policy since the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Nationals from 39 countries currently face US entry restrictions, ranging from partial limitations to outright bans. Among those 39 are 4 countries whose national teams qualified for the tournament. Haiti and Iran face complete entry bans; Ivory Coast and Senegal face partial restrictions. Although players are exempt from the presidential ban, fans have no pathway to acquire tourist visas to support their teams, player families cannot watch their loved ones play in the biggest match in the world, and local media cannot obtain visas to cover the games stateside.

President Trump has also barred the Iranian national team from sleeping on American soil, requiring the players to overnight in Tijuana and cross the border only to compete.

At the same time, the United States created a system called FIFA PASS, which gives World Cup ticket holders the ability to schedule a prioritized consular interview. So, while some are fully banned, those who are not can expedite their visa appointment. This pattern recurs throughout this administration’s approach: Those fully excluded receive nothing, while those who are not excluded receive an expedited benefit unavailable to the general public.

One might wonder how these bans are allowed in the first place. The legal vehicle is INA section 212(f), a provision historically invoked with restraint and for targeted purposes. Before Donald Trump, presidents used it for specific suspensions tied to specific conduct: Haitians intercepted at sea under Ronald Reagan, maritime interdiction extended under George W. Bush, senior Haitian government officials (affiliated with the 1994 coup) under Bill Clinton, and persons responsible for grave human rights abuses by the Iranian and Syrian governments under Barack Obama. Despite leading a country built by immigrants, Trump has used the same authority to ban ordinary people from large portions of the world. This is unlike anything seen among fellow Five Eyes countries.

Although nationality-based exclusion has historical precedent, the current bans appear to function as instruments of punishment rather than legitimate security measures. The justification typically rests on elevated visa overstay rates or insufficient governmental cooperation, meaning that individual nationals are effectively penalized for the conduct of others. This year’s World Cup will reflect that reality in diminished diversity, and the consequences extend beyond mere attendance. President Trump has also barred the Iranian national team from sleeping on American soil, requiring the players to overnight in Tijuana and cross the border only to compete.

No story captures this more sharply than that of Omar Artan. Named Africa’s best male referee in 2025 and selected by FIFA for the tournament, Artan was set to become the first Somali referee ever to officiate at a World Cup. He cleared the visa process, boarded his flight, and landed in Miami. US Customs and Border Protection denied him entry over unspecified “vetting concerns,” and FIFA removed him from the tournament. He returned home to a hero’s welcome in Mogadishu, received by thousands at the stadium and by Somalia’s prime minister, who wrote that Artan had “already won the hearts of millions.”

As in the first Trump administration, serious questions remain about whether these bans serve any genuine security purpose. Instead, they appear to function as diplomatic punishment aimed at governments this administration dislikes. Preventing fans and players from freely entering the United States, and forcing them to bear the personal cost of policies directed at their governments, produces no discernable security benefit. What it does produce is a steady stream of international criticism. On the opening day of a World Cup the United States is hosting, Omar Artan’s story is the image America has projected to the world.

The consensus is that this is the year for the Democrats. They have the political winds at their backs. Even with the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and everything Republicans have thrown at the wall, smart money says Democrats take the House and maybe the Senate. And anything that limits the power of this president is good. I’ll grant all of it. Net positive.

But what happens after a good cycle or two, if the winners don’t understand what they won? If they don’t see the pain that powered their victories?

We don’t have to guess because it already happened in Britain.

A year and a half ago, Labour won in a landslide. Imagine our centrist Democrats, the Newsom and Buttigieg wing, sweeping into power with the biggest majority in a generation. The Tories were finished, the same way a lot of folks think Republicans are about to be finished. But Labour walked in and decided the mission was better management. Be the adults in the room. Trim the spending. Talk tough on the border. The ship was fine, just needed a steady hand.

If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Donald Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain.

Now look at them. Reform is Nigel Farage’s party, which is their MAGA more or less. Reform is leading the polls, and Labour’s a distant second. Their MAGA has led just about every poll since late last year. Keir Starmer, the head of Labour, is one of the least popular leaders in the Western world. A year and a half ago centrists won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.

When a party wins on the promise of change and then delivers management, the people who abandon ship don’t all come back. The ones who move, move right. The angry ones, the ones who feel lied to, don’t drift off to some nicer party on the left. They turn to the man burning it all down, which is always how the right takes power. Afterward, centrists throws up their hands, convinced the country is turning right, when in reality they’re turning desperate. If you promise change and deliver the status quo, things don’t get better; for a lot of people, they get worse.

Britain at least has a buffer. They build coalitions, so no single party runs the whole thing alone usually. The damage is scattered and slower. But the US doesn’t have that. We’ve got winner-takes-all, with gerrymandering stacked on top. Here, a centrist party that wins big and then governs scared doesn’t lose gracefully. It delivers the whole country to MAGA. The House, the Senate, the gavels, all of it.

Our centrists, the Newsoms, the Buttigiegs, the Slotkins, are on the rise right now. They aren’t leaders. They aren’t fierce advocates for structural change. In fact this is exactly the kind of compromise-driven, go-along-to-get-along Democratic Party that abandoned the working class and helped usher in MAGA. Hell, California Gov. Gavin Newsom can’t even bring himself to tax billionaires. These are folks who don’t get the depth of pain across our the country. And they certainly don’t get the ferocity behind the criminal administration wrecking our democracy. The Democratic Party and its faux leaders don’t see what’s coming, or they see it and don’t care. In the end it won’t matter which.

The cost of living is so far out of reach for young people that you can’t fix it with a tweak. There’s no tax credit, no rebate, no clever little program that closes that gap. It will take transformation. It will take building things again. The same is true for jobs. AI and robotics are about to come for human labor in a way this country has never seen, and Democrats have no plan for it. None. They’re not ready for the losses. They’re not ready for what happens to a person, to a town, to a whole generation, when the work goes away.

And they’re sure as hell not ready for what’s happening at the very top. Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. I wrote on Thursday about how we built him, how public money and public research and public contracts carried him up the hill while we kept no ownership. Our tax dollars built SpaceX and then we handed over the deed. The pretenders in the Democratic Party, the ones about to take the reins, have no answer for that. They have no intention of stopping the next massive giveaway. Why? Because they don’t want to upset the interests who fund their campaigns.

Lack of accountability for guys at the top is the clearest indicator that we need systemic change. Forget for a second the question of genocide in Gaza. Forget the West Bank. You don’t have to know the answer for those to agree we should honestly investigate war crimes. The International Criminal Court already issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister for using starvation as a weapon of war. Our government’s response? To go after the court. To sanction its officials, and defend the war criminals.

Here at home, we’ve got a Justice Department unit whose entire job is crimes against humanity. Did it ever investigate Joe Biden’s cabinet, the men who signed off on the bombs? It didn’t. It won’t. They go after small men in faraway places, and give a pass to the policy masterminds here. The impunity of the powerful doesn’t start with Jeffrey Epstein or end with him. It runs straight through the war machine, the financial machine, the whole arrangement. A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.

We’ve got from now until the end of primary season to pick the right people. The candidates who understand our fight is structural. The ones who are ready for what’s actually coming. The ones not owned, willing to take a real risk.

If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Donald Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain. The winners were supposed to be an alternative to right-wing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their own MAGA because a real alternative takes work.

That’s the thing about the so-called adults in the room. The centrists, the moderates, the corporatists, they won’t do the hard work. In part because they’re bankrolled by entrenched interests who will use every weapon in the arsenal to maintain status quo. And in part because of fear. They’re terrified of blame, so they’d rather keep walking toward disaster than take a chance on something better. Real reform means changing the whole structure, the democracy, the social fabric, the economy itself, and that’s going to take fight.

People are desperate for a life that works, but it’s easier for Dems to keep their heads down, push gently for incremental change, and hope things will get better on their own.

They won’t.

China exported 435,000 electric vehicles in May, a 100% increase from its exports in 2025. Its total exports of cars was 809,000, an increase of 73% from last year. By comparison, domestic US vehicle sales in May were 1,470,000. That means China’s exports of cars were equal to 55% of US purchases in the month, while its EV exports were almost 30%.

President Donald Trump can legitimately take credit for the surge in China’s EV exports. As he might say, “Frankly, if it wasn’t for me, their EV exports would not be growing like that.”

Trump has lit a rocket under China’s EV industry. While EV sales by producers worldwide are rising, no one was better situated to benefit from the surge in demand created by Trump’s war on Iran than China’s producers. Chinese producers account for more than 70% of global EV sales. That share is likely to rise, even as the market expands rapidly.

Trump’s war helped to boost sales not only by raising the price of gas, it also created enormous uncertainty about future prices. With one of the world’s major superpowers run by a person who apparently gives no consideration to the impact his actions have on the world economy, driving a gas-powered car looks like a much riskier proposition.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump’s war in Iran has done far more to jump start the green transition that almost any conceivable policy than a Biden-Harris administration might have put in place.

What is neat about this surge in EVs is that it is irreversible. People who buy EVs rarely switch back to gas-powered cars, especially in countries that have the infrastructure and charging stations to support EVs. And more EVs on the road create political and economic pressure to upgrade the infrastructure to facilitate their use.

