The United States is on a very dark path under President Donald Trump, argues political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. Democratic rules and norms have virtually collapsed, and cruelty is the name of the game. Trump has used the military and federal law enforcement to build a paramilitary force that carries out pogroms against immigrant communities, assaults the constitutional rights of citizens and even murders people if they protest against its Nazi-like tactics. Under Trump, the US is acting at home in the same lawless manner that it acts abroad. How to fight Trump’s fascism is the million-dollar question.

Alexandra Boutri: I want to start by asking you to elaborate a bit on the concept of “imperial proto-fascism” that you referred to in the last interview we did together. I don’t think I have encountered this term before.

C. J. Polychroniou: It’s really a pretty basic and straightforward term. It seeks to capture the type of political order that is unfolding in the United States under Trump 2.0. The United States is and has been an imperialist power at least since the late 1890’s, although imperialism has changed its pattern over time and surely since the time of the writings of Hobson, Lenin, Luxembourg, and Hilferding. Yet, in a very surreal way, the Trump administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine and seeks to take over foreign territories through whatever means necessary while making a mockery of international law. Whether you want to call it “Old Imperialism” or “New Imperialism” is a rather academic matter. The point is that the Trump administration envisions a new role for the US in today’s word in which might is right. No tricks or deception about pursuing US interests in the name of democracy, human rights, and freedom, which has been the rhetorical approach to US foreign policy by all previous administrations since the end of the Second World War. There is no point talking about international niceties because as Trump’s Waffen-SS chief Stephen Miller recently put it, “the iron laws of the world” are strength, force, and power.

On the domestic front, you have the emergence of a regime that relies on the same tactics that it uses on the international arena. Cruelty and brute force are its main traits. Under Trump, the US is acting at home in the same lawless manner that it acts abroad. But Americans are rebelling against Trump’s imperial proto-fascist political order, so interesting times do lie ahead.

Alexandra Boutri: The Trump administration has brazenly lied in order to justify the deaths of the two people in Minneapolis. What sort of government people can justify the murders of their own citizens?

C. J. Polychroniou: Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by Trump’s own fascist paramilitary squad. The mission of ICE is to capture undocumented immigrants and instill fear across communities. In shooting and killing two harmless protesters, ICE thugs did not violate any protocol. They followed the protocol. When pressed about ICE’s tactics and the murder of Alex Pretti, Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller turned against each other. But they are both complicit in Trump’s lawless police state actions. They work for a criminal government and are carrying out its leader's orders. Miller is in fact the architect of Trump’s inhumane anti-immigration policies.

The current administration in Washington DC does not pretend to be a national government looking after the interests and the well-being of all Americans. So let’s put aside political niceties. It is an administration of hateful, racist, ruthless thugs who have embarked on an open war against democracy and the rule of law, against the “other,” and against human decency. It is fascism with US characteristics.

Alexandra Boutri: It appears that Trump has switched tactics and is now trying to turn attention back to the economy. Will it work?

C. J. Polychroniou: It depends on what he decides to do with his inhumane immigration crackdown. I don’t see anti-ICE protests going away as long as the paramilitary squad's barbaric tactics continue unabated. Most Americans are clearly fed up with Trump and his policies. He has nothing to point to that would make the public feel good about his administration. He had made life much less affordable in just one year. He has added trillions to the debt and the US dollar is collapsing. Only those supporting Trump like sheep, either because they are wearing blinders or because they have vested interests in him being in office, like the tech oligarchs, can find something positive with his administration. But he has three more years left in the White House and there is no doubt that his wrecking ball will keep swinging. And Trump will continue with his distraction tactics during damaging stories for his administration. And that includes embarking on new military adventures abroad, more bombings and killings, and even pursuing regime change.

Alexandra Boutri: How do people push back against Trump’s imperial proto-fascist order?

C. J. Polychroniou: The anti-ICE protests are very important because they signify resistance against one of the administration’s cruelest and most dangerous policies. The US is indeed on a very dangerous trajectory under Trump. The situation is so critical and overwhelming that only a united front, I believe, could defeat Trump’s imperial proto-fascist order. In this context, what is needed is full-fledged resistance against the Trump regime and all its collaborators, especially including its corporate collaborators. A united front against fascism is an alliance of working-class organizations with all progressive forces whether they are reformist or even attached to liberal institutionalism. And I am not necessarily referring to the united front strategy of Leon Trotsky against Hitlerism. The united-front formulation predates Trotsky, and it was a united front strategy in France that defeated the far right in the legislative elections of 2024. The primary goal here is to resist and ultimately defeat Trump’s plan for an imperial proto-fascist order. Nationwide general strikes which are a very powerful tool against unpopular and repressive regimes, but are exceptionally rare in the US, have a much better chance of happening if there is a movement of mass resistance based on a united-front formulation. Hopefully, with each passing day, more and more people will come to recognize Trump’s government for what it really is, an abomination, and realize that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train,” as Howard Zinn aptly put it.

As President Donald Trump’s second term unfolds, the contradictions at the heart of his “America First” agenda are increasingly apparent. What began as a populist revolt against elite globalism appears to have morphed into policies that alienate the very rural and small-town constituencies that backed him in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

These rust-belt and rural counties were drawn to his promises of economic revival, border security, and non-interventionism. Yet, emerging signs of fracture in this MAGA base suggest a potential backlash in the upcoming midterms.

The administration’s domestic policies, coupled with aggressive foreign postures, are accelerating disillusionment among Trump’s core supporters.

Domestically, Trump’s intensified immigration enforcement has backfired. Ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were sold as fulfilling pledges of mass deportations targeting “criminals”. But these operations have swept up undocumented workers essential to rural economies. Small family farms and businesses in states including California, Idaho, and Pennsylvania are reliant on immigrant labor for harvesting crops, dairy operations, and meatpacking. They now face acute shortages.

Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.

Agricultural employment dropped by 155,000 workers between March and July 2025, reversing prior growth trends. Farmers in Ventura County, California, for example, denounced raids that targeted routes frequented by agricultural workers. Fields lie unharvested signalling financial ruin for some operations. Family-run farms struggle to find replacements. Low wages and grueling conditions simply fail to attract American-born laborers.

This labor crisis exacerbates a broader sense of betrayal. Rural voters supported Trump for his anti-elite rhetoric, expecting protection for their livelihoods. Instead, the administration’s actions have hollowed out local workforces without viable alternatives.

The H-2A visa program, meant to provide temporary foreign workers, has been streamlined—but remains insufficient amid ongoing raids, which deter even legal migrants. These disruptions ripple through small-town economies, where agriculture underpins community stability. Democrats, sensing opportunity, are investing in rural outreach, emphasizing economic populism to woo disillusioned voters who feel abandoned by Trump’s enforcement zeal.

Compounding these woes are the ongoing tariff disruptions. Trump touts his tariffs as tools to “make America great,” but in fact they have driven up costs for the same rural groups. Between January and September 2025, tariffs on imports from China, Canada, Mexico, and others have surged, collecting US$125 billion. However, the figure may be even higher according to experts.

But while the administration claims these taxes punish foreign adversaries, the burden falls squarely on American importers and consumers. Small businesses, which account for around 30% of imports, faced an average of US$151,000 in extra costs from April to September 2025, translating to $25,000 monthly hikes. Farmers, already squeezed by low grain prices, pay more for necessities, such as fertilizers (hit by 44% effective tariffs on Indian imports) and machinery parts.

Midwest producers of soybeans, corn, and pork—key US exports—suffer doubly from retaliatory tariffs abroad, which reduce demand and depress revenues. In Tennessee and Pennsylvania, builders report 2.5% rises in material costs, while food prices climb due to duties on beef, tomatoes, and coffee.

Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. This disparity fuels resentment. Polls show Trump’s approval slipping in swing counties, with economic anxiety eroding the loyalty that once overlooked his character flaws.

Foreign Policy Compounds Domestic Fractures

These domestic fractures are mirrored in foreign policy, where Trump’s interventionism starkly contradicts his campaign pledge of “America First” restraint. Having promised no new wars, he has instead pursued aggressive postures that many Republicans view as unnecessary. The most emblematic is his renewed bid to acquire Greenland, apparently by negotiation or force, which has swiftly followed the US raid on Venezuela in the first week of January, accompanied by threats against other Latin American countries including Cuba and Colombia.

The US president has justified demands for control over the Arctic island—citing threats from Russia and China—as a strategic necessity. But NATO allies such as Denmark—of which Greenland is a constituent part—have rebuked it as an potentially alliance-shattering move. Congressional Republicans, including Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), have broken ranks, warning that force would obliterate NATO and tarnish US influence.

Such dissent highlights broader paradoxes. Trump’s populist realism prioritizes tough rhetoric for domestic consumption but yields aggressive, even reckless actions abroad. His administration is effectively dismantling post-1945 institutions while embracing 19th-century spheres-of-influence and outright colonialist thinking, including invoking an updated version of the 1823 Monroe doctrine.

The fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind.

Rural voters, weary of endless wars, supported his non-interventionist promises. Now they see echoes of past entanglements in Trump’s suggestion that the US could intervene in Iran. This cognitive dissonance is accelerating disillusionment with his presidency.

These self-inflicted but inherent contradictions are hastening a pivotal reckoning for Trumpism. In many counties that have thrice backed him—and especially in swing counties—economic hardship and policy betrayals erode the cultural ties binding rural America to the Republican party. Democrats, through programs such as the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, are betting on this “betrayal” narrative, spotlighting farmers’ plights to flip seats in November 2026.

Polls show Latinos and independents souring on Trump, with the US president’s base turnout potentially waning as the midterm elections approach in November. If Republicans suffer larger-than-expected losses in those elections, it could mark the decline of Trumpism’s grip by exposing its elite-serving underbelly beneath populist veneer.

Yet, without a compelling alternative vision, Democrats risk squandering this opening. For now, the fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind. Whether Trumpism proves resilient or begins a long decline may well be decided not in Washington and Mar-a-Lago, but in the county seats and small towns that once formed its unbreakable base.

Any resistance needs to celebrate its victories, and the weekend’s retreat by the administration is a big one: Should the forces of decency ever regain the upper hand in DC, we need a monument to the people of Minneapolis on the National Mall, and busts of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the Capitol.

And it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I'm paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)

I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cell phone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.

As we were reminded Tuesday morning, when Drew Warshaw, a candidate for New York state comptroller with a long record of building clean energy in the private sector, released a true bombshell report. In it he called for the state to divest its vast pension funds from fossil fuels—and provided the data to show that the failure of the incumbent to do that over the last two decades had cost taxpayers $15 billion in foregone returns. Billion with a b. That’s $750 for every woman, man, and child in the Empire State, all because the longstanding (as in, way too long) state treasurer, Thomas DiNapoli, has ignored the counsel of one expert after another and kept the state invested in Big Oil. (Oh, and since cowardice often consorts with incompetence, another report also finds that DiNapoli has cost the state more than $50 billion by underperforming index funds and giving huge contracts to various advisers.

Always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.

A bit of backstory here. Fifteen years ago, some of us launched a fossil fuel divestment campaign. At the beginning the argument was mostly moral: It was wrong to try and make a profit off the end of the world, and if we could convince institutions to sell that stock it would tarnish Big Fossil’s social license.