EVs can be thought of as being like a virus; the more that get sold, the more they spread. When a large segment of car users has EVs, governments and businesses set up charging stations and repair shops. Also, when people see their co-workers, friends, and neighbors driving EVs, and saving a fortune on gas and maintenance, they become interested in owning one themselves. Once EVs get a big foot in the door, their spread is pretty much impossible to stop.

That is one reason why some of us have argued for allowing at least some number of high-quality, low-cost Chinese EVs into the US market. People could then see the benefits of EVs. Ideally, we would work out an arrangement where China transferred the technology so that the cars could be produced here, with union labor.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has zero interest in going this route. It would rather double down on archaic technology.

The story is actually getting worse. There has been legislation introduced in Congress that would prohibit Chinese cars from even entering the United States. This would prevent someone from Canada or Mexico from driving their car over the border for a visit.

Apparently, the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Haley Stevens, both from Michigan, are worried about allowing people in this country to even see Chinese cars. This shows that not all whack job stuff in US politics originates with Donald Trump.

But getting back to Trump and the green transition, it’s not just China’s EV exports that Trump sent skyrocketing. Its exports of solar panels are up 60% year-over-year. China’s exports of wind turbines to the European Union rose 66% over 2025, and its battery exports worldwide were up 42%.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump’s war in Iran has done far more to jump start the green transition that almost any conceivable policy than a Biden-Harris administration might have put in place. That is great news. The unfortunate part is that China is at the center of it, and that it had to come about through war.

June is National Immigration Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the diverse peoples and cultures that have made America great.

This year–when not only immigration and cultural diversity are being challenged, but also the complex history of our country is being erased–it is more important than ever that we stop and examine the record of who we are and how we got to where we are as a country and an American people.

First, we should never forget that this country was born with two “original sins”: slavery and genocide. The current administration in Washington wants to rewrite our history by eliminating mention of negative events and practices that defined our past, focusing instead on the “greatness and industriousness” of our founders and their “glorious victories.” In reality, there would be no America if not for the surplus wealth created by the labor of enslaved people across the South and the riches accrued by those who benefited from the theft of Indigenous peoples’ lands.

Nor should it be forgotten (although it is) that the Declaration of Independence names one reason for the War of Independence against the British Empire as the American settlers’ grievance that King George would not defend them against “merciless Indian Savages,” who were resisting having their lands taken from them. And, of course, we fought a civil war not so much to end the deplorable practice of human slavery, but to rein in the power and independence of the Southern states.

What would be American food, fashion, music, art, humor, literature, diplomacy, and so much more be without the contributions of African Americans, the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Latino, and Arab immigrants (and so many more)?

As the country grew and with the industrial age upon us, the need to build infrastructure to transport people and goods, mine coal for power; and operate factories opened the doors to new immigrants from countries far afield. Chinese built railroads; Irish dug canals; Irish and Eastern and Central Europeans worked in the mines, and they were joined in the mines and factories by Italians, Greeks, and Arabs.

As needed as these new immigrants were for America to grow and prosper, their very presence, growing numbers, and unique cultures provoked a backlash among the earlier northwest European settlers who had come to see themselves as the original and “real Americans.” The “new immigrants” were demeaned, discriminated against, and subjected to state and vigilante violence.

Tragically, we see the same pattern of behaviors playing out today as Americans are confronting our newest immigrants. In a brilliant paper written a decade and a half ago for the Immigration Policy Center, Jeffrey Kaye examines the immigration history of one town in Pennsylvania. He notes that when the Irish, Italian, and Eastern and Central Europeans were first moving into the community, newspaper articles and speeches by City Council members described the Irish as “drunkards,” the Slavs as “peculiar,” the Hungarians as “ignorant, immoral, and filthy,” and the Italians as “the most disreputable.” All were subjected to derision for their “queer languages” and not fitting in. The tragic irony is that one century later, the descendants of these same groups are now saying the very same things about the newest immigrants who were mostly from Latin American countries.

Forgotten in this history of miserable repetition are the lessons we should have learned and the benefits we accrued along the way. We now know that the early English settlers in New York and the eastern colonies learned lessons in governance and agriculture from the Native Americans, and yet they referred to them as “savages.” And we know that it was the hard work, for no wages, that brought wealth to white Southern landowners who nevertheless demeaned Blacks as lazy and shiftless. Much the same can be said about the immigrants of the industrial age. Despite the bigotry and violence they endured, we can ask, “Where would America be today if not for the hard work and inventiveness of these immigrant communities?” Further, what would be American food, fashion, music, art, humor, literature, diplomacy, and so much more be without the contributions of African Americans, the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Latino, and Arab immigrants (and so many more)?

The lesson here is a simple one: We should never forget that what makes America great is its diversity and its capacity to absorb so many peoples and cultures. What threatens our greatness is when we forget this and stupidly attempt to fabricate our history and “whitewash” our culture.

In the first few weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump announced a massive AI infrastructure project dubbed Stargate. It was an unexpected and rather odd event for a new administration’s first major initiative. It now seems obvious that the project was a highly coordinated initiative between the federal government and the Big Tech power base that puppeteers many of its programs as the US glides into full technocrat mode.

Stargate is an ongoing $500 billion public-private partnership intended to fast-track AI. It includes tech behemoths such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. In practical terms, that means only one thing: a massive push to deploy AI data centers in every US state as quickly as possible. In the public’s perception, Stargate has faded from memory and neither the public nor many media outlets make the connection with the data center controversy now gripping the nation and generating headlines practically every day.

Nominally, this initiative is part of the larger goal of establishing the US as the world leader in AI innovation, especially with respect to similar efforts in China. But, tellingly, after the announcement, OpenAI described Stargate as a project that “will not only support the reindustrialization of the US but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies." Here’s the translation of that language: military use and protection against cyber threats.

Astonishingly, in the press conference announcing it, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison blithely noted: “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

In behind-the-scenes Oz-like fashion, the raw power of this new form of information manipulation remains largely invisible yet all-pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives.

Even more astonishing is the fact that such a blatant declaration of the intent to radically ratchet up mass surveillance didn’t get pounced on by reporters and editors in the corporate media. At an Oracle financial analyst meeting, Ellison opined that AI will be used to process vast amounts of camera footage including data from car dashboards, front-door security systems, and Flock cameras. In the meantime, many states are busy deploying the highly controversial Flock devices to feed the AI beast its insatiable appetite for data. The good news is that, according to both the American Civil Liberties Union and mainstream media, there has been strong citizen pushback against the Flock cameras, even if the general public is not aware of the full range of the Trump-Ellison vision of a dystopian digital panopticon.

States Are Cooperating with Trump’s Plan

It seems clear that the Stargate initiative is authoritarian in nature. This blanket imposition of a massive technocratic structure imposed by an unholy alliance between the federal government and Big Tech business—the public-private partnership concept on steroids—is at odds with our most fundamental democratic processes. And while the temptation exists to lay this on the doorstep of the Republican-controlled Congress, make no mistake—the change is deep and structural and includes the compliance of Democrats as well.

Let’s just look at one example. In the bluest of blue states, Massachusetts, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey has been working closely with an array of Big Tech companies that include AI giants such as Google and OpenAI. In February 2026, she announced partnerships with both companies. As described in a press release: “At Google’s office in Cambridge today, Governor Maura Healey announced a new statewide partnership with Grow with Google to offer all Massachusetts residents access to artificial intelligence…This initiative is designed to help provide every resident and small business with the AI and tech skills they need to succeed in today's digital economy at no cost.” Around the same time, Healey also announced the launch of an initiative involving Open AI’s ChatGPT, making Massachusetts the first state to embrace AI usage for the entire executive branch of approximately 40,000 employees.

But to commit to AI is also to commit to the necessary infrastructure. AI data centers are springing up like dandelions in states all over the US. This is often happening without oversight because of undemocratic non-disclosure agreements that keep plans for building data centers out of the watchful eye of the cities and towns that will have to live with them as they suck up available public resources such as electricity and water while driving up costs for those essentials. This is happening in both red and blue states. The data center push is also what’s behind various state initiatives to bring back nuclear power as a “green” alternative.

AI’s Subtle Nudge Towards an Authoritarian Mindset

Stargate and the data center debacle are just the more obvious aspect of the authoritarian threat. There’s another that’s perhaps more insidious. For years, an interesting phrase has been popping up in high-tech circles: “a single source of truth.” It’s an enticing idea of course as we all crave simplification in this increasingly complex world. But this conceptual framework lays the groundwork for a new and more subtle kind of authoritarian mindset. And the rapid advance of AI is increasingly pushing this fatuous notion into alarmingly broad adoption, even in academic and professional circles.

Widespread AI adoption is based on the conventional wisdom that it will greatly expand the human panorama of knowledge, scientific and otherwise. The reality may be very different. In fact, it’s possible that the precise opposite will be the result. How can this be? Let me explain. In its current trajectory, AI usage appears to hijack the vast landscape of facts, opinions, and ideas across the arc of human knowledge and the multidisciplinary spectrum. The existential danger is that we’re being ever so gradually led to believe that there’s a single “right” answer to every known question, issue, or conundrum in politics, science, religion, politics, philosophy, and many other areas of modern life.

The next six months and the midterm elections represent a critical window of opportunity to turn much of this around and “just say no” to the AI juggernaut.

While AI appears to be a conduit to vast sources of knowledge previously unavailable, one of its most concerning characteristics remains poorly understood. AI has been designed to act not just as a new conduit to the internet but also as a gatekeeper and arbiter of what’s true and not true. Just as concerning, it’s not enhancing the internet… rather it’s replacing it. This shift means that searching the web will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. At its annual I/O developer conference in May 2026, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed this as a major change in the company’s strategy. As noted by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch, “Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.” Goodbye search as we know it.

In behind-the-scenes Oz-like fashion, the raw power of this new form of information manipulation remains largely invisible yet all-pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives. It’s a nifty setup. Big Tech can sit back and claim lack of responsibility: We only developed it, and now it’s “doing its own thing.” In the meantime, they rack in billions and begin charging businesses and ordinary internet users more and more for AI capabilities that were initially offered as free services.

AI will increase our technological dependency by orders of magnitude, reducing our collective sense of human agency so badly needed now to counteract the effects of living in day-to-day polycrisis and political gridlock. Over time, this may translate into a kind of “learned helplessness” and a potent diminishment of grassroots political power. Society will become structured into rigid tiers depending on AI status. In the meantime, as poet and political commentator Katha Pollitt has pointed out, AI is also debasing “language, imagination, individuality, and art.”

Obviously, this is not a pretty picture but, in my opinion, there are real reasons for hope on the horizon. Increasingly, the technocratic takeover is being exposed for what it is: an anti-democratic power grab informed by a warped view of what constitutes quality of life (i.e. Silicon Valley transhumanism) and an acceleration of hyper capitalism that’s already wrought significant havoc on our planetary ecosystem.

The AI data center pushback is a wake-up call. Big Tech elitists have their hooks into everything—from what happens in the privacy of our homes to the rampant AI-driven militarism we see unfolding on the global stage. But the next six months and the midterm elections represent a critical window of opportunity to turn much of this around and “just say no” to the AI juggernaut. I believe there’s a very good chance that the nationwide pushback we’re now seeing about AI data centers and the rejection of the failed use of computers in education may be the beginning of a new wave of hope, renewal, and the restoration of democracy and common sense. Stay tuned.

Sometimes the truth stares you right in the face.

Case in point—in the middle of his agricultural roundtable event with farmers and Republican representatives held this past June 5 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, President Donald Trump took a moment to reflect about a different meeting he once had with another group of producers. As the president remembered, he told the farmers, “I’m going to get you a subsidy.” To his surprise they responded that they didn’t want subsidies, but rather, “a level playing field.”

It would be easy to gloss over the truth in Trump’s recollection, especially as he rambled on about many things unrelated to farming such as repairing monuments around Washington DC, his disdain for Democrats, and how the Southern border was closed to migrants. This, as NFL Hall-of-Famer Joe Thomas sat to Trump’s side and drew gushing remarks from the president about the retired player’s body.

Unlike Thomas, most farmers cannot draw on millions to stay on the land. Instead, they can turn to the government to promote fair markets. As much could happen now, during June Dairy Month, as the Farm Bill is working through Congress and much needed relief could come by including in the ominous piece of legislation key reforms to the dairy industry.

Instead of such piecemeal fixes, the dairy industry needs industry-wide reform, as the farmers who spoke with Trump once said, “to level the playing field.”

To be fair, discussion during Trump’s roundtable did include some dairy policies.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, for instance, alluded to trade deals that would increase exports. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), whose district the roundtable took place in and who appears in danger of losing his seat to the daughter of dairy farmers, Rebecca Cooke, touted the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act. The act restores whole and reduced fat (2%) milk options at schools.

The problem is that both initiatives don’t do much.

First, the evidence shows that increasing exports doesn’t keep people farming.

Farm Bureau data shows that since 2016, total dairy export value has doubled from just over $4 million to over $8 in 2024. But during this same period, the number of licensed dairy herds has collapsed, from over 40,000, to under 25,000.

Meanwhile, serving milk at school lunch does open markets. And nationwide, since 2024, more people have been consuming milk after years of decline. But even amid rising demand, in 2025 Wisconsin saw a 700% increase in bankruptcies, particularly hitting dairy farmers.

Instead of such piecemeal fixes, the dairy industry needs industry-wide reform, as the farmers who spoke with Trump once said, “to level the playing field.”

The proposal that would advance such change is the Milk From Family Dairies Act (MFDA). Created by the National Family Farm Coalition and endorsed by over 90 organizations, the MFDA ensures farmers a decent price without driving up costs for consumers and relying on taxpayer-funded subsidies.

The principle behind the MFDA is supply management, similar to the system in Canada. In this system, consumer supply demands are balanced with prices that farmers are paid for their milk in regular meetings of stakeholders. For farmers, receiving compensation for at least the cost of production is a big deal, as since 2021, even taking into consideration advantages of increasing herd size, dairy producers across the board have consistently had to sell their milk at a loss as the price of feed, seed, and fertilizer rise.

Consumers benefit as the MFDA makes investments in local dairy processors, increasing competition to drive down prices, and corporate concentration in the industry is targeted with anti-trust enforcement to curtail price gouging by large-scale retailers at the grocery store. Currently, taxpayers pick up the tab for farmers who have financial troubles with subsidies, or direct payments, which Trump has handed out repeatedly across his administrations.

Unlike Joe Thomas, most farmers don’t have millions to keep them going. Instead, they have the government, which should ensure fair markets. So, to mark June Dairy month, our lawmakers should listen to farmers, level the playing field, and include elements from the MFDA into the Farm Bill.

Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd that :

“[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported this morning:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked ninety years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In a contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least twelve thousand eligible voters were wrongly purged, twenty-two times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were eleven percent of the electorate and forty-one percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.

Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.

Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.

Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.

To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.

Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.

Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.

Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.

Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)

Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.

Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.

To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”

Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.

In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.

Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.

Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.

Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”

Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”

Both Trump and Musk also have long histories of misogyny.

Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has frequently disparaged women, describing female opponents and journalists as “disgusting,” “slobs,” and “piggy.” He has a well-documented history of sexual aggression. A federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, awarding her millions in damages. And he has appointed conservative judges instrumental in rulings that overturned long-standing reproductive rights.

Musk, too, has faced frequent claims of misogyny and sexism. Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit detailing a pervasive “’Animal House’” culture — accusing Musk of creating a hostile environment, treating female employees as sexual objects, and retaliating when employees challenged his sexism. Separate reports have also emerged alleging that Musk engaged in inappropriate relationships and persistent advances toward employees, including asking them to bear his children.

Musk has 14 kids with different mothers, and talks about them as a “legion,” as in a Roman military unit. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he told one of his partners, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has frequently drawn ire for promoting a “bro culture” and mocking femininity. He sparked a major online debate by stating that “Instagram is for girls” and has repeatedly shared or amplified sexist theories and extremist content regarding traditional gender roles.

*. *. *

The question, then, is why have two such loathsome men come to dominate America and much of the rest of the world at this point in history? Is there something about American capitalism or culture in the 21st century that has given both such extraordinary power?

Part of the answer, it seems to me, is a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame, and a disintegration of public morality — which has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power.

The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”— not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

To be sure, the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy men who violated social norms and monopolized the economy. “The public be damned,” said William Henry Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad.

But the reign of these “robber barons” ended when the American public — outraged by their abuses of wealth and power — rose up to demand reform and a return to the common good.

Subsequently, during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required that we work together for the common good. Many of us — both white and black Americans — were motivated to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. And a sense of common good moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.

Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. There is no longer any restraint on aggressive men (almost all of them men) using whatever means possible to accumulate vast wealth and power on a scale that exceeds even the Gilded Age.

This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it.

What a planet! I only wish I could tell my grandfather about it. He arrived in this country, an immigrant from what’s now Ukraine, in March 1888—or so his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote me once upon a distant time. Here’s how she began that long-ago message to me: “Your grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship—way down below steerage. Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children and, for the first few months in America, I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.”

As a boy of 14, he had, my aunt reported, challenged the local rabbi where he lived to give him back some of the money his father had donated to the rabbi—money his mother had made and that they needed just to live. And when the rabbi refused, he evidently hit him and then ran away from home. The rest, as they say, is history.

I barely knew him. He died when I was about five years old and I have only the faintest memory of standing beside him, holding his hand, while he leaned on his cane. But in the end, he managed to turn that 50 cents into a business in Brooklyn, New York. He got clobbered in (but made it through) the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even built a couple of buildings in Brooklyn that he named after my dad and Hilda. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think about our strange Trumpian world today. After all, we’re on an increasingly disturbed planet, where, in some places, as the heat rises, the storms intensify, wildfires grow ever fiercer, sea levels rise, and... well, you get the idea... ever more people are finding that they simply can’t stay in their worlds anymore and migration of the sort my grandfather once engaged in is growing exponentially.