But it didn’t take long for another argument to emerge. The pension funds, college endowments, and others who joined the movement reported that they were making money as a result, and for a very simple reason: Anything that they put the money into was generating better returns than coal, gas, and oil. And that in turn was for an even simpler reason: Fossil fuel is a faltering industry, because an alternative—the trinity of sun, wind, and batteries—now produces the same product, just cleaner and cheaper. That’s why 95% of new generating capacity around the world last year came from renewables; fossil fuel only has a good year any more if something goes very wrong (the invasion of Ukraine, say).

Anyway, this became the largest anti-corporate effort of its kind in history, with funds representing $41 trillion in investments joining in. Its had powerful effects—when Peabody Coal filed for bankruptcy, for instance, its legal documents listed divestment as a reason. But it also protected the fiscal integrity of the funds that did the right thing—they had more money to pay pensions, provide scholarships, or whatever else. That’s why pension funds in states and entire countries joined in.

Which brings us back to New York. Advocates have put in tens of thousands of person hours explaining to DiNapoli that he should join pension funds in dozens of other places in divesting from fossil fuels, and he has dragged his feet at every turn, with half-measures, occasional strongly-worded letters, and the rest: He is the Chuck Schumer of finance. As Warshaw’s report puts it:

When an investment, and in this case a whole sector of investments, fails to perform over a long period of time and show no realistic signs of turning around, investment managers need to act. Each market cycle over the last two decades has left in its wake less value for fossil fuel companies and less value for fossil fuel investors. This value erosion and strong headwind threats are at the heart of the divestment argument. Why continue to invest in an industry that is now only 2.8% of the market with no plausible strategy to turn things around and a corporate culture that simply that denies the problem even exists? Investment managers need to focus their time on maximizing risk-adjusted returns, not engaging in politically-driven wishful thinking for an industry in permanent decline.

DiNapoli is not alone in his cowardice, of course. For a brief moment—when they were scared by the emergence of Greta’s worldwide movement before the pandemic—lots of financial leaders said they were going to take steps to address climate change. BlackRock, for instance, the biggest investor in the world, which has the power should it choose to use it, to make vast change fast. (BlackRock’s wealth is roughly twice the continent of Africa’s). Here’s what Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said in 2020:

Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasized the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity–a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.

The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations–including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk–is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.

Will cities, for example, be able to afford their infrastructure needs as climate risk reshapes the market for municipal bonds? What will happen to the 30-year mortgage–a key building block of finance–if lenders can’t estimate the impact of climate risk over such a long timeline, and if there is no viable market for flood or fire insurance in impacted areas? What happens to inflation, and in turn interest rates, if the cost of food climbs from drought and flooding? How can we model economic growth if emerging markets see their productivity decline due to extreme heat and other climate impacts?

Investors are increasingly reckoning with these questions and recognizing that climate risk is investment risk.

But then what happened? Big Oil pushed back, in the form of red state treasurers promising to pull their money from BlackRock. Suddenly Fink turned tail and ran. By now he’s part of President Donald Trump’s inner circle. As Pilita Clark explained in that radical journal the Financial Times over the weekend, DiNapoli and Fink’s failure of courage is endemic across too much of the American elite landscape:

This failure is not due to a shortage of scientific understanding or technological breakthroughs. It is because we lack the political changes needed to put financial systems and economies on to paths that avoid burning fossil fuels. Achieving those changes is inordinately difficult.

Public support from large businesses is important. Ultimately, staying quiet at a time like this is self-defeating. It undermines the global institutions needed to address a growing global climate problem that poses serious financial threats.

David Gelles, in the Times, has another sad account of this collective failure of nerve on Wall Street, and it’s well worth reading. As he writes:

Republican legislatures around the country introduced more than 100 bills to penalize financial companies that supported ESG practices. Republican state treasurers around the country began pulling money out.

This is the company DiNapoli keeps, and the people he apparently listens to—again, he’s a lot more like Chuck Schumer than he should be. So it’s very good news that insurgent candidate Warshaw is talking about bringing New York State’s financial might to bear—in part because it amplifies the message being sent by Mark Levine, new comptroller of the city of New York. Levine’s predecessor Brad Lander, who already led the divestment from fossil fuel companies, late in his tenure called for the city to ditch BlackRock, and Levine seems to be interested in following through.

Together, the pension funds of New York City and New York state control far more resources than the funds of the various red states combined. If they manage to put effective pressure on the oil industry and the finance industry, it will have enormous impact—it will aid enormously in the climate fight and it will undercut Trump. And it will encourage other blue state leaders to do likewise: Always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.

And New York can do so without putting anyone’s pension at risk—under the Empire State’s laws, the comptroller has to pay pensions in full no matter what happens to his investment portfolio, so there’s no danger Warshaw will do anything except save taxpayers large sums of money. (And Warshaw is not alone; the other Dem in the primary, Raj Goyle, has called for divestment too, though not with the same depth of analysis). This is a no-brainer, except if you’re stuck in your ways.

I helped found an organization devoted to elder action on behalf of climate and democracy; obviously I don’t think age disqualifies one from office. But DiNapoli is 71 and he represents the greatest danger of long tenure in office: a stultification of ideas, an inability to see new facts, a stubborn attachment to old ideas. It’s time for him, finally, to get out of the way, or to be voted out.

The climate fight, even in this country, is very far from over. The basic premise of that battle—that we must move swiftly away from the moral and financial sinkhole of Big Oil—is still clear and powerful.

A coalition of unions and other progressive groups is trying to get an initiative on California’s ballot this fall which would impose a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the 200-250 billionaires living in the state. The tax would be retroactive, so it applies to billionaires who lived in the state as of January 1 of this year. The supporters estimate that it could raise $100 billion, almost 30 percent of the state’s annual budget, although the tax could be paid over five years.

Many people have asked me what I thought about the tax. I confess to originally being hesitant. I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. After all, they are the ones with the money.

The right likes to push the story that billionaires won’t have incentive to become ridiculously rich if we tax them more. I always found that absurd, but even taken seriously what would it mean? Will Elon Musk spend less money and effort bribing politicians to get government contracts and favorable regulatory treatment if we tax him too much?

But that aside, I do take seriously concerns about evasion and avoidance. Billionaires care a lot about their money, and they are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid having to surrender it to the government. There clearly is some point at which we get less tax revenue by raising rates, as a result of evasion and avoidance. And that point is lower at the state and local level than the national level, since it’s much easier for billionaires to move out of New York City or California than to leave the United States.

On this point, I was influenced by research by Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu showing that the state lost 60 percent of the revenue anticipated by California’s 2012 Proposition 30. This raised the marginal tax rate on people earning more than $1 million a year from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent. This suggested to me that California was very close to this tipping point. (It got closer when Trump’s 2017 tax bill limited the deduction for state and local taxes on the federal taxes.)

Rauh works at the conservative Hoover Institute, so I naturally viewed the work with suspicion, but I could not see anything wrong with it. (If anyone can tell me where they messed up, I’m all ears.)

Anyhow, recognizing that avoidance and evasion are real, I have always been cautious about efforts to whack the rich with very large taxes. I am open to the California wealth tax because its structure seems to minimize this risk.

By making the date at which the wealth tax applies in the past, rich people cannot leave going forward. I was concerned about some billionaires fleeing when the tax was being discussed in the fall, and it seems some did, but at this point that’s water under the bridge.

To be clear, I’m absolutely certain that many of the people facing the tax will do everything they can to try to escape the tax, starting with defeating the initiative, and then tying it up in the courts as long as they can. With the ultimate decision likely to rest with the Republican Supreme Court, I’m not at all confident that the state will see the money, but we can’t preemptively surrender. At this point it seems worth going full speed ahead with the initiative.

The Longer Term: Let’s Not Have Billionaires

My bigger complaint with the effort to tax back some of the billionaires’ billions is that we should be more focused on not letting them be billionaires in the first place. There is an incredibly lazy view that we just have a market sitting there, which generates inequality, and then we need the government to step in to redistribute income.

More than a decade ago, Elizabeth Warren, who I greatly admire, did a viral video that was dubbed “you didn’t build that.” The gist of it was that the success of rich people depended on a social and physical infrastructure that was paid for by the whole of society, not just the hard work and ingenuity of the person who happened to get rich.

This is very true. To be profitable, a factory needs the roads and ports to bring their materials in and ship their finished product out. It also needs a skilled workforce to be both on the factory flaw and to handle business operations. No one can get rich by themselves.

Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Go Far Enough

But this is only part of the story. In addition to the physical and social infrastructure, we have a massive set of rules that determine who gets to keep the goodies. I keep harping on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, both because there is a huge amount of money at stake (easily over $1 trillion a year or $8k per household) and because they so obviously could be different.

We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, allowing their holders to profit much less from them. Also, we can rely more on alternative mechanisms, like direct public funding of research, as we do currently with more than $50 billion a year in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. Many of today’s yacht-loving billionaires would still be working for a living with different rules on intellectual property.

Labor law is another obvious case where governments set the rules, and they could be structured in a way far more beneficial to workers. In the early post-World War II era it was widely recognized that large corporations with monopolistic power dominated the economy, but that was not necessarily seen as a bad thing, because their workers also benefited from higher wages. This was due to the fact that they were unionized and able to demand their share of the benefits from monopolistic power.

This is much less the case today because unions are far weaker. But that is not a natural outcome, the rules on labor-management relations were written to make workers weaker. There is no natural market in this story, the government writes the rules to make them more beneficial to one side or the other.

Just to give a few examples: the prohibition on secondary boycotts in the US is a regulation that unambiguously weakens unions. A secondary boycott would mean Elon Musk’s suppliers could be struck over sending him steel, if he didn’t give the auto workers at Tesla a big pay hike.

The ban on union shops (“right-to-work”) in most states, where all the workers who benefit from a union pay their share of the union’s costs, is a government intervention against freedom of contract. This also weakens workers. Restrictions or outright bans on collective bargaining by gig workers is another example. In addition, there could be serious penalties for violating labor laws, as in millions of dollars in fines from real courts, rather than joke sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board.

None of this is “the market.” This is a story of government policy designed to give more money to the oligarchs.

The list goes on. Mark Zuckerberg, and now Larry Ellison, would be much poorer without Section 230, which protects their massive social media platforms from the same sort of liability for spreading lies that print and broadcast media face. Different bankruptcy laws that made private equity firms liable for the debts of the companies they take over and then push into bankruptcy would likely have prevented many of today’s billionaires, as would applying a sales tax on financial transactions similar to the sales tax people pay when they buy clothes or shoes.

This is the topic of my now dated book Rigged (it’s free). The point is that the market is infinitely malleable. We can structure it in a way that leads to far more equality or in ways that gives all the money to billionaires, as we have done in the last half century.

In that context, by all means we should try to find creative ways to tax back some of the wealth we have allowed them to accumulate, but it makes much sense, and it’s much more efficient, not to structure the market in a way that gives them all the money in the first place.

In principle, extremists primarily seek to harm people who do not share their race, religion, or nationality. In practice, they often harm the very people they claim to serve and protect, people with whom they share some supposedly sacred demographic.