And President Donald J. Trump doesn’t like that one little bit. I have no doubt that, had he been president back in 1888, he would have wanted to chuck my grandpa, a wandering Jew from what’s now Ukraine, out on his ear.

And yet, you might also think of “our” president as a migration-causer extraordinaire. After all, whether he likes it or not, he is indeed the climate-change president. And give him credit, though he’s not the sun (not faintly), he certainly has proven himself distinctly capable of upping the heat in this world of ours exponentially and I don’t just mean by doing everything he can under the (yes!) sun to deny that climate change is even happening. Of course, he’s labelled it a “con job“ and claimed its potential threat to our health is a “scam.”

What he’s attempting to do on (and to) this planet of ours will, in the not-at-all-distant future, prove to be a disaster of an almost unimaginable sort—from trying to increase the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, to interfering in plans to use wind and solar power. In doing so, of course, he’s also turning our future over to that other great imperial power of the moment, the New Green Power of Planet Earth, China (despite the fact that it’s also still using record amounts of fossil fuels). Someday, without a doubt, Donald Trump will—yes!—undoubtedly be seen as the D(and a 1/2)P or Disaster (and a Half) President.

Even his fierce attempts to get rid of any immigrants (who aren’t, of course, White South Africans) by flying them first to deportation camps and then out of the country are only further heating this planet of ours, as Alexandra Villarreal of the Guardian pointed out recently. That staggering number of flights is “producing hundreds of thousands of metric tons of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s air operations are estimated to have pumped 370,240 tons of carbon emissions into the air in 2025 alone, “up 88% from the year before.”

Imagine that! Fortunately, as the (remarkable) Guardian also reported, explain it as you will, red states actually seem to be leading Democratic-led states in the build-out of clean-energy capacity. Despite its powerful links to the gas and oil industry, Texas, for instance, is now the country’s leading clean-energy superpower because of its remarkable build-out of wind power. Recently, it even overtook California (yes, California!) when it comes to utility-scale solar power. (Yikes! Who would even believe it? Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure!)

Still, it is remarkable to have had a climate-change-denier elected president of the most powerful country on Earth not once, but twice! And that’s not all that he and his crew are denying. Only recently, for instance, Secretary of Offense (oops, sorry, Defense) Pete Hegseth compared the (non-White) immigrants now entering Europe to the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in June 1944 (one of whom I knew as a kid). As he put it recently, “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

As I sit here sweating on an early June day in New York City that has almost hit 90 degrees in a world heating towards the boiling point ever faster, I’m all too aware that Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of that grim clan have launched their own invasion—of planet Earth itself. They have indeed landed on the beaches of our world, armed to the teeth, and intent on turning this planet into a heat zone. (And we haven’t even noticed the half of it yet because our oceans have so far absorbed so much of that heat.)

Yes, there are obviously many, many problems when it comes to Trump, Hegseth, and crew, but in the end, none matters more than their urge to heat this planet to the boiling point. Their version of governing certainly gives the phrase “hell on earth” new meaning.

Early Monday morning Islamabad time, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that “Following intensive talks, we are pleased to announce that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED. Both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon. The official signing ceremony will be on Friday, 19 June in Switzerland.” Pakistan and Qatar had been the lead negotiators, though Qatar’s negotiating team appears to have sealed the deal Sunday with a marathon 14-hour session.

The White House concurred. US President Donald Trump posted that the deal with Iran is “complete” and that he would immediately lift the US blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and is announcing its “toll-free” opening. “Let the oil flow,” he said.

Al Jazeera reports that Iran’s National Security Council announced the end of all military actions, including in Lebanon.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted on an International Criminal Court indictment for war crimes, attempted to derail Sunday’s negotiations by bombing Beirut, an Iranian red line, but this petulant display failed in its purpose. Trump called Netanyahu “a very difficult guy” and insisted that he should be “very thankful” for the deal. Israel was not involved in the negotiations although it began the war in partnership with the US Having lost to Tehran, Netanyahu has been marginalized and is clearly increasingly seen as a problem by Trump and MAGA.

Tasnim, the pro-government news agency, reported that Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed that the text of the MOU had been finalized, that there has been an immediate end to military actions, and that it will be signed in Switzerland on Friday. Over the next sixty days, he said, issues will be negotiated in the lifting of US sanctions on Iran and the disposition of Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program and its existing stockpile of High Enriched Uranium, which the US and others fear could be enriched to weapons grade.

What exactly has been agreed on? Much less than meets the eye. It is a “Memorandum of Understanding,” not a detailed peace treaty of the sort the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. It is simply an agreement to stop fighting while further negotiations continue.

Although the US says that the Strait is open “toll-free,” the Iranians have changed their terminology and are speaking of collecting an “administrative fee.”

Sharif’s breathless announcement was the first sign of a breakthrough, though the leadership of Israel’s extremist far right government continues to insist that it will occupy and attack Lebanon at will, defying President Trump. Lebanon is one of the Iranian government’s “red lines,” and Tehran’s inclusion of it in the ceasefire is an attempt to project Iranian influence so as to counter Israeli expansion into south Lebanon.

Lebanon is a small country of 4 million people, about a third of them Shia Muslims, the same branch of Islam that predominates in Iran. Those Lebanese Shia live in the south of the country abutting Israel and were brutalized by repeated Israel invasions and attempts at occupation. Their chief paramilitary power is Hezbollah, which subjected northern Israel to repeated rocket barrages in response to the Israeli genocide against Gaza. Israeli politicians have expressed a desire to ethnically cleanse the Shia from the south, and have been destroying entire towns and villages and attempting to depopulate Tyre, the ancient major city of the south. The Israelis have also been bombing the disproportionately Shia Beirut district of Dahieh, killing and wounding civilians. Iran insists that this bombing cease as part of the agreement with Trump.

Netanyahu’s land-grab of fully 1/5 of Lebanese territory and his attempt to do to south Lebanon and parts of Beirut what he did to Gaza remains a wild card in US-Iran relations.

The MOU is good news, but it is only a first step.

The following is a statement released in response to news of an interim agreement between the US and Iran for a ceasefire in the war started by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026.

With news of a ceasefire agreement to end the disastrous and unnecessary US-Israeli war on Iran, the tragic failure of Donald Trump’s Iran policy has now played out exactly as anti-war critics warned it would.

Trump said that his war on Iran would be quick, decisive and force the regime to totally capitulate or collapse. We warned it would become a quagmire that would fail to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, ignite a regional conflict that could threaten the global economy, further strengthen the Iranian regime’s hold on power and cost thousands of lives–including American servicemembers. We were right.

This diplomatic agreement is critically needed to bring the disaster to an end, and must be fully and swiftly implemented. Nonetheless, the United States will be left in a weakened strategic position—not because of the contents of this agreement, but because of the utter failure of the reckless approach taken by Trump at the urging of pro-war groups in Washington, and a racist, corrupt Israeli Prime Minister.

US lawmakers from both parties should support the agreement to end this historic and completely avoidable foreign policy disaster. Just as importantly, both Congress and the White House must end the definitively failed approach of ever-increasing sanctions and belligerence toward Iran, and seek to build on this new opening for diplomacy to address the full range of issues–as well as potential opportunities–in the US-Iran relationship.

On June 1st, despite a ceasefire ostensibly underway in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s prime minister launched a major escalation against Lebanon, including threatening airstrikes against the Lebanese capital. The US president called the Israeli leader, furiously demanding an end to Israel’s escalation. Six days later, Israel attacked Beirut’s southern suburbs, long understood to be a red line for Hezbollah. The Lebanese resistance organization launched a limited response, sending 11 rockets towards Israel, almost all of which were intercepted; no one was hurt or killed. Trump called Netanyahu again, telling him in a brief call that now that Iran and Israel had each “had their fun,” that Israel should stand down.

Commentators across the Middle East and beyond debated whether Netanyahu would abide by Trump’s demand. What virtually none of them mentioned was that Trump had refused to even mention his most important pressure point: that if Israel resisted his order to stand down, the US would simply stop sending tons of weapons and tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli military. The close but sometimes divergent interests of the Middle East’s two powers, the global and the regional, was on full display.

It's now been 106 days since Trump launched his preemptive and illegal military attack on Iran. On February 28, 2026, the world awoke to the fury of a new war in the Middle East after the United States and Israel had launched their joint assault against Iran, with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu standing shoulder to shoulder against their common foe. Claiming unbridled hegemony was on the agenda for both.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals.

Today, with yet more fresh promises of a so-called "peace deal" that is nearly ready to be signed by Trump and Iranian leadership, the Israeli military is bombing the suburbs of Beirut despite ongoing claims of a "ceasefire." Trying to understand the current doom loop, it's vital we remember how we got here.

In the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with an unknown number of other top military and political leaders, was assassinated with a ballistic missile. Just an hour later, the US fired a Tomahawk missile directly at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the northern Iranian city of Minab—killing 156 people, 120 of them children, and destroying the school. The war’s official reasons, initially, were to eliminate the ostensible threat of Iran creating a nuclear weapon, and to destroy its conventional military capacity. The no-daylight US-Israeli partnership, Trump and Netanyahu as BFFs, the collaboration between the US and Israeli warplanes, bombers, drones, missiles… all seemed seamless and perfect.

Three months later, and half a dozen or so “ceasefires” announced, renounced, ignored and denounced, headlines around the world gleefully recounted a Trump phone call with Netanyahu. Focused on Israel’s escalating bombing of Lebanon threatening to derail the latest US-Iran ceasefire, the June 1 call reportedly started with Trump telling Netanyahu “you’re fucking crazy—you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me." The US president then went on to his “Everybody hates you now" remark. "Everybody hates Israel because of this,” he reportedly said.

Trump acknowledged saying it, and then, as is his usual style, moved on, quickly reclaiming his friendship with the Israeli prime minister. As was true with so many earlier ceasefires, Israel continued its massive bombing and its brutal occupation of south Lebanon, making a US-Iran ceasefire impossible. In the meantime, throughout the months of the war, commentators, politicians of all stripes, journalists and analysts across the globe were struggling to figure out what that war was actually being fought for.

War for What?

Real fear of an actual nuclear bomb was certainly not the answer. After all, US intelligence agencies have agreed for years that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Despite that clear assessment, US B-2 stealth bombers still dropped 14 of their 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on Iran’s civilian centrifuges at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz at the end of Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025. Trump and his supporters bragged of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then, eight months after that, in the early days of the US-Israeli 2026 war, those B-2s were back in the air, dropping more 30,000-pound and some smaller versions of the bunker-busters on Iran. Seems they don’t believe even their own intelligence agents.

They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game.

Rationales for the sudden war in 2026 (launched in the midst of US negotiations with Iran for a long-term ceasefire) were tossed around like confetti, ranging from stopping a nuclear threat (which of course didn’t exist because Iran didn’t have, wasn’t trying to make, and hadn’t even made a decision to try to build a nuclear weapon), to ending Iran’s support for its regional allies, to destroying Iran’s navy, to crippling its missile capacity, to protecting Iranian civilians or maybe encouraging a popular uprising, or perhaps even full-scale regime change. Later, once Iran had responded to the attacks by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump shifted to trying to justify the war as a means of forcing the reopening of the Strait, in effect waging the new war to get back to the situation that had existed until the US and Israel launched the war in the first place.

Not a Senseless War

None were very convincing arguments. The popular view emerged that this was a pointless war, being fought for nothing. But that was wrong—there was a purpose. Actually, there were several. The Israeli prime minister has shaped his political career, for more than 35 years, around the claim that only he could bring down the Iranian regime, falsely claiming it as an “existential threat” to Israel. (In fact, even if Iran changed its internal decisions and decided to try to build a nuclear weapon some day, it would not represent an existential threat to Israelis but only to Israel’s 47-year-old nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East.) Netanyahu needed the war to continue—any ceasefire, under any conditions, would weaken him politically.

On the US side, some of the war’s goals had to do with the personal obsessions of the president and his minions. Trump’s fixation on expanding US power around the world, and more importantly being seen as presiding over a return to the glory days of unchallenged US global domination, remain a driving force—as does his determination to “get a better deal” than Obama did with the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2015. For his self-defined “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, the pageantry of a powerful military—not only “the most lethal” force in the world but more white, more male, and even more slim than any other army—could compensate for Hegseth’s lack of experience. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all roads lead to regime change in Cuba—and supporting all of Trump’s military assaults, including attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping the president and seizing the oil resources of Venezuela, bombing Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria, all help set the stage for his life-long goal of destroying the Cuban revolution.

The Search for Hegemony

All those personal obsessions likely played some roles. But the US-Israeli war on Iran is also rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals. While Trump has shown himself for years as far more committed to maximizing his own and his family’s wealth and power than he is accountable to any particular faction of US capital or US elite power (except perhaps “the billionaires,” writ large), the trajectory of imperial expansion, especially in an era of greater and rising powers around the world, continues to shape much of US policy.

That is where the search for hegemony comes to the fore. For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon. That means asserting its power—a derivative power, given its strategic dependence on the United States, but power nonetheless—to seize land, dispossess and expel whole populations, and exert permanent control over countries, economies, and people—whenever, wherever, and for however long it chooses. Without being held accountable.

For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon.

To be recognized as the regional hegemonic power in the Middle East, Israel needs to not only “mow the grass” in Lebanon and in Gaza (as well as arming and empowering ideologically driven settlers in the West Bank to escalate their violent seizure of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing of its population), it needs to continue to weaken, threaten, and when possible (with US backing) go to war against Iran, its sole challenger for regional control.

Mowing the Grass

Israelis—military and government officials, academics, journalists and others—routinely use the term “mowing the grass” to describe Tel Aviv’s consistent attacks against Israel’s neighbors. The phrase was first coined to describe Israel’s brutal 22-day assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, that began the day after Christmas 2008 and killed more than 1400 Palestinians, most of them civilians and including 300 children. Since then, it describes the frequent attacks on Gaza or Lebanon—ostensibly aimed at militant organizations but designed originally to kill massive numbers of civilians, displace hundreds of thousands or millions from their homes, and destroy huge swathes of homes, schools, churches, mosques, businesses—to remind everyone who it is who actually holds power.

Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

Iran has historically been the main obstacle preventing Israel from consolidating that regional hegemonic role, and part of Netanyahu’s political power depends on his ability to keep the US-Israeli “special relationship” strong and to deal effectively with Iran. So going to war against Iran in complete and willing partnership with the United States serves to strengthen his still-shaky political position. What’s different now is that Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

So Netanyahu remains committed to continuing this war against Iran, opposing ceasefires regardless of their terms—and most recently, escalating attacks against Lebanon precisely because they could prevent or shatter any ceasefire. Following the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in 2024, UN peacekeepers on the ground documented more than 10,000 Israeli violations of the agreement in just the first year. When a wobbly US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 8, 2026, Israel responded with massive force against Beirut, launching more than 100 airstrikes within 10 minutes across the capital and killing 357 people, many of them civilians and at least 101 of them children and women.

Back in the USA….

For the United States, going to war against Iran could strengthen Washington’s longstanding commitment to maintaining global domination—a goal particularly relished by its power-obsessed and erratic president. The war was designed to both demonstrate and bolster the US role as unchallenged global hegemon. And doing so arm in arm with Israel, the regional version.

What a team they thought they would make. What they didn’t reckon with was the reality of Iran—its military, its government, its people. While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

For example, Iran’s relatively few strikes on US bases and sometimes domestic facilities in the surrounding US-backed Gulf states had political consequences beyond their comparatively low levels of casualties. They showed how “protection” in the form of US military bases, weapons and troops in those countries did not keep their people safe, but rather laid a target on their backs. Most especially, Iran’s few direct attacks on ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz early in the war, had the much broader effect of shutting down the vital waterway entirely, as shipowners and insurance companies refused to take the risk.

Miscalculations

When Israel carried out its guided missile attack on the first day of the war, killing the supreme leader and a number of other top officials, the cheering in Washington and Tel Aviv reflected the assumption that the decapitation of the government would lead to chaos and its inability to function. The cheerleaders were wrong. As Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr noted in Foreign Affairs, the US and Israel “expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.” Not only did Khamenei’s son take over his father’s position, but younger military, political, and business leaders filled in the gaps across the structures of power.

And while the Iranian leadership had been significantly weakened by public mobilization against both governmental inability to solve the escalating economic crisis and its increasingly repressive attacks against protesters, it appears it was not further weakened by the US-Israeli assault. As Nasr and Bajoghli describe the situation, the public anger of January 2026 in response to escalating repression of the mass uprisings, didn’t disappear with the US-Israeli assault. They wrote:

The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger has not disappeared. The grief, frustration and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the 4th century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the 7th century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.

Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.Palestine

There was another reason for the US-Israeli war, that explains at least the timing, if not the overall rationale—Palestine. Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for two years and eight months. There are now more than 73,000 known, identified, named Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed by Israeli bombs, tanks, bullets, drones, missiles, almost all paid for (and to a large degree produced) by US taxpayers. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what were once the cities, towns, refugee camps of the decimated Gaza Strip. The statistics belie the lives lost—babies, elders, children. Journalists and health workers in staggering numbers. And Israel’s genocide continues, people are still being killed by Israeli bombs, tanks and drones, as well as deliberately-imposed shortages of water, food, medical supplies, shelter.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler. It is precisely the level of impunity, the absolute lack of accountability for any of the perpetrators of this crime against humanity, that has given Israeli and US leaders the confidence to go ahead with what many have called the “Gazafication of Iran” and the “Gazafication of Lebanon” without fearing there might be a price to be paid.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler.

The international arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders (Israel assassinated the Hamas leaders who were similarly charged) are ignored in most of the US-allied countries that Netanyahu and his former defense minister might want to visit. South Africa’s unprecedented effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice for its violations of the Genocide Convention resulted in a powerful preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly do constitute genocide. Israel was ordered to carry out specific actions—starting with an end to killing people in Gaza—but it has yet to face any consequences for ignoring those orders. And no one knows when the final ruling might be issued—or if it will lead to some level of enforcement, either in the United Nations, by a coalition of governments, or, most likely by a newly-enraged, newly-engaged global civil society ready to move with ever greater energy, strategic clarity and political power to impose serious consequences on the governments and individuals responsible for the first genocide in history to be carried out openly, proudly, and visible to the world.