Consider Minnesota, currently under siege by anti-immigrant extremists in the employ of the federal government, with ICE and CBP at the forefront. Immigrants have indisputably suffered the most from this program of harm, but we have seen a recent turn toward harming non-immigrants.

This change was starkly illustrated with the January 7 slaying of Renee Good by anti-immigration forces, which was followed by an escalating crackdown on protesters, observers, and people simply trying to go about their lives. On Saturday, January 24, ICE killed another Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, a registered nurse who worked to help veterans, who put his body between immigration officials and other citizens targeted for violence, as clearly seen in multiple videos of the slaying. Federal government agents are shown shooting Pretti in the back while he was pinned to the ground, immobilized, and disarmed.

It goes without saying that citizens and immigrants alike should be equally entitled to live with dignity and free of state violence, and it should be emphasized that citizens are not “more important” victims than immigrants. However, these recent attacks highlight an important dynamic and key vulnerability in any extremist movement.

Through their courage and solidarity, Minnesotans from all walks of life are asserting an authentic American identity based on inclusive ideals in the face of adversity and escalating violence.

To make sense of this, we must first discuss how and why extremists classify people according to their social identity. The broadest categories of identity are in-groups and out-groups. An in-group is the group to which one belongs, and an out-group is anyone excluded from that in-group. As defined in my MIT Press book on the subject, extremism is the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group.

Enacting harm on out-groups is risky, difficult, and costly, so extremists almost always seek to make the task easier by enlisting the entire in-group. To understand how this works, it’s useful to break the in-group down into subcategories.

• The extremist in-group is a movement based on a demand to harm out-groups. Examples include Al-Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan.
• The eligible in-group is the category of people an extremist movement claims to represent and from which it seeks support. For Al-Qaeda, the eligible in-group is Sunni Muslims. For the KKK, the eligible in-group is white people.

In the extremist context, eligibility refers to the traits that make someone eligible for in-group membership. For instance, according to the KKK, light-colored skin is the minimum requirement for eligibility in the category of “white people.” But eligibility implies a counterpart: ineligibility. To continue with the same example, the most obviously ineligible people are members of an out-group, such as those with dark-colored skin.

But eligible in-groups often rebuke the extremists who claim to represent them, throwing the extremist movement’s legitimacy into crisis. If the extremist movement can’t persuade the eligible in-group to enact harm on out-groups, it may try to change the composition of the in-group by declaring that dissenters have forfeited the right to their in-group identity.

Extremist movements are at their most dangerous during times of uncertainty or upheaval.

The ineligible in-group thus consists of people who possess the canonical qualifications for membership but whose actions put them at risk of expulsion. In white supremacist extremism, for example, the ineligible in-group usually includes white people who have sexual relations with non-white people and are therefore subjected to even harsher treatment than the out-group. For instance, the infamous “Day of the Rope” massacre described in the neo-Nazi novel “The Turner Diaries” refers to the gruesome public execution of white “race traitors,” while racial out-group members are killed without fanfare “off camera.”

Extremist movements are at their most dangerous during times of uncertainty or upheaval, when group boundaries can be suddenly redrawn, with control of the in-group hanging in the balance. An extremist movement that hasn’t consolidated control of the in-group often declares war against “ineligible” dissenters. We saw this play out in the mid-2010s, when the Islamic State organization (IS) attempted to consolidate its control of a large swath of Iraq and Syria. Sunni Muslims who opposed IS control were massacred mercilessly under the principle “nine bullets for the traitors, one for the crusader.”

Disturbingly, we’re seeing the early stages of this dynamic right now in Minnesota, although we can hope it will not evolve into atrocities of the same scale. Anti-immigrant extremists in the U.S. federal government have increasingly menaced and used violence against dissenters and observers who are U.S. citizens — members of the in-group that the extremists claim to serve and protect. In addition to the Good and Pretti shootings, federal agents have roughed up and detained observers without provocation, and have repeatedly used pepper spray on peaceful gatherings, sometimes at close range and in violation of safe operation guidelines. In one horrific incident, a car full of children was exposed to tear gas while their parents tried to drive them home from a school event. The extremists continue to escalate their program of harm against the ineligible in-group, with no end in sight.

One of the most important ways extremists seek control of the eligible in-group is by exploiting the socially constructed nature of reality. The theory of social construction is popularly understood as “consensus reality,” and its premise is simple enough: The world is too big and complicated for people to experience in its entirety. We can only understand the world through consultation with trusted others, who tell us what happens out of our sight and help us determine right from wrong. Put simply, we can only understand the world in dialogue with others.

In-groups and out-groups come into play during social construction. We tend to trust people whose experience of life is most like our own, typically those with whom we share some concept of identity — anything from race and religion to neighborhood and nationality. When this normal instinct congeals into an excessive attachment to a specific identity and a mandate to harm people who don’t share that identity, it becomes extremism. Almost everything done by authoritarians and fascists (for whom extremism is an essential tool) can be understood as an effort to control the social construction of reality by amplifying selected in-group views and entirely suppressing the views of out-groups through methods that range from discrimination to segregation to genocide.

To this end, the current generation of anti-immigration extremists is navigating turbulent waters, in part because its coalition is complex and not exclusively focused on immigration writ large. The alliance includes often-overlapping categories of racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes, and the priorities of its factions are not always aligned. This increasingly fractious coalition is ill-equipped to face down an increasingly cohesive coalition of Americans united by anger that our nation’s peace, progress, and safety have been intentionally undermined.

Minnesotans are courageously demonstrating this unity, mobilizing to defend neighbors whose race or national origin puts them at risk. In the process, they are communicating a strong in-group consensus to their persecutors by turning out in large numbers and loudly asserting their condemnation through shouting, blowing whistles, giving sermons, honking horns, posting signs, and painting graffiti. These expressions of in-group disapproval can help defuse the psychological drivers of violence and undermine competing narratives and political power structures that seek to validate an extremist orientation and the repressive tactics that it justifies.

In a globalized media environment like America’s, the in-group is never just local. People around the country can support Minnesotans using many of the same tactics — by speaking out and showing up in large numbers, both online and offline, as so many have already done. In conjunction — and perhaps even more importantly — we can fight the tide of hate by demanding that institutions, including politicians and the media, recognize the severity of the current crisis in American democracy and respond proportionately.

Those institutions are critically important precisely because America’s consensus reality is, again, too big and too diverse to observe directly. You could spend your entire life talking to Americans and still understand only a tiny fragment of the American experience. For in-groups larger than a neighborhood, the consensus is therefore described and defined by institutions and individuals in journalism, politics, and the arts. These portraits of the in-group consensus are distributed through traditional and new media platforms, and none of them are neutral.

The winner of this struggle will define what values the American in-group stands for, perhaps for generations to come.

It is no accident that the purveyors of hate have moved to take control of major news and social media platforms through a combination of money and pressure tactics, and to discredit and defund those they can’t control. In some cases, these platforms have been bought outright and subjected to blunt and obvious manipulation. In other cases, reporters have succumbed to flawed journalistic conventions, such as providing “both sides” of every controversy with equal weight, even when one side is obviously lying or otherwise detached from reality. This practice misleads the public by inflating the extremists’ appearance of strength and credibility under the guise of “balance.” (Imagine news programs inviting a flat-earth believer to weigh in whenever the subject of the globe comes up. That’s what happens now when the topic is immigration or vaccines.)

The in-group consensus can never be determined with perfect objectivity. The tools for measuring it, such as polls, are complex and subject to bias. Even if polls were perfectly composed and executed, they would still be open to wildly divergent interpretations. Look through the archives and ask which presidents won “with a mandate” over the last 100 years. Then compare their vote counts.

In other words, the consensus is won through perception. And when an authority figure, an institution, or an algorithm creates the perception that extremists are winning, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People have a well-documented tendency to justify the legitimacy of the status quo as they perceive it.

Although we can reject those who would assign us to an out-group or an ineligible in-group, we cannot assume that our voices will be acknowledged. If America is to climb out of this era of rage and hate, those who stand against the extremist wave cannot just show up and expect to be counted. They must loudly demand their voices be acknowledged in every setting and institution of civic life, from business to politics, from news to the creative arts. With every death at the hands of anti-immigrant extremists, this assertion becomes more necessary and potentially more powerful.

Even so, a winning narrative or communication strategy may not be enough to defeat those who seek to control the in-group consensus using state violence. If the extremists can’t persuade the ineligible in-group to surrender, they will seek to intimidate and perhaps kill its members, an escalation that is now well underway. That is why the eligible in-group must defend its relevance with all available methods, including the courts, the ballot box, mutual aid, and more. Justice must be pursued, regardless of whether accused murderers wear a badge. And all of these in-group actions will build and reinforce support and mobilization networks that will be sorely needed before this is over.

We’ve arrived at a critical juncture in the history of this country and the world beyond, which is being buffeted by the same reactionary forces. The winner of this struggle will define what values the American in-group stands for, perhaps for generations to come. Through their courage and solidarity, Minnesotans from all walks of life are asserting an authentic American identity based on inclusive ideals in the face of adversity and escalating violence. For those values to prevail, we must stand together in their defense.

This piece was originally published by The MIT Press Reader and appears here at Common Dreams with permission.

One of the many remarkable and lasting ideas the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed into the national conversation was the concept of something he called “negative peace.”

Although the phrase began appearing in the writings of the civil rights leader in the late 1950s, King made the idea famous in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he was locked up for fighting segregation in Alabama’s largest city. He was annoyed by a letter from eight local white clergymen, titled a “Call for Unity,” that begged King to end a civil disobedience crusade for racial integration and seek progress through negotiations and the courts.

When an aide smuggled the newspaper into King’s cell, he began furiously scribbling his response in the margins of the ad before writing more on any scrap of paper he could find. His key passage argues that the white moderate was a greater threat to Black freedom than the KKK, because he was someone “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” and who wants African Americans to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Flash-forward 63 years, and the grand pooh-bahs of US capitalism have learned nothing from this. On Sunday, 60 major corporations based in Minnesota — feeling caught in the crossfire of the federal immigration raids tearing apart Greater Minneapolis and the growing resistance movement — issued a cowardly and pathetic call for a negative peace to reduce the tensions.

The open letter that was released through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce was signed by the CEOs or equivalents of almost every major Gopher State brand that you could think of — including Target, 3M, General Mills, Hormel, UnitedHealth (yes, that UnitedHealth), and all five major sports franchises. Some of these firms are beginning to see real economic fallout from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and protest activities, which have kept some frightened Black and brown workers at home and triggered a large general strike last Friday.

The letter reads little differently from the Birmingham ministers’ “Call for Unity.”

“With yesterday’s tragic news”—a vague, bloodless reference to the 10 shots fired by federal officers into a 37-year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti—“we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” the letter states. It notes that Minnesota business leaders have been in touch with Gov. Tim Walz, the Donald Trump White House, and others in pleading for what it hopes would be a solution to the state’s crisis.

Pretti is never mentioned in the letter. Neither is Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was gunned down behind the wheel of her family SUV by an ICE agent as she attempted to drive away from a confrontation. In fact, ICE is never mentioned, nor are the federal agency’s most outrageous tactics, such as the seizure of a 5-year-old boy as “bait” to detain him and his father, or dragging a barely dressed Hmong refugee who is a U.S. citizen out of his home in frigid weather.