War Over War

For now, while the war against Iran continues, it looks like both Israel and the United States are moving into a different phase. They are still looking to claim power, still working to reshape political relations and consolidate regional and global power across the middle east. But rather than simply escalating again, as Israel still is in Lebanon, or continuing a grinding daily assault as it still is in Gaza—both actions armed and paid for by the US—they are facing some changed circumstances. Just maybe Washington and Tel Aviv are finding that it’s harder than they thought to re-order the whole Middle East—and to do that in tandem is harder than ever.

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely. Turns out Iran is not Venezuela. Netanyahu has massive public support among Jewish Israelis for continuing the war in Iran, though support for the war in Lebanon is not so popular. (It should not be forgotten that after 18 years of occupying South Lebanon, Israeli troops were finally pulled out in 2000 primarily because the government could not survive the mobilization of Israeli mothers angry that their sons in the IDF were occasionally being killed by Hezbollah’s retaliation actions..)

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely.

At home Netanyahu may be able to get away with claiming victory over Iran even if a ceasefire is imposed, by continuing Israel’s longstanding practice of assassinating Iranian scientists and political/military leaders, and occasional bombing raids. But Israel’s plummeting losses in the war of global legitimacy are certainly not likely to be reversed any time soon. The most recent Pew survey indicates sky-high majorities holding negative views of Israel and Netanyahu around the world—up to 95% in Pakistan, 78% negative in Sweden and Spain.

The global Palestinian rights mobilizations and the even broader movements for ceasefire and an end to genocide of course play a major role. Social movements and civil society activists around the world will continue to hold up the ICJ decisions and the UN General Assembly resolutions requiring governments to impose arms embargoes, boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

And as the Strait remains closed and food shortages mount in the poorest countries, as Arab governments fearing public opposition at home reduce their ties with Israel and reject expansion of the Abraham Accords, and as Israel continues to kill Lebanese and Palestinian families, Trump’s claims will be less likely to be believed. With the mid-terms only a few months off, his claims of “We’re the winner, we won” are already ringing increasingly hollow. It doesn’t mean he won’t make the claims, it just means they’re not going to work.

For Trump, given the unexpected level of resilience in Iran, Tehran’s access to a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones that are doing real damage to Gulf Arab states hosting US bases and troops, and its willingness to close the Strait as a pressure point with global ramifications, it’s going to be difficult to claim this war as a victory.

The search to consolidate regional and global power continues. It’s a big part of the reason the US and Israel are launching new wars and escalating longstanding attacks. People are still losing lands and lives as these hegemons rely on war to consolidate their positions. But neither Israel in the Middle East nor the United States in the world are unchallenged. They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game. The search for hegemonic power is far from settled.

This film presents a synthesis of my father’s book The Doomsday Machine. His book depicts the evil murderousness of nuclear war plans, and the particular dangers posed by intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, with their first strike capability, intended to be launched on warning.

He believed that with these weapons both the US and the USSR, now Russia, had constructed Doomsday Machines, capable of destroying most life on Earth—machines that are particularly dangerous because neither side acknowledges this reality but continue to proceed as if there were some circumstances in which it was possible to win a nuclear war.

The epigraph from Dad’s book is from Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

And I am very glad that this film expands on that particular theme with the title: “Ordinary Insanity”—ordinary, as he says, because it is so widely shared.

My dad said that until his last breath he would continue to do everything he could to avert this peril.

And that points to a theme that underlies his most recent, posthumous book, Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. These reflections, drawn from notes he wrote for himself over 50 years, reflect his deep meditation on what kind of flaw in the human species makes us vulnerable to this kind of insanity.

In other words, we have to face, on the one hand, the particular danger posed by the weapons we have created and the strategies that dictate their function and use. But we also have to contend with the kind of danger posed by human beings—all of us capable of participating in projects that are evil, participating in the widest sense through our silence.

If we are to dismantle the Doomsday Machine, it will require widespread and concerted efforts to awaken from the spell of this ordinary insanity. In other words, we need to cultivate an ordinary sanity.

One of the ways of promoting that is through educational efforts such as this film, which may alert the public to the dangers we are facing. But it will also require widespread conscientious action, a kind of pandemic of courage, wisdom, enlightenment, and dedication to the survival of our planet.

Only when such sanity becomes ordinary will we have a chance of surviving the nuclear era.

My dad said that until his last breath he would continue to do everything he could to avert this peril. I am happy that through this film, even after his last breath, he may continue to plant seeds of sanity and hope.

An Ordinary Insanity is free for viewing on the film’s website or on YouTube.

You can mute Instagram stories. You can turn off Snap Maps. You can silence every notification on your phone. But try turning off reels. Try removing your “explore page.” Try turning off your TikTok algorithm.

Social media platforms have spent years perfecting the art of giving users just enough control to feel empowered, but not enough to actually break away. The result is a false sense of autonomy. Psychology Today cites that users used to control their feeds by choosing who to follow and which posts to interact with, but most platforms have shifted to algorithms that prioritize content for users based upon its likelihood of engagement. Consumers now get countless settings to reorganize the surface level features of a structure that cannot be fundamentally changed.

These apps enable endless settings to facilitate an illusion of control, whether that be through settings privacy, hiding like counts, or blocking certain pages. But none of these features are meaningful. They all act as a decoy to prevent change from the much deeper issue.

The features you cannot turn off are the ones that keep you scrolling hour after hour. It is the product of years of behavioral engineering, precisely designed to exploit dopamine loops and addiction to keep account holders in a cycle that generates a feeling of continuous rewards. The ability to scroll infinitely on any platform through videos and suggested posts prevents the natural end that a finite feed would create. As time goes on, algorithms adapt to the users employing them. It understands what will make you excited, enraged, or captivated, all at the expense of your attention span and countless unreturnable hours of your life.

The question isn’t about how to not use social media—it's unavoidable. It’s about if you even have the ability to not use it.

In a landmark case in March of 2026, Meta and Youtube were just found guilty of intentionally addicting young users and damaging their mental health. The juries found them both negligent in the design of their platforms, knowing it was dangerous and failing to appropriately warn of the risks. The companies were required to pay $3 million in compensatory damages, and jurors recommended another $3 million in punitive damages.

This verdict is revolutionary because for the first time, the law has indicated that the design of the apps was the issue, rather than the content or the users. It changes the conversation from blaming consumers for being on social media too much to recognizing these apps are designed to make it impossible to walk away. This trial could set the precedent for the over 1,500 similar cases that have been filed against the companies.

The findings of this case are nothing new. For countless years, tobacco companies sold cigarettes knowing the devices engineered customer addiction, while vehemently denying the harm every step of the way. It's easy to reflect on that chapter of history with clearer vision, but it was difficult to spot in the moment. Now we are living through its modern day counterpart.

The difference in these cases is that purchasing cigarettes takes explicit effort, but social media follows you everywhere you go. It’s in your pocket, it’s with you at school, in the office; no place is out of reach and no moment is off-limits. There is no social media equivalent of a “no smoking zone” or too inappropriate of a place to check your phone. It is a socially enabled addiction with no guardrails to limit engagement.

The question isn’t about how to not use social media—it's unavoidable. It’s about if you even have the ability to not use it. When the entire algorithm is designed to keep you from clicking away, and keep the app gaining revenue, it’s not about your personal autonomy anymore, it's about the devices keeping you from being able to physically peel yourself away.

Politicians can see this problem too. California AB 2169 would require companies to provide a copy of their personal data, including behavioral profiles and the digital map of online interactions. It also mandates that platforms build a bridge to allow users to sync their friends and interactions to other apps. Michigan's Kids Over Clicks package SB 757-760 goes further to prohibit platforms from using minors' personal data to fuel recommendation algorithms without parental consent, banning manipulative patterns like streaks and reward systems to incentivize continued app usage, and strictly regulating AI companion chatbots that could encourage self-harm or serve as unlicensed therapists.

While these bills make leaps toward restoring user autonomy, none of them actually address social media addiction head-on. Knowing the features these apps use to trap you into endless scrolling is helpful but doesn’t stop the behavior at its core. The option to turn off these privacy settings and default restrictions is still present. The problem isn’t the content on the apps, but the design. We can’t stop at changing the features and restructuring the settings. The issue cannot be resolved until the entire architecture of the platforms is overhauled.

I’ll leave you with this: We already know how the story ends if we do nothing as we have lived it before. So what are we going to do today to write a different ending?

Every election tells us something about who holds power in America.

In Maryland's 5th Congressional District—the Democratic primary race to replace former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer—that lesson is arriving in the form of an avalanche of outside money. According to recent federal filings as of June 12, 2026, more than $8 million has been spent by outside groups to boost Adrian Boafo's congressional campaign. Nearly $4.8 million comes from Protect Progress, a crypto-industry super PAC backed by some of the wealthiest interests in the cryptocurrency world. Another $2.8 million comes from United Democracy Project, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC's) super PAC. Add another $500,000 from political organizations tied to longtime Washington power brokers, and the total exceeds $8.1 million.