The entire letter is remarkable not for what it says—since it says very little beyond praying this whole mess somehow goes away so they can go back to making money without thinking about such dreadful things—than for what it doesn’t say.

There is no condemnation of the murders of two U.S. citizens who did nothing beyond legally monitoring the federal officers and their activities while on public streets. There is no condemnation of the ICE tactics in seizing hardworking migrants with no criminal records who are the backbone of the Minnesota community. There is nothing about what MLK would have called “positive peace”—a desire for real justice.

That’s probably because positive peace requires bold choices and displays of real courage—qualities that modern corporate America seems to have misplaced in a giant warehouse somewhere.

Exhibit A would have to be Target, the large national retailer that, with its hundreds of stores and its name slapped on the NBA’s Timberwolves’ arena, is now to many Americans the corporate face of Minnesota. Under pressure from demonstrators, including more than 100 clergy who protested outside Target’s Minneapolis headquarters on Friday, the retailer still said nothing — before the tepid group letter — about the ongoing ICE raids, or why agents have been allowed to stage operations in its parking lots and even inside stores.

There’s a bleak history here. In 2020, Minnesota became the epicenter of the fight for racial justice when the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd was captured on video. That time, the state’s CEOs not only expressed moral outrage but pledged to spend heavily on diversity initiatives. Five years later, the local news site Racket reported many of these firms had backtracked, and that barely a third of the pledged $550 million had been spent.

This time, the business leaders just want the “tension” to disappear. That’s not so easy. Just ask Target. Its early 2025 move to end its diversity initiatives as Trump took office sparked calls from Black leaders for a boycott that has cut into store traffic and lowered Target’s stock price. It seems that moral surrender actually does have a price.

Also on Sunday, the team chaplain for the Timberwolves—ironically, one of the teams that signed onto the corporate letter—issued a personal statement with loud echoes of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” calling out any churches that had prayed that morning for peace and unity but not for justice.

“Peace is what the powerful ask for when they don’t want to be interrupted,” Matt Moberg wrote in a short piece that went viral on social media, adding, “Unity that refuses to name violence is just loyalty to the ones holding the weapons.”

This wouldn’t be the first time corporate America misread the room. Sunday’s statement suggested a continued deer-in-the-headlights reaction from the shock of Trump’s return to office—even as the CEOs ignore not just the power of the Target boycotts but the recent success of economic justice campaigns against firms from Disney to Avelo Airlines, not to mention the solidarity that drove the Minneapolis general strike.

Already, there is growing talk of a national general strike or expanded boycotts by millions of citizens who are also consumers, and who are both furious over the Good and Pretti murders and now flabbergasted by the corporate cone of silence. America’s business leaders don’t understand that cowardice has a steep cost attached.

Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board presented the 2026 Doomsday Clock. At 85 seconds to midnight, this is the closest it has been since the original clock was presented 79 years ago by the Bulletin’s founders, scientists who were involved with the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. The prophetic clock symbolizes the proximity of humanity to nuclear apocalypse at the strike of midnight. It is yet again a stark reminder of how close we are to nuclear Armageddon and the end of life as we know it. It is at great peril that we continue to ignore this pronouncement. The current board is composed of globally recognized leaders in science, academia and threat assessment who are charged with determining the potential of man-made existential threats.

In recent years, the movement forward of the minute hand has taken into account the nuclear risk accelerators of climate change, disruptive technologies, emerging threats and a breakdown of international cooperation.

This announcement comes as civil society and the majority of the world‘s population last week celebrated the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which formally made nuclear weapons illegal to have, test, develop, stockpile, transfer and/or threaten to use. In defiance of international law and norms, the nuclear nine nations continue their arms race to develop and modernize their nuclear weapons under the gross fallacy of nuclear deterrence. In reality deterrence remains the greatest driver of the current arms race and threat to our survival. This year’s setting of the Doomsday Clock follows a year where global order has been shaken and conflict multipliers occur, seemingly on a daily basis, increasing nuclear proliferation and potential for use either by intent, miscalculation, accident, or cyber attack. In this past year, 5 of the 9 nuclear nations, Russia, the U.S., Israel, India and Pakistan, were at war, the last two with each other and China has made increasingly bellicose threats to occupy Taiwan.

Additionally, the push to resume nuclear power and the entire nuclear fuel cycle, setting aside environmental safeguards, is presented under the charade of nuclear power – totally ignoring the intimate connection between nuclear power and weapons development increases the availability of nuclear material and thus the risk of nuclear proliferation, increased contamination of our communities, and, of course, a nuclear war.

Finally, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty, New START, is set to expire February 5 with no follow on treaty in the works.

This breakdown of international nuclear norms, fueled by “us versus them” thinking and the newly termed “Donroe doctrine” challenges our legitimacy around the world.

These flashpoints coupled with the interconnected existential threat of climate change that moves forward with the failure to create any significant climate agreements this past year. This has worsened due to the U.S. withdrawal from 66 international organizations and treaties further isolating us around the world.

Currently global nuclear arsenals have approximately 12,321 weapons or roughly 267,000 times the firepower of the bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Therefore, when, and not if, nuclear deterrence fails, as it certainly will as long as these weapons exist, everyone and everything we care about will be destroyed. As Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev stated in 1985, subsequently reaffirmed by Presidents Biden and Putin in 2021, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” We cannot outspend or outgun our way out of this. Our only hope for survival for our generation and future generations is the complete and verified elimination of these weapons.

Fortunately there is hope. The non-nuclear nations of the world have refused to be bullied any longer. The International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by 99 nations, and ratified by 74 nations, is now international law. Here in the United States we have a growing grassroots movement, Back from the Brink, at all levels of our society, from civil society including faith-based organizations to cities, counties, states and bicameral resolutions in the U.S. House (H.Res.317) and Senate (S.Res.323) with 55 sponsors.

We can and must demand action now. Absent this we risk the reality expressed by Oppenheimer when he said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We must push back against the nuclear industrial complex and their captured elected officials. We must denounce the lie of deterrence whenever and wherever it is uttered. We must choose the path of hope, the hope and commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons. We will then be free to turn our global attention and our resources to fighting our other interconnected existential threat of climate change. The choice is ours.

Early on Saturday, January 3rd, Venezuela was attacked on behalf of oil, mineral, tech, and weapons profiteers in a regime change operation. Since then, the Trump administration has threatened Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. What unites these threats? The US quest for endless resource extraction to power its increasingly deadly global empire. And it’s not slowing down. These resource wars and “operations” are emerging as the AI drive also ramps up. In July, Palantir and the Pentagon signed a 10-year, $10 billion agreement. In April 2025, Palantir won a $30 million contract with ICE — a significant development in their decade-plus-long partnership that we are now seeing play out in their increasingly militarized, unrestrained murders and abductions in Minneapolis and around the country. This increasingly inextricable partnership between AI and the war economy is throwing us into a fast track of climate and environmental chaos that threatens us all.

In August, I learned about an AI program created by the US-armed Israeli military called “Where’s Daddy.” The program is designed to track individuals Israel is targeting in order to kill them at home with their families. In October 2023, the AI war giant Palantir entered into a contract with the Israeli military. Since 2021, the Israeli Occupation Forces have been working with tech companies like Google on AI programs such as Project Nimbus, used to surveil and murder Palestinians. “Where’s Daddy” and other overlapping systems represent the newest phase of this. The program characterizes the families of these alleged combatants as “collateral damage” and is often far from accurate, killing entire families without the “intended targets” even being there. The tech companies developing these programs do not have anyone’s “safety” or “security” in mind; they are solely motivated by profit. This cruelty is no surprise— these companies are the same ones building toxic data centers across the US, largely in working-class and Black and Brown communities, in the newest phase of environmental injustice.

We’ve been hearing about AI more and more as it enters the commercial market in increasingly pervasive ways. In particular, much has been reported about AI data centers entering communities and the opposition to them. Many of these fights have been taken up by environmental organizations; it’s estimated that data centers could consume approximately 21% of global energy by 2030. In order to sustain this energy use, data centers need cooling. Mid-sized data centers use as much water as a city of 50,000 people. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana is projected to use as much water as the entire city of New Orleans. Another Meta center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is projected to use more power than the state of Wyoming itself.

These AI and tech companies are war profiteers.

These centers not only increase electricity bills for communities that can’t afford them, but they also generate significant air, water, and noise pollution. Some centers regularly use diesel “emergency” generators to meet increased demand. Each generator is the size of a railcar, and thousands are littered across data center hotspots like Northern Virginia. As a result, toxic chemicals are seeping into the lungs of residents, causing asthma and long-term illness. Data centers are known to create noise pollution, with constant hums that can lead to hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, and a host of other long-term issues. Furthermore, equipment is certain to break down and lead to toxic waste and electronic pollution.

“Critical” minerals are required for the operation of these data centers. The process of obtaining these minerals, supposedly also used for green technology, requires the militarization, destabilization, and total plunder of mineral-rich regions. These minerals are supposedly “critical” for energy transitions, and some have advocated more “sustainable” methods for maintaining data centers through “green” technologies.

The use of these minerals is clear: The Pentagon recently became the largest shareholder in MP Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in the Western Hemisphere. Why? Aluminum for fighter jets. Titanium for missiles. And copper, lithium, cobalt, and many others for data center batteries and semiconductors. The more data centers are built, the more minerals are needed. This process of extraction has murdered millions in the Congo, destroying the soil, water, and forest: one of the largest “lungs” of the planet. It has led to the newest phase of imperialist aggression on Venezuela, a mineral-rich country with the largest oil reserves in the world (oil, of course, is also essential for data centers). Additionally, it has led to the attempted subordination of the Philippines to semiconductor production. The US also seeks to use the archipelago as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the US’s looming war with China, its largest competitor in the AI and mineral race.

These are the impacts we already know to be devastating. But this is also new technology, which means there’s a lot we don’t know and a lot that’s being intentionally hidden. Lack of transparency is the norm in this industry. As data centers rapidly expand and buy up land around the country, the actual companies behind them hide behind non-disclosure agreements. This is not dissimilar to the intentional concealment of the military's role in global emissions, enacted through US pressure at the third U.N. Climate Change Conference in 1997. Decades later, the issue of militarism is still left out of climate conversations.

The parallel makes sense, considering how the AI industry has fused with the war machine. The US military is one of the most environmentally destructive forces on the planet. In its oil consumption alone, the US military is the world's largest institutional polluter. The 800+ US bases in 80 countries globally are known to regularly leak jet fuel and cancer-causing PFAS chemicals, along with a toxic cocktail of hundreds of other chemicals. While training exercises like RIMPAC in the Asia-Pacific region authorize the deaths of thousands of sea creatures, in environmental sacrifice zones like Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, toxic waste from military facilities has killed infants hours after birth. In bomb testing sites like Vieques, off the coast of mainland Puerto Rico, lung cancer and bronchitis rates have been shown to be 200% higher than on the mainland for men, and 280% for women. And the oil-motivated “war on terror” emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2001-2017.