That amount is staggering. It dwarfs the direct fundraising of the candidates themselves. It raises a fundamental question: Why are national special interests willing to spend so much money on a single congressional primary in Maryland?

The answer is simple. They understand what is at stake.

While outside groups spend millions trying to shape this election, Blegay has built a grassroots campaign centered on Medicare for All, universal childcare, workers' rights, housing justice, and human rights abroad and at home.

Across the country, voters are demanding a break from politics dominated by corporate influence, lobbyists, and billionaire donors. They are demanding Medicare for All instead of an insurance industry that profits from illness. They are demanding affordable housing, universal childcare, stronger labor protections, and an economy that works for working people rather than Wall Street. They are demanding an end to endless war and blank checks for militarism. They are demanding elected officials who answer to their communities instead of powerful donors.

The flood of money into Adrian Boafo's campaign is not happening because crypto billionaires or AIPAC suddenly became concerned about the everyday struggles of Maryland families. It is happening because powerful interests recognize that this race represents a choice between maintaining the political status quo and building something different.

The involvement of crypto-industry super PACs should concern anyone who believes democracy should not be for sale. The cryptocurrency industry has spent unprecedented amounts of money in recent election cycles in an effort to shape federal policy. Their goal is not a secret. They want lawmakers who will be friendly to their interests and resistant to regulations that could affect their profits. When millions of dollars from a national crypto super PAC suddenly appear in a congressional primary, voters should ask themselves what those investors expect in return.

The same question applies to AIPAC's unprecedented spending. Across the country, AIPAC and its affiliated organizations have spent heavily to defeat candidates who support a more balanced US policy toward Israel and Palestine or who have criticized the Israeli government's actions in Gaza. Whether one agrees with those candidates or not, it is impossible to ignore the broader trend: Enormous sums of money are being deployed to shape the boundaries of acceptable political debate.

The result is a political system where ordinary voters increasingly feel that their voices are drowned out by wealthy interests. Many Americans already believe that government works better for corporations and donors than it does for working families. When more than $8 million floods into a single congressional primary, it becomes harder to argue that those concerns are misplaced.

That is what makes Wala Blegay's candidacy so important.

While outside groups spend millions trying to shape this election, Blegay has built a grassroots campaign centered on Medicare for All, universal childcare, workers' rights, housing justice, and human rights abroad and at home. Long before she became a congressional candidate, she was organizing in her community, advocating for workers, and fighting for policies that put people ahead of corporate profits. She has been a consistent supporter of Medicare for All when many elected officials were unwilling to take that position. During the height of the devastation in Gaza, she stood publicly for a ceasefire and Palestinian human rights when doing so carried significant political risk.

Whether voters agree with every position she takes is beside the point. What matters is that she represents a vision of politics fundamentally different from the one being financed by outside interests. Her campaign is built on the belief that elected officials should answer to the people who elect them—not to super PACs, corporate donors, or wealthy political networks.

This election is about more than two candidates. It is about what kind of democracy we want to have. Do we want a system where a handful of powerful organizations can spend millions of dollars to shape local elections? Or do we want a system where ideas, organizing, and community support matter more than the size of a donor's bank account?

The fact that more than $8 million is being spent to influence this race tells us everything we need to know: Powerful interests are paying attention. They understand the stakes. They understand that the outcome of this election could help determine whether the next generation of Democratic leadership will answer to entrenched interests or to ordinary people.

The question now is whether voters are paying attention too.

More than a decade ago, a video (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14) showed Jodi Rudoren, then The New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief, having a casual and friendly meeting with Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. The cozy relationship in the video was telling enough, but when the video captured Foxman complaining that the “Arabs” had taken over a famous New York City hotel, and Rudoren shrugging it off, many skeptics viewed this as a window into the Times’ pro-Israel bias.

The recently deceased Foxman (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/12/26), famous for promoting the pro-Israel viewpoint and insinuating that critics of Israel were antisemitic, wasn’t Rudoren’s source in this video; they were pals.

Emmaia Gelman’s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is a history of the group, framing it not as a racial justice organization but as a deputy sheriff for the US empire. Gelman shows how the ADL crafts a narrative for the public that pushes Western imperialism rather than equality. In recent years, the ADL’s main focus has been smearing criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights as Jew hatred. As the group (4/4/23) says, “anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.”

The book is loosely part of the #DropTheADL campaign, which encourages both progressives and schools to stop citing the group as a source on political extremism, because of its “racist and right-wing” track record. The movement has had limited success: The delegates of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, voted to sever ties with the ADL, a move that was overruled by the union’s governing board (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/21/25).

Over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism.

When major newspapers write about the definition or prevalence of antisemitism, they frequently look to the ADL (New York Times, 2/27/28, 12/10/23, 10/6/24; Washington Post, 10/27/21; Wall Street Journal, 5/6/26; USA Today, 4/22/25, 5/6/26). In the Times obituary for Foxman (5/10/26), the paper wrote:

One reason Mr. Foxman was consulted by journalists and academics was that he made sure his organization could back up its claims with facts and statistics.

Gelman’s research challenges that record, arguing that ADL documentation of antisemitic incidents lacks context, allowing the group to “conflate small ambiguous acts like some kid writing a swastika on their desk with burning a synagogue,” Gelman told FAIR. That’s where their research “got fudgy” and “showed spikes” in antisemitism, leading to reporting filled with “stark terms without context.”

Bulwark of the West

Why is the ADL so influential? In Gelman’s telling, the ADL worked hard in the early days of the Cold War as a news source for Washington, DC officials. It blanketed congressional offices and newsrooms with briefings, newsletters, and press releases, making it a go-to source for civil rights information. Its stances neatly aligned with pro-US Cold War policy, unlike other other civil rights organizations, which anti-communists tended to view with political suspicion.

The book documents much of this history, including how the ADL produced influential media of its own:

One measure of the ADL’s reach into political culture was the ADL Bulletin, a glossy, often chatty magazine of news features and insider tidbits on domestic and international civil rights issues. The Bulletin started the decade with a paid circulation of 150,000—already a major publication, matching about 11% of the concurrent circulation of the New York Times. By 1967 it had grown to nearly 169,000 subscribers.

In particular, she cites the organization’s role in changing US perception of Israel after the 1967 war, establishing the Israeli side as the West’s bulwark against a Soviet-aligned Arab alliance. The group’s

reporting heralded a new project of blanketing US media with articles about Israelis as salt-of-the-earth Westerners, mixing human interest with political argument, and flatly denying Palestinian dispossession.

In the 1970s, the ADL created the radio series Dateline Israel, which “was distributed at no cost to thousands of radio stations and reportedly aired on 500 stations,” where “episodes presented Israel as bustling, hopeful, modern.” Gelman adds:

Dozens of 15-minute radio segments highlighted Jewish ingenuity, character, and desire for peace. They highlighted an ostensible pluralism alongside grateful and supportive Arabs who welcomed colonization.‘A Bit of Selection Bias’

Gelman wants to see news organizations stop using the ADL as a go-to source, not just because of what she sees as dubious reporting methods, but because the group tends to conflate right-wing racial extremism with pro-Palestine speech and activity.

It’s a long road ahead, she said. “We have progressive media moving away from the ADL,” she said. “What’s left is the legacy media and the big-reach media. The only way I can see that shifting is if journalists themselves begin to revolt.”

Part of the problem is that over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism. Last year, for example, when FAIR asked the Southern Poverty Law Center about a rise in antisemitic and white supremacist content on social media networks like Facebook, a media handler suggested FAIR send its request to the ADL.

There are small signs of change. In a long interview with ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt, New York Times writer Lulu Garcia-Navarro (8/9/25) asked the leader about “young Jews who might self-describe as anti-Zionist or have problems with the state of Israel at the moment.” Greenblatt dismissed them, comparing them to “Hispanic people who support President Trump’s policies at the border.” “There are Blacks for Trump,” he added.

When the writer continued to press this issue, he bit back:

What polls are you seeing? I understand anecdotally you may have heard it from some people. I believe there may be a bit of a selection bias there. Have you gone to any of the mainstream synagogues in New York City, the ones with the largest membership, and asked them? I would encourage you to go to 92nd Street Y. Go to the West Side JCC. Go to Central, Park Avenue, Rodeph Sholom, go to KJ. Go to all these large Jewish synagogues and ask where their young people are.

Later that year, the Forward (11/21/25) reported that “younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.” A Washington Post poll (10/6/25) taken in September 2025 found only 36% of Jewish Americans aged 18 to 34 saying they were emotionally attached to Israel, while 50% of Jews in that age group said that Israel has committed genocide.

A 2026 poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found 44% of Jewish Americans under 35 supported a democratic, binational government in Israel-Palestine elected by both Jews and Palestinians—”even as most major Jewish organizations classify calls for a single state as an expression of antisemitism,” the Forward (5/27/26) reported.