Now we are entering a new era of resource wars that will further destroy the planet as the AI race with China accelerates. The relationship between AI and the US military goes beyond the Pentagon’s contracts with Palantir, Meta, and Microsoft: last June, executives Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Andrew Bosworth (Meta), Kevin Well (OpenAI), and Bob McGrew (Thinking Machines Lab, previously OpenAI) were sworn into the US Army as lieutenant colonels. Michael Obadal, executive of the AI-war manufacturing company Anduril, is now the Under Secretary of the US Army, still with hundreds of thousands in Anduril stock. Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, is himself a major funder of Anduril. In June 2025, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic entered into $200 million contracts with the Department of War. The more you look at the partnerships between such companies and their executives, the Pentagon, governmental departments, and other entities, the more tangled this military-tech-industrial complex all becomes.

Many organizing groups are rightfully building power against the data centers that literally fuel it all, pushing for increased regulation and transparency. At the same time as Palantir makes new deals with the Pentagon, regulations in sacrifice zones are being thrown out the window. On December 18th, the House of Representatives passed a bill backed by Microsoft, Micron, and OpenAI to fast-track data centers. The bill significantly reduces the number of environmental and financial factors that can be considered in permitting processes. It’s simple. These communities are becoming the Camp Lejeunes of a new age: the new toxic waste dumps in the belly of the beast used to power the war machine. They must be fought against at all costs.

Regulation is crucial. It’s also far from a long-term solution. There is a lot that we don’t know, because a lot is hidden: just how much of these companies are tied up with weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon, and proxies like Israel; the environmental destruction caused by military usage of AI; the specific usage of all of these data centers. But it is obvious that AI is becoming inseparable from war-making, that increased AI means increased war-making, and that increased war-making is resulting in new and increased forms of unfathomable environmental destruction to communities around the world and here within the belly of the beast.

AI has been creeping up our necks. The horrific “Where’s Daddy” program existed long before I heard of it. It seems like these products are popping up in every corner of the market before we can even start discussing them. Their emergence has been intentionally designed to not only conceal their role in environmental destruction, but also their role in the militarism destroying communities from Virginia to Gaza.

No part of this is sustainable—not the war economy, not unending extraction, regardless of how much “green tech” it produces, and not an AI-driven speculative economy. We cannot afford to have splintered conversations either; these AI and tech companies are war profiteers. The new Cold War on China drives this. The genocide in Palestine drives this. The war on Venezuela, Latin America, and the Caribbean drives this. And so our organizing must be unified against the impacts, mechanisms, and causes. Against data centers and the wars that drive them. We need to stop the blood. But we can’t lose sight of why and how the bullets are fired.

In the aftermath of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by US forces in early 2026, the Trump administration has repeatedly proclaimed the full “cooperation” of Venezuela’s interim leadership, prominently naming Acting President Delcy Rodríguez as a key partner. Under the clear framework of international law, however, these assertions are legally meaningless—null and void from their inception. Cooperation, to carry legal or diplomatic weight, must be freely given. What has been presented instead resembles consent extracted under duress.

A growing body of evidence indicates that the purported “partnership” with Rodríguez and the interim government was not the product of diplomacy or mutual interest, but of military intervention, direct threats, and sustained economic coercion. Reports circulating widely describe a leaked audio recording in which Venezuelan officials were issued a fifteen-minute ultimatum by US forces following Maduro’s ouster: comply or face lethal consequences. While the recording has not been independently authenticated, neither its gravity nor its substance has been officially denied or investigated. The allegation remains unrefuted and gains plausibility from its consistency with publicly observable executive conduct.

At the same time, US officials publicly took credit for controlling Venezuela’s transitional arrangements. State assets, including oil revenues, were placed under American authority. Sanctions were explicitly framed by senior Treasury officials as instruments of “economic statecraft,” designed to impose maximum financial pressure to influence political outcomes. In substance and by their foreseeable consequences, this strategy operates as a form of hybrid coercion—seeking regime change through economic collapse rather than direct military engagement. This is not diplomacy; it is coercion through threat and deprivation, as a matter of law and practice.

International law leaves little room for ambiguity. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides that any agreement secured through the coercion of state representatives is legally void, and that arrangements born of the threat or use of force are nullities as a matter of law. These provisions reflect foundational principles: the legitimacy of state action rests on the free will of its representatives. Consent given under the barrel of a gun—or under the crushing weight of engineered economic catastrophe—cannot be recognized as valid. By this standard, claims of Venezuelan “cooperation” do not demonstrate diplomatic success; they amount to admissions of coercion.

That Rodríguez now serves as interim president under these conditions does not confer legitimacy on her actions as a freely acting representative. If her authority emerged under duress, shaped by ultimatums and bounded by ongoing threats of renewed military action or economic devastation, then any subsequent “cooperation” attributed to her must be treated with profound skepticism. Acting where refusal is not a viable option is not partnership; it is submission enforced by power.

The broader danger lies in normalizing coercion disguised as consent. If executives can compel foreign leadership changes through military or economic force and then cite “cooperation” from installed interlocutors as proof of legitimacy, international law is rendered meaningless. Domestic safeguards erode as well: war-powers constraints are sidelined, congressional oversight is bypassed, and a precedent is set for repetition elsewhere, wherever the next “strategic interest” is declared. This is not solely a Venezuelan concern; it is a warning for global governance and democratic accountability.

Every claim by the Trump administration regarding Venezuelan “cooperation” after the forceful removal of President Maduro must therefore be regarded as legally and morally suspect. International law does not grant impunity to victors, validate arrangements imposed under threat of annihilation, or recognize coerced submission as consent. Until coercion is replaced by a genuinely free and verifiable process grounded in real diplomacy, all current assertions of cooperation with Hon. Delcy Rodríguez and the interim Venezuelan government are, by definition and by law, null and void.

He broke it! He did not wait for permission to change things. He simply bent and, in most cases, broke it. If the answer was going to be no, why wait for the no is his strategy. The strategy is to test the basic mores of the country. Don't ask about tearing down the West Wing of the White House. He ordered the dismantling of DEI and government and businesses fell into line. It resulted in one of the biggest reductions in workforce in government employment with workers surprised and left scurrying to find new job security. Vastly significant portions of Black women, estimated 300,000 "lost their good government job." He did not ask for permission to do that. He demanded that historical language be sanitized in museums and on official signage erasing historical social and racial justice messaging. He just did it. As he bombed boats in the Caribbean Sea, killing a hundred people, he did not ask whether it was legal but simply let the incendiary devices fly. The justification offered was that they were bringing drugs to America which was not feasible or truthful given where the boats were. When he commandeered ships carrying oil from Venezuela he did not ask. He hijacked the ships without seeking permission. He sent troops into American cities without respect for local governments using the weight of the national government.

Trump's right-wing agenda has inspired and turned loosed a viciousness embodied in the actions of trained and also hastily onboarded federal law enforcement that are acting more like storm troopers than anything else. Renee Good was shot three times as she served as a monitor observing these storm troopers. She seemed to try and connect appealing to the humanity of the federal agents, as observed on video but was spurned and in futility she tried to drive away. As she turned the wheels on her vehicle to leave the hatred and right-wing zeal of a federal agent stepped in front of her vehicle and discharged his weapon. He killed her for no apparent reason other than she for watching and monitoring the action of these federally protected agents. She was not an immigrant, but she was a mother, wife and an American citizen. They shot her three times. Then approximately two and a half weeks later, early on a Saturday morning Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the VA was shoved to the ground, brutally beaten by this death squad and shot nine time in five seconds. He died on the spot. He also was an American citizen exercising his right to protest trying to safeguard the community from this lawless occupation. The Trump administration quickly swung into action to discredit and devalue their lives by calling them "terrorists". This is a word DHS and Christie Noem use to justify any and all ICE shootings and killings. ICE and immigration officials have discharged their weapons into the American public at least 16 times. The headlines, as the media try to collect information, expands not necessarily daily but certainly. In January 2026, The Wall Street Journal identified at least 13 instances of immigration officers "firing at or into civilian vehicles" but by the end of the month that figure was obsolete. There is a violent, murderous hatred embedded in the attitudes of these so-called officers of the law.

Local government has tried to resist. In Montgomery County, Maryland there is currently a bill, The County Values Act, that would require a judicial warrant for ICE to access nonpublic areas in county facilities. It would also prohibit the use of county-owned parking lots, garages and vacant lots for immigration enforcement. There is also The Unmask ICE Act, that would prohibit federal, state and local law enforcement from wearing masks on the job. That seems only fair since because in many jurisdictions it was already illegal for citizens to be masked! Currently some 15 states have proposed bills to prohibit law enforcement officers from wearing masks. The federal law enforcement agencies claim that masks are to protect DHS officers and their families by shielding their identities. That is ironic since cameras are in use by ICE and other federal agencies to build a facial recognition database. There are and has been attempts to pushback against federal masks and the conduct of federal agents. Bills have been proposed in Alaska, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. Each of these legislative bodies are appalled by the dangers of troops in the streets and are seeking to reestablish democratic norms. Twenty-one state attorney generals penned and sent a letter to Members of Congress urging them to pass legislation to prohibit immigration agents from wearing masks. They warned that ICE agents wearing masks “have the effect of terrorizing communities rather than protecting them.” They further stated in the letter that “the commonplace use of masks and the failure of ICE to identify themselves as law enforcement makes everyone less safe and weakens the integrity of our justice systems.” The pushback is admirable and needed but the issues are far more than masks but the overall viciousness and violent attacks being carried out with impunity on American streets against immigrants and citizens alike.

These bills and letters are local governments and political leaders operating within the culture and structure of American conformity where decorum is presented and the traditional rules of law applies. Civil protest and discourse are exercised believing that the structures have power. They have been trained to abide by the rules of civility. Meanwhile the federal behemoth is trampling standard political decorum by bending things until they break and using the weight of the federal government to crush any the resistance. What is needed now and before it is too late is the deliberate creation of a constitutional crisis.

The 10th amendment has swung in opposite streams through US history. Its purpose was to maintain boundaries between the federal government and the states. It was ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights. This is one reason why it took so long for slavery to be abolished in the United States. The federal government was restrained in ordering states what to do and nearing the Civil War battles were fought within certain territories of whether they would become a free state or a protectorate of enslavement. It took the Civil War for slavery to be abolished. Then with federal troops stationed in the former slave states there were several years where enfranchisement and relative freedom was advanced. That period is called Reconstruction. The federal government used its powers to enforce political and social inclusion. However, the racists fought back through acts of terror and sabotage until Reconstruction ended with federal troops being withdrawn from the south. Once again, those former slave states were free to institute Black codes and legally enforced racial stratification and separation. The federal government did not intervene for another 100 years until the civil rights movement challenged the legalities of racial segregation by pushing and passing laws using the weight of federal government to restrain the racial excesses of local governments. We in the racial justice movement wanted the federal government to regulate the behavior of the states. So, you can imagine the angst I have in this historical moment for a stronger state and local government.

The irony is that in this historical moment I would like to see a strong local and state government that is able to muster its own law enforcement to confront, challenge, question, apprehend, and arrest masked federal armed marauders. This requires local governments to call upon local law enforcement to be loyal to the local community and committed to protecting the community from the violence being perpetuated by federal authorities.

The local authorities need to have future employment predicated on whether local law enforcement is committed to the safety of the local population or will continue to stand assisting federal agents as they assault the population. They need to be tested as to whether they are more loyal to local government or obedient to federal agents who are racially targeting, terrorizing, assaulting, shooting and killing the local population. This is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. Local government must demand that members of local law enforcement go after masked agents, arrest them for every act that threatens, every person kidnapped without due process, each violation of property rights, and for acts of violence against the local population. In other words, local law enforcement should be pressured to do what they have always done in every social and racial justice uprising - demand order, protect property, people, and make arrest!

We are in a civil war, and the tables of history have turned because the federal government is trampling over all the rights at the local level.

This historical moment demands that we find strategies to bend it back and maybe do our own breaking in this horrific moment of American history. When this federal behemoth monster is subdued then we can redress normal order. However, as the behemoth tramples the landscape in America bending things until he breaks them something more graphic and demonstrative is need then bills that are proposed and passed but have little to no impact. Local governments and the states need to precipitate a national and constitutional crisis where the local governments challenge the legalities of national government in more than letters, bills and grassroots petitions.

Local governments need to demand local officials to enforce local laws, and in most cases laws that are already on the books. This would be the wake-up call that is needed for the courts to pay closer attention, create a vigorous debate in Congress, and challenge the powers of these grotesque beings that are occupying our cities and towns and shooting and killing our neighbors and friends.

Something is rotten in the Department of Labor. I’m not talking about the recent news that Secretary of Labor Chavez-DeRemer is being investigated about claims she used taxpayer money for personal trips disguised as business-related. Or that she allegedly engaged in an improper tryst with a subordinate.

If true, these are serious issues that call for appropriate responses. But, from my perspective as an attorney who committed a 39-year career to a government agency I continue to care deeply about, they pale in comparison to something that’s out in the open, carefully curated for all to see: the Department’s latest social media campaign.

Just take a look at the past few weeks’ postings on the Labor Department’s Facebook or X accounts. One might ordinarily expect to find content that reflects the Department’s worthy mission of lifting up all workers in the United States, regardless of race, religion, or national origin. That might include reminders about employers’ responsibilities under wage and workplace safety laws Congress enacted over the past several decades, or maybe spotlight a series of particularly impactful enforcement actions that vindicated workers’ rights.

Don’t hold your breath. Instead, watching a jarring graphic with a dystopian soundtrack, you’ll be instructed to “Remember who you are, American.” Those words are placed below the header, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”—a slogan promptly recognized by visitors to the Facebook site as a haunting echo of the 1930’s Nazi propaganda poster featuring Adolf Hitler and the slogan “One People, One Nation, One Leader.”

That’s only one of a steady drumbeat of similar phrases, like “Faith in God. Law and Order. Pride in Our Homeland…central tenets of the American Way of Life.” We learn that “[u]nder President Trump, the globalist dominance of our government is over,” and that a year ago “our country was dead.” Now, however, we’re “the hottest country anywhere in the world because we finally have a President who puts America first.”

We’re instructed not to “believe the fake news lies.” Multiple entries feature paintings and posters depicting 1940’s-era churchgoers and families with beatifically smiling children, all white. And most prolifically, we’re treated to one hero-like depiction of Donald Trump after another, mostly in bold silhouette, with captions like “Americans First,” “NEVER SURRENDER,” “Second to None,” “Trust the Plan, Trust Trump,” "PATRIOTS IN CONTROL,” and “One of One.” We learn that “No President has cared more about hardworking Americans than President Trump.”

There’s so much wrong with all this it makes the head spin. Most blatant is the unmistakable resemblance to the style and messaging of the Nazi propaganda machine. As described by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, during the Third Reich “public adulation for Adolf Hitler was an ever present feature in the public square of German life.” Hitler was portrayed “as the living embodiment of the German nation,” radiating strength as the savior of a beaten-down German nation, and idolized as a “gifted statesman who brought stability, created jobs, and restored German greatness.” Take a look at the Labor Department’s Facebook page and see if that description resonates.

Add to that: the posts’ repeated targeting of undefined “globalists”—a recognized “dog whistle” for racist, anti-Semitic and anti-government conspiracy theorists—as the shadowy characters responsible for our country’s woes, not unlike Nazi propaganda demonizing Jews and other “outsiders”; the Christian imagery and language, smearing the line that separates church and state, and implicitly, if not explicitly, promoting white Christian Nationalism; the full-on outrageous assertion made on X, just days after the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, that “Mass Deportations are Improving Americans' Quality of Life.”

Appalling as all this is, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Substantively, in addition to the countless other ways Trump’s presidency has been a disaster for this country, he has been no friend to US workers—undermining their wages and economic security, weakening job creation, and assaulting their rights to organize. Federal worker ranks have been terrorized and dissembled by DOGE, and soon tens of thousands will be judged not by merit alone but by their loyalty to Trump. Religious prayer services have been introduced at the agency’s headquarters. Labor Department employees are demoralized. And for months, an enormous banner with Trump’s face has been hanging off the front of the Francis Perkins Building, sternly looking down at the passersby below.

Still, the Facebook/X campaign brings the Department to a new low. It dishonors the government agency whose charge is to support the workers of this country. It has no business deifying any President, particularly one already drunk with power. Nor should it be promoting a white, Christian nationalist vision for this country, that was built by immigrants -- people of all colors, places of origin, and beliefs. As a Labor Department veteran, I’m ashamed. And as a first generation son of Jewish refugees who lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany, I’m aghast, at seeing history rhyme, if not repeat.

This poem no one should have to recite to their grandchildren.

In 1965, as excessive state violence was being unleashed against the Black citizens in Selma, Alabama, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent out a nationwide call to faith leaders: “The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden.”

Dr. King’s call for others to join him in leading a march to Montgomery was answered by clergy from across the country, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.

Sixty-six years later, in the same spirit and with the same clarity as King’s 1965 call, clergy in Minneapolis asked faith activists from across the country to join them in praying with their feet against the atrocities being committed by Immigration Customs and Enforcement against the good people of their state.

Upon hearing that my presence might be helpful, I immediately packed my tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), and on behalf of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, I jumped on an airplane. Arriving in Minneapolis on Thursday, here’s what I witnessed:

Images of Luis Ramos, a terrified and bewildered five-year-old in a tiny plaid coat and blue knit bunny hat, were dominating local media coverage. Coming home from school, just steps away from his front door, ICE agents took Luis from his father’s car using him as bait to lure his pregnant mother out of their home.

By the time I arrived in Minneapolis, only two days later, Luis and his father had already been whisked away to a detention facility in Texas.

Like Selma, Minneapolis has become this generation’s frontline in the struggle for freedom and justice.

Thursday night, as we were preparing for the next day’s mobilization with nonviolence training, a person with a distressed look on their face asked to make an announcement. Along with informing us that a car full of children had been tear gassed today, they had just received a message from one of the local schools warning people not to be deceived by flyers offering “food assistance” since this was one of the tactics being used by ICE to lure parents from their homes. There were other examples of ICE’s cruelty. Immigrants injured by ICE agents have been taken to hospitals and registered using false names so that their families couldn't find them.

In the face of this inhumane behavior, and given Minnesota’s expected below zero temperatures, it would have been easy to remain home, feeling depressed and yet powerless to help. But I recalled Rev. Jesse Jackson’s words, “both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.”

With this in mind, on the coldest day the Twin Cities area had experienced in seven years, I joined hundreds of other clergy and faith leaders at the Minneapolis St. Paul International (MSP) airport to protest Delta airlines complicity in over 2,000 deportations.

The designated “free speech zone” for legal protest was bursting at the seams with more than a thousand bundled-up Minnesotans who had turned out to support those of us who were to engage in civil disobedience.

Our action consisted of over 100 faith leaders kneeling down blocking the terminal, holding signs picturing the detained and disappeared. We prayed and we sang: “everybody’s got a right to live/love/learn and “before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail.” The assembled supporters chanted “Justice for Renee Good!”

With the bottom half of my face tucked into the bundles of warm clothing, I closed my eyes, and began quietly humming a nigun (wordless melody sung in a repetitive circular manner) to myself.

The man kneeling next to me, who I soon learned was the Community Engagement Organizers (CEO) program at Macalister College, asked if I was okay. He was grateful for our presence and wanted to make sure how we were handling the frigid temperatures.

The police lined up behind us with long clubs and chemical agents they had threatened to use. They arrest us. One by one, many in religious stoles, we stood and offered our bulky mitted wrists for handcuffing.

The crowd’s chants turned from “Justice for Renee Good!” to “Let them pray! Let them pray!” and we began to realize the significance. Our prayers were both exposing and healing the rot to which our country has been subjected for the past year that is now festering like an open infected wound.

While prayer can sometimes be meaningless, hypocritical, or even damaging. There are other times, when it can have a profound impact. As the Jewish siddur (prayerbook) Mishkan T’Filah says “prayer Invites God’s Presence to suffuse our spirits. Prayer may not bring water to parched fields,” but it ”can water an arid soul." The souls and spirits of the people of Minneapolis certainly need watering at this time.

On Saturday, I was preparing to leave Minneapolis when we received the news that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, had been beaten and shot to death by federal agents. I traveled instead to the site of this murder to join with others who were holding a vigil and turning the crime scene into a holy site. I took the tallit I have been wearing over the last year to mourn the passing of my father off my shoulders and laid it on the pine branches among the crosses, candles, sage brush bundles, mala beads, and kuffiyehs. As the crowd circling the site wiped tears from their eyes, “Somali aunties,” who momentarily felt safe to leave their homes, to provide hot food from their kitchens to their fellow mourners.

Riding the city bus back to my hotel, I noticed that my fellow passengers were carrying gas masks and eye goggles for the tear gas that wafts through the city’s freezing air and one knew not when they might get tackled to the ground and sprayed directly in the face with a chemical agent. It felt more like being in the Occupied West Bank than in an American city.

Picking up a quick lunch, I had to knock on the door to be admitted to the restaurant. In order to check into my hotel, I had to use the doorbell to be let in, and to get into Ubers, I had to show a code. Because everyone is aware that ICE agents could barge in at any moment, they are taking extra precautions trying to keep themselves and their neighbors safe.

Many of the Uber drivers in Minneapolis are of Somali ethnicity. One driver, a US citizen who has been in the country for over 20 years, told me about having to show his naturalization papers (he now keeps them with him at all times) while trying to do his job. Another, a young Somali-American woman, told me that she has just spent days too afraid to leave her house, but then today had to get back to work because she needs to pay her rent.

What is unfolding in Minneapolis is frightening, but the response of its people has been inspiring. Between delivering groceries and supplies to those afraid to leave their homes, to roaming the streets with whistles strung around their necks so they can alert others when ICE is spotted, to rabbis and Jewish activists, including myself this past Sunday, keeping watch outside churches so Latinx communities can worship together, to providing emotional support—the work of care, mutual aid, and resistance, week after week, should fill us all with pride. And what was so moving to encounter was the degree to which everyone—from hotel staff, to restaurant workers, to Uber drivers—all expressed gratitude that so many of us had traveled to support them as they defend democracy for the entire country.

Like Selma, Minneapolis has become this generation’s frontline in the struggle for freedom and justice. And like Selma, it will be the disciplined, caring, and prayerful response of Minneapolis' people and their supporters that will win out in the end.

I was born and raised in Minnesota. One of my childhood homes in south Minneapolis is less than a mile from the scene of Saturday’s brutal Border Patrol killing. The victim was 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a US citizen born in Illinois and a registered ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital.

Pretti’s crime: He was “Minnesota nice.”

Before proceeding further, please watch this New York Times video.

But be warned, the footage is violent, graphic, and disturbing:

Footage and analyis of Alex Pretti killing

Similarly, a detailed CNN compilation of bystander videos confirms that Border Patrol officers took Pretti’s gun before shooting him an estimated 10 times:

And USA Today also offered a second-by-second analysis:

Now contrast what you just observed with the Trump administration’s four-step playbook for avoiding accountability: Lie, double-down, deflect, and cover-up.

Step #1: Lie

Almost immediately, the Department of Homeland Security issued a false statement exonerating Border Patrol officers and blaming Pretti for his death:

• “At 9:05 AM CT,… an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun….”

No. Pretti approached the officers with a cellphone as he filmed their encounter with two protesters. Then he tried to aid a protester whom officers had shoved to the ground.

• “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect, but the armed suspect violently resisted.”

No. The officers didn’t even know that Pretti had a gun until seven of them had already swarmed, pepper-sprayed, and wrestled him to the ground. Then one of the officers exclaimed with surprise, “He has a gun!”

At that point, several officers were on top of Pretti. A gun matching the description of the one that DHS said Pretti owned (and for which he had a permit in the open-carry state of Minnesota) emerged from the group. After Pretti had been disarmed, an officer shot him in the back at close range. As the officer continued firing, another officer shot Pretti as he lay on the ground.

The agents fired a total of at least 10 shots.

Step #2: Double Down

During a six-minute press appearance, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino doubled-down on the lies. He said that an “individual approached Border Patrol agents with a nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun.”

No. It was a cellphone.

“The agents attempted to disarm this individual, but he violently resisted.”

No. Pretti was on the ground when officers noticed his gun and took it.

“Fearing for his life and lives and safety of fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots.”

No. Two agents fired a total of 10 shots as Pretti lay on the street with his hands over his head.

“The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID.”

I don’t know what an “accessible ID” is, but Minnesota is an open-carry state and Pretti had a permit to own the gun.

“This looked like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

There is no evidence supporting that claim.

“The officer was highly trained and had been serving as a Border Patrol agent for eight years. The officer has extensive training as a range safety officer and less lethal officer…”

Two officers fired a total of 10 shots at a man who had been disarmed. What about the second shooter? And what training recommends firing 10 shots at a defenseless US citizen lying on the ground?

Bovino then took questions but refused to answer them:

Q: “When did agents learn that he had a gun, and did he ever brandish that weapon at them?

Bovino: “This situation again is evolving. This situation is under investigation. Those facts will come to light. This particular incident is being investigated, just like we investigate other similar incidents like we’ve done over the past several years. It’s in the hands of professionals as facts will come to light.”

The videos show that Pretti never brandished a weapon at anyone. As for an investigation, the federal government had refused to allow Minnesota officials to participate after an officer killed Renee Nicole Good two weeks earlier. But this time, Minnesota officials took two extraordinary steps: the state obtained a warrant to search the public street where the officers had killed Pretti; and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal officials from altering or destroying evidence.

Q: “Did he have an additional gun, or was the gun removed from the scene?... From the video, it doesn’t seem like he pulled a gun on anyone…. When did the gun come out?”

Bovino: “Again, this situation is evolving. This is under investigation. Those facts will come to light…”

The gun never “came out” until Border Patrol officers discovered and removed it after forcing Pretti to the ground.

Step #3: Deflect – Blame the Victim…and Anyone Else

Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, Stephen Miller, tripled down on the lies. Others quickly followed.

• Miller said Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.”

• Trump blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) for “inciting insurrection.” He posted that they were leading a “subversive effort” against law enforcement “the likes of which we have not seen, probably, since the Civil War.”

• Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Walz a deal. One of her demands revealed the true motive behind Trump’s aggressive immigration surge in Minnesota: leverage. Trump is looking ahead at the November midterm elections, doesn’t like what he sees, and is preparing to upend them. That’s why Bondi told Walz to turn over the state’s voter rolls and maybe it “will help bring back law and order to Minnesota.“ (A few days earlier, Trump’s Justice Department had already subpoenaed numerous Minnesota officials, including Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristia Noem parroted Bovino’s lies that Pretti “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” She said that her assertion of “domestic terrorism” was just “the facts.”

• Vice President JD Vance posted that the events in Minneapolis were “engineered chaos” caused by “far left agitators, working with local authorities.”

• On Fox News, FBI Director Kash Patel characterized Pretti as a violent actor.

Step #4: Repeat – and Cover-Up as Needed

Trump’s minions had falsely smeared Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist” too. Then the Justice Department announced that the civil rights division would not even investigate whether her killer had used excessive force—as it typically has done in such situations. Instead, the Department would investigate the victim and her partner. Days later, six senior career federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the issue.

Noem announced that DHS would lead the Pretti investigation—with assistance from the FBI.

Bovino’s “Choices”

In a press conference on Sunday, January 25, Bovino lectured Minnesotans on “choices,” suggesting that Pretti’s choices led to his death. But Pretti chose only to exercise his First and Second Amendment rights. For that, Trump’s newly expanded paramilitary organization chose to execute him in broad daylight. Bovino, Trump, and Trump’s sycophants chose to lie about it.

In the aftermath of Pretti’s killing, thousands of Minnesotans also made a choice: In sub-zero temperatures, they protested the federal government’s aggressive occupation of Minneapolis that had led to yet another death. They know that the whole world is watching. And if I know anything about Minnesotans, they will prevail.

“The border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world.”

Ivan Krastev, Bulgarian chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, dropped that assessment on Jon Stewart’s weekly blog last week.

Four days later, that stark reality took a quantum leap with the brutal murder of registered nurse Alex Pretti by a member of President Donald Trump’s paramilitary army in Minneapolis. Pretti is not the first killing by an agent of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) in recent weeks.

Renee Nicole Good was maliciously shot through a car window by an ICE agent earlier in Minneapolis. Keith Porter was shot and killed while celebrating on New Year’s Eve by an off-duty ICE agent in a Los Angeles suburb. At least six others have died in ICE detention facilities, including Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, who was strangled in what an El Paso autopsy has ruled a homicide.

Yet the Twin City murders of Good followed so soon by Pretti, two white US citizen observers who were appalled by the violent ICE invasion of their city, has transformed the dialogue on whether our country has crossed the road to authoritarian rule.

Neither could be easily demonized by the administration despite desperate attempts by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Vice President JD Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavett and other administration attack dogs to label them as “domestic terrorists” and justify their murders.

The violence has escalated as Trump, Miller, Vance, and Noem seek to secure and expand their power through what they believe will intimidate and force consent for their authoritarian rule. But they are also afraid of the growing popular resistance.

The usually compliant major media rapidly rejected the administration's lies and cover-up efforts. Almost immediately, the media rejected the excuse that Pretti was planning a “massacre” of ICE agents with a firearm he had a legal permit to carry under Minnesota law. That was especially hypocritical considering the administration’s regular celebration of those on the far right who bring lethal weapons to protests from Kyle Rittenhouse to militia seeking to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists pardoned by Trump.

“Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Federal Shooting,” blared a New York Times headline, as the Times had pioneered video documentation exposing the lies on Good’s murder. The footage, the Times wrote, shows Pretti “stepping between a woman and an agent pepper spraying her. Other agents then pepper spray Mr. Pretti who is holding a phone in one hand and nothing in the other. His concealed weapon is found and only after he is restrained on the sidewalk …and taken from him before the agents opened fire.” He was killed with 10 shots then, and the agents blocked a physician who saw the shooting from providing medical aid.

The Washington Post presented the clearest video evidence in a report labeled “Federal agent secured gun from Minn. man before fatal shooting, videos show.” Even the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal called the shooting “the worst … to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump Presidency.” A Journal editorial dismissed administration “spin” saying it “simply isn’t believable.”

Few missed that the Pretti shooting occurred just a hours after tens of thousands of Minnesota residents marched through the streets of Minneapolis in minus 10 degree weather in a general strike and economic boycott to send a message of overwhelming public opposition to Trump’s Minneapolis invasion.

“I do believe that the real problem is that the border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world,” Ivan Krastev, also a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, prompting Stewart to proclaim, “you can't just drop that in the middle of a podcast and expect me not to stand up and applaud. Say that again.”

State sponsored violence is the clearest signpost of a regime that has embraced autocratic rule, whether the dictatorship is appointed following an election, as in the case of Hitler or Suharto, marched on the capital by his paramilitary troops like Mussolini, imposed by a military coup like Pinochet and the Argentine “dirty war” generals, or through a bloody civil war like Franco.

ICE and CPB agents most resemble Hitler’s SA Brown Shirts, his paramilitary troops who engaged in violent assaults on political opponents even before Hitler was appointed chancellor by fading democratic Weimar Republic leaders. Two months before Hitler was anointed, a document was leaked in one Nazi sympathetic state that ordered “all orders of the SA or other paramilitary force were to be obeyed under pain of death,” as Benjamin Carter Hett points out in The Death of Democracy.

“While the junta’s national project had several ideological pillars—neoliberalism, social conservatism, and Pinochet’s authority – violence fueled it and made it possible,” writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen.

Social media posts from the White House and several executive departments have begun borrowing Nazi slogans and translating them to justify the ICE campaign. “One People, One Realm, One Leader,” posted the US Department of Labor this month, echoing the Nazi slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." Just days after assuming office, Hitler declared “There can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk,” notes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.

On Ezra Klein’s podcast, Atlantic journalist Caitlin Dickerson describes how after passage of Trump’s massive bill to extend the tax breaks to the super rich and nearly doubling the number of agents for the anti-immigrant campaign, there was a rush to fill the new ICE spots with “lots of people, it seems, within this new workforce who have absolutely no experience, who are learning how to enforce the law, how to carry a weapon, how to interact with the public, just starting from square one right now.”

“But we're also seeing a lot of explicit references to white nationalist ideas and the kind of dog whistles that we've all become used to when Trump is president. The fact is that if you're a member of the Proud Boys or you're a follower of QAnon, you recognize these exact phrases that are being used as a kind of call to action and to apply for a job as an ICE agent.”

They’ve all received a message, Dickerson continues, from anti-immigrant campaign leader Stephen Miller, who said on TV: “To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”

“Obstruction” to Miller and company has become a license to threaten, assault, and arrest anyone bearing witness—especially filming—ICE violence and brutality. Legal citizens have been dumped far away from where they were picked up, even in unsafe conditions. Agents are now also using technology to identify observers for economic retaliation, an escalation of the goal of intimidation and seeking to silence observation and dissent.

Miller, Dickerson emphasized, “is just underscoring that argument that you're not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive. And in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.”

The violence has escalated as Trump, Miller, Vance, and Noem seek to secure and expand their power through what they believe will intimidate and force consent for their authoritarian rule. But they are also afraid of the growing popular resistance symbolized by the massive march in Minneapolis in horrific freezing conditions, and the solidarity protests from coast to coast in red states and blue.

In Jacobin, Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Twin Cities Sunrise Movement, described the increasingly effective fightback campaign in her state. Their tactics have focused on targeting corporations like Hilton, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with ICE, and have been especially successful in tormenting ICE agents in hotels at all hours with noise intended to drive out the agents and create conditions where “ICE agents won’t want to stay there, and hotels won’t want to house them.”

“I think about it as leverage and power looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers. Under a functioning democracy, you play the game of public opinion," said Shiney-Ajay. "If you convince the majority, then you can get legislation or win an election. But what we’re living under right now is not a democracy.”

“A lot of establishment advocacy groups seem to be hoping we’ll show America that Trump is really bad, then in the midterms we’ll take back power… I don’t think that’s accurate,” Shiney-Ajay says. “Just look at what Trump is doing now and how similar it is to how authoritarians in other countries have grabbed power.”

“You have to look at what ways ordinary people are directly upholding a regime’s ability to logistically function, and switch from purely persuasion campaigns to the logic of non-cooperation. It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people—it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.”

We all need to do something. That includes non-cooperation, continuing to bear witness; recording the abuses; pressuring media to report and expose the ICE lawlessness; organizing national economic boycotts and general strikes; mobilizing to win elections, and more. No one leader or political party will save us from fascism. We have to do it ourselves.

Do Americans who engage in lawful and peaceful protest enjoy the protection of the United States Constitution? Not any more, the Trump regime says in authorizing the shameless misconduct and lethal violence ICE agents are perpetrating against citizens in Minnesota.

ICE has invaded the state of Minnesota to show America that nothing can restrain Trump’s army of thugs. Not the Constitution. Not the laws which make it a crime to commit assault and murder. Not public opinion. And not thousands of citizens exercising their rights.

Although far from the first instance of ICE brutality, the slaying of Renee Nicole Good shocked the nation as a clear case of murder in cold blood.

The killing was not in “self-defense”—if a car is really hurtling toward you, you don’t pause to take out your gun, aim and shoot, because you know shooting won’t stop the car. You run. Good’s autopsy confirms that it was murder: the fatal bullet was the one fired into the victim’s left temple, when the ICE agent shot through the driver’s side window from alongside the car.

In response to the homicide, President Trump false asserted the agent had been run over, and charged the victim with the “crime” of having been “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement”; the chief of Homeland Security called Good a “domestic terrorist,” supposedly “stalking” ICE (meaning she followed them to observe their conduct); and the Department of Justice launched an investigation, not of the killing, but of the victim’s widow.

Meanwhile, the Vice President proclaimed ICE impunity. Speaking of Renee Good’s killer, Vance stated, “That guy’s protected by absolute immunity.”

The claim is legally baseless, but ICE agents got the message they can brutalize and even summarily execute at will, without consequences. And now, within weeks, ICE agents have committed another murder, this time of Alex Pretti, a citizen who was an ICU nurse, with a burst of bullets in the victim’s back while he lay defenseless on the ground.

Since the Supreme Court approved of ICE stopping individuals based on racial profiling, ICE agents have seized and frequently assaulted individuals simply because they appeared to be Hispanic—or Hmong or Somali or Native American. They are freely employing the same tactics in Minnesota.

Do you carry proof of citizenship with you? Neither do I. But in an echo of Nazi Germany, ICE agents demand to “see your papers,” particularly if you are non-white.

Targeting journalists and citizen observers. An official policy of breaking into homes without a judicial warrant. Detaining children. Handcuffing individuals until they come up with proof of identity. Dragging people out of their cars without probable cause to think they committed a crime. Assault on suspected “illegals.” Attacking nonviolent, peaceful demonstrators with pepper balls, tear gas, rubber bullets. Threatening with guns, shooting at cars, and now, actual murders.

These are the abuses of a conquering army, inflicted upon an occupied nation.

ICE and Border Patrol, the entities now inflicting these wounds on our democracy, are no more law enforcement agencies than was Hitler’s Gestapo. ICE is an unrestrained, racist, violence-craving gang, trying to impose Trump’s will on a state. It should be disbanded.

Hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans have taken to the streets to bravely defy ICE’s intimidation and violence, to insist on their rights under law, and to express solidarity with their neighbors who are ICE victims. And across the nation, many thousands came out in support.

In other places where liberty has been challenged, Americans and our leaders identified with a threatened people. “I am a Berliner,” President John F. Kennedy affirmed at the Berlin Wall in 1963. “I am a Greenlander,” some now say in response to President Trump’s threats to invade an ally’s territory.

The threats and the invasion have come home. If our constitutional rights are not to be erased, we must act with the courage displayed by Minnesotans. “I am a Minnesotan.” So are we all.

Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.

But that’s not their real message.

Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.

One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.

“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”

His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:

“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In other words: “Obey or die!”

It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.

Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.

Their real message — and Trump’s, Miller’s, and Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:

“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”

And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.

Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington DC, perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.

Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.

Billionaires are buying fancy homes around DC so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.

And the message under it all is:

“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”

Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.

— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.

Their message: “Obey or die.”

— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.

He didn’t obey, so he had to die.

These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Erdoğon does in Turkey, and El Sisi does in Egypt, among others.

This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”

It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.

They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”

And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.

The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.

Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.

When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.

That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğon, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.

Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.

We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.

Trump himself has already been convicted of fraud multiple times, as well as stealing money from a children’s cancer charity and raping E. Jean Carroll, and his lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.

Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.

Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.

Soon, everybody is silent.

Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”

And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.

There’s a fable about how Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of the University of Alabama, found the toughest players. He would, supposedly, drive through dusty Alabama towns with a dead dog tied behind his car. He’d then stop his car where the high school boys hung out and wait. The kid who came over and kicked that dead dog would get a scholarship.

JD Vance aspires to be the captain of the MAGA team when Trump moves on. The way to get there, he seems to believe, is to kick the dog, whichever one is most helpless (and not being eaten by Haitians), and show that he’s even meaner than Trump. His rhetorical style is all about the strong beating up on the weak, something Vance seems to relish. There are just too many examples of Vance’s delight in kicking to ignore.

Dog Eaters

The one that made these attacks Vance’s signature concerned the unsubstantiated story that his Haitian constituents in Ohio were eating their pets, which Trump and then Vance not only said, but then repeated despite denial from local authorities that it was happening. But Vance didn’t care. He went even further by admitting it was a false story, but one that he still proudly put forth:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The hell with the Haitians he supposedly represented in the Senate. And to hell with the truth.

Zelensky Muggers

When Volodymryr Zelensky visited the Oval Office on March 25, 2025, to secure American support against the Russians invaders, Vance took the lead role in a carefully orchestrated effort to humiliate the Ukrainian leader. Vance accused Zelensky of campaigning for the Democrats and for not thanking Trump profusely for all of the US support.

Vance said to Zelensky, “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

The vibe of this made-for-TV reality show reminded me of how bullies operate: Trump pinning back Zelensky’s arms, while Vance landed the body blows.

Denmark Trashing

JD wants to be a point person in taking Greenland from the Greenlanders and Denmark. In a visit to the Pituffik Space base last March, he belittled the sacrifice made by Danes who lost more soldiers per capital than any other ally in Afghanistan. But, as he put it, that was

“years ago, just as, for example, the French honor the sacrifice of Americans in Normandy 80 years ago…. Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland…”

It must be such a rush for a leader of a country with 340 million people to threaten a county of 6 million. They can’t touch you. You’re invincible.

Killing "Domestic Terrorists"

Without waiting for an investigation of any sort, Vance jumped to defend the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, who killed Renee Nicole Goode in Minneapolis by firing three shots through her car window at close range:

“The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self-defense.”

No, the reality is that Vance wants to demonstrate to the MAGA world that he is a bad ass who owns the libs, over and over, and supports killing them, if necessary.

And stomping on reporters who dare question his unsubstantiated finding is blood sport:

“Everybody who’s been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her: you should be ashamed of yourselves, every single one of you.”

Kicking the Five-Year Old

You’ve got to have a heart made of stone not to show sympathy and kindness for a five-year-old who had his father taken away during an ICE raid. But if you want to be a MAGA leader, you have to look past any maudlin sentimentality even when the facts are lined up against you. According to the family’s asylum lawyer,

“The family was not eluding ICE in any way. They were following all established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, not flight risk and should never have been detailed.”

Vance could care less about the facts:

“When they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So, the story is that ICE detained a 5-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?”

Although the boy’s school and relatives offered to take care of the child, he was shipped with his father to a detention center in Texas.

So what? Why should Vance care any more about this child and his father than about dog-eating Haitians? Even though asylum seekers in the judicial process are legally here, Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, ignores the facts because the only facts that matter are proving that he will back ICE no matter what; that he will support the deportation of immigrants, legal or otherwise; that he will be seen as tough enough and mean enough to become the MAGA crown prince.

Cruella de Vance.

P.S. As the world learns that Alex Pretti was brutally murdered by federal agents, Cruella has yet to stomp on his dead body. Instead, he has issued a wilting word salad about “the engineered chaos” that is “the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” You offer that kind of gibberish when you’re worried that a real investigation might make you look like a fool.

On January 24th, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old white US citizen, was murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis. This comes less than three weeks after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good.

Video footage shows Pretti, an ICU nurse, stepping in between a woman and a federal agent who was pepper-spraying her. That agent proceeds to pepper-spray Pretti who was filming the encounter with his phone in one hand and nothing in the other. Several agents approached and forced Pretti onto the ground. He was restrained.

Despite this, one agent unholstered his gun and fired one shot at close range. As that agent continued to fire, another grabbed his gun and fired additional shots. In total, at least 10 shots were fired within five seconds.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately began spreading their state-sanctioned propaganda. Via Twitter-X, DHS posted that federal agents were conducting a “targeted operation” when an armed individual approached. “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. […] Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.” Without offering a shred of evidence, DHS wildly speculates that “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Like Good, the Trump administration immediately labelled Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”

Both Good and Pretti were victims of state-sanctioned executions conducted by federal agents illegally occupying the state of Minnesota against the will of its people and its elected officials.

Regardless of your thoughts on ICE’s presence in Minnesota specifically or the Trump administration in general, this is beyond debate: there was absolutely no reason for federal agents to fire a single shot—let alone ten. Pretti was not a threat to anyone—let alone several heavily armed federal agents. They chose to abuse the power and “absolute immunity” that the Trump administration granted them to publicly execute a US citizen at their own discretion.

We vote for representatives, not kings.

The Trump administration, in their utter disregard for the safety and well-being of Americans, has unleashed an army of poorly trained, heavily armed, masked agents without any guardrails or accountability. Several news outlets have reported that the federal investigation into Renee Good’s murder is more focused on any possible ties between her wife, Becca Good, and activist groups rather than Ross’ conduct. Thus far, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned over the Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate Ross.

An FBI agent who was working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) also resigned. Shortly after opening a civil rights investigation into Good’s death, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the ICE agent. The