But in his interview with the Times, Greenblatt redefined which Jewish opinions mattered to him: not just pro-Israel opinions, but those of monied religious congregations in upper Manhattan, an elite that towers above Jewish communities elsewhere. The exchange makes the leader seem woefully out of touch.

He and his group still enjoy a kind of media access the rest of society can only dream about. But the pushback from the Times reporter is a small signal that some outlets are beginning to look at this group more critically.

Suddenly my cynicism vanished and things started making sense... America started making sense, from past to present.

I was already in the process of writing this column—hey, the nation’s 250th birthday is coming up—and had never felt more lost. Where, where, where am I going with this? What am I trying to say? My words had no core, no soul. I felt like I had given myself the random rubble of a bombed-out building to write about.

Then a friend sent me a link to a New York Times opinion piece. I decided to give it a quick read. I don’t necessarily trust the Times. It can be smugly wrong. But I took a look—it was by literary critic A.O. Scott —and I couldn’t stop reading it. He had found our country, it seemed, beginning with these 35 simple words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

To which Scott added: “No matter how many times you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again. Each idea flows from the previous one, and a comprehensive argument takes shape.”

This country is still being created—out of the same chaos and greed, the same structural racism, the same ignorance and cruelty—that was present in 1776, and you and I and everyone else are the ones creating it.

Ah, the Declaration of Independence. So easily dismissed with a shrug, with a smirk, followed by a quick glance at our history, then a glance toward the Oval Office, a glance at Palestine, a glance at Iran. This is just a feel-good lie, right?

But Scott goes on, pointing out that these simple words “don’t appeal to precedent, tradition, or any other external authority, but to the evidence of our own eyes. Human equality is not aspirational: It’s obvious.”

The words’ lasting significance isn’t due to the deep truths they pull from humanity’s philosophical depths, but rather, Scott notes, the opposite: “Its writers said so much more than they meant. The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.”

The promises in the words weren’t fulfilled on the spot, but oh so slowly—and only partially—over the last two and a half centuries, as people such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and so many others used the words, again and again, to challenge the reality of their particular present moment.

“For Lincoln and King, the Declaration functions as both a sacred text and an unfulfilled promise,” Scott writes. “The conditions that it holds to be self-evident in that second sentence did not, at the time it was written, exist in any known reality. Whether they subsequently did or ever could is the subject of debates that have more or less defined our politics ever since, but the ringing confidence of the statement has not diminished.”

And the words still pulsate. As I read Scott’s essay, for the first time I saw the Declaration not merely as a gold-covered lie meant to be plunked in front of the White House as a symbol of American greatness—to be endlessly glorified and endlessly ignored—but a moral fact and, praise be, a tool of the present moment! This country is still being created—out of the same chaos and greed, the same structural racism, the same ignorance and cruelty—that was present in 1776, and you and I and everyone else are the ones creating it.

Before this had become apparent to me, I was reading the news, getting endlessly appalled and depressed, trying to figure out how to write about things like: “Bovino Launches Exploratory Committee for Presidential Campaign with Pledge To Deport 100 Million People.”

I couldn’t let go of this recent Common Dreams headline, concerning President Donald Trump’s ex-Border Patrol commander, Gregory Bovino, who wants to run for president. Fine. His right. But he’s running on the idea that 100 million residents are bad, bad people and need to go, and if we give him the power, he’ll shove them all, including the children, into concentration camps and, ultimately, over the border. Good riddance! God gave this country to white people.

Fascism is percolating here. Hell is percolating. I just felt shattered and lost. How can I write about this—simply the latest, and perhaps the craziest, bit of deportation blather to hit the news? I could feel the country sinking, sinking into political quicksand.

But when I heard, in my own mind, the words “all men—all humans—are created equal,” my heart filled with hope and purpose again. There is power in moral sanity, just as there was in 1920, 1954, 1965, 1865, in time immemorial. Hate is a social infection. Fear is a social infection. All we can do is keep recognizing this and creating a morally sane—safe, equal—world.

The same emotional transformation began applying to everything I’d been reading. Trump wants to expand the military budget from $1 trillion annually to $1.5 trillion, at the same time cutting huge chunks of domestic spending? Endless war is the national way, and in the process of losing one war after another, after another, throughout my lifetime—Korea, Vietnam. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran (?)—we’ve killed, murdered, slaughtered, millions of people, most of whom have been dehumanized in the public mind, turned into numerical abstractions: collateral damage. But...

All humans are created equal?

My God, this simple, deeply buried truth applies even to them, the “other,” the people living beyond our sacred borders. Bombing them is no different from bombing ourselves. This doesn’t mean I can just shrug and relax, waiting for the Moral Arc of the Universe to do its thing. The meaning I felt pulsating was, once again, no more than a speck of moral sanity, but it isn’t going away. It’s real. It’s the core of who we are.

And suddenly, as I say, my cynicism vanished. This truth is right there, simply put, at the heart of our Declaration of Independence. Let us seize it now—once again—and continue devoting our lives to creating a future that values everyone.

Driving on the Interamerican Highway from Monteverde Biological Reserve to Rincón de la Vieja National Park, I couldn’t help but notice a series of rope bridges that crossed the six lanes of traffic. Each crossing structure featured traffic warning signs with silhouette images of monkeys or sloths as nonstop flows of diesel semitrucks and electric cars zoomed by.

Costa Rica is known for its protected areas, which cover one-third of the country and function as core zones for conservation, but the “green republic” should also be recognized for its corridors. What started as an NGO effort in the 2000s when organizations like Kids Saving The Rainforest started installing aerial bridges to improve habitat connectivity later became national policy with a 2024 presidential decree requiring electrical companies to build crossing structures so that animals like howler monkeys and kinkajous avoided electrocution from using power lines. These monkey bridges also keep tropical rainforest more intact for mobile creatures.

Beyond Central America, wildlife corridors are popular in the western United States. According to recent surveys from the Environment America Research and Policy Center and the Pew Charitable Trust, respondents approve creating more wildlife crossings at rates of 85-90%. And that support spans the political spectrum. In March 2026, the Idaho State Legislature passed Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 124, officially supporting the development of wildlife crossing infrastructure, such as highway overpasses and underpasses, to reduce animal-vehicle collisions. In December 2026, California’s Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is set to be completed across 10 lanes of Los Angeles freeway, making it the largest structure in the world.

Wildlife corridors could receive a financial boost by the bipartisan BUILD America 250 bill, considered by US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week. If passed, it would increase funding for the Federal Highway Administration’s very popular Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program (WCPP) to $80 million annually ($400 million total). The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $350 million to 35 projects across 30 states, but demand far exceeded with $500 million in requests.

Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological.

If we’re living in a worldwide golden age for wildlife corridors, where did this idea come from? I trace the origins of this dominant conservation strategy in my new book, Borders of Biodiversity: How Gray Wolves, Monarch Butterflies, and Giant Sequoia Transformed Large Landscape Conservation, published by University of North Carolina Press.

In the 1970s and 1980s, new technologies provided windows into animal mobility. For wolves, radio- and satellite- telemetry allowed US biologist Diane Boyd and Canadian biologist Paul Paquet to track the interchange of dispersing juveniles along the Rockies. For example, Boyd collared wolf #8551, named Kay, west of Glacier National Park; the wolf turned up six months later dead after it was legally shot near Pouce Coupe, British Columbia. The 600-mile movement northward was interesting scientifically because it was two-thirds of the way to the Yukon Territory, but Kay’s movement also had major conservation implications. Wildlife corridors facilitated wolf dispersals; transborder dispersals could facilitate wolf recovery under the Endangered Species Act.

In the 1990s, wildlife corridors were thought of as proactive tools against habitat fragmentation. Responding to Boyd and Paquet’s work, conservationists in Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming created the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in 1993 to keep core areas—like Yellowstone National Park or Banff National Park—connected. Projects included lobbying the Canadian government to build wildlife overpasses and underpasses along the Trans-Canada Highway, which Y2Y founder Harvey Locke called the “Berlin Wall of Biodiversity” for its high rate of wolf and elk fatalities. Or investing in predator-deterrence tools like range riding and electrified fladry fencing for ranching communities so wolves and grizzlies could use rural spaces as biological passageways.

By the 2000s, however, wildlife corridors were also understood to help with climate adaptation in a warming world. A scientific meta-analysis documented that of 4,000 animals recently tracked, almost three-quarters of them shifted their ranges to cooler lands or waters. Terrestrial species, on average, were moving 12 miles (or 20 kilometers) every decade toward the poles. Animals relocate to adapt.

Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological. In 2012, Ben Bobowski of Rocky Mountain National Park and Yaxine María Arias Núñez of Santa Elena Biological Reserve created a series of personnel exchanges between the two protected areas called the Naturalmente Juntos-Naturally Together Project. Their connection was based on bird banding studies that revealed 150 bird species, like yellow warblers, migrated along the Continental Divide between Colorado and Costa Rica. In 2015, Rocky and Santa Elena entered a formal sistering agreement.

From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility. In an era of border-hardening nationalism, corridors can help people of different nationalities facilitate solidarities among shared species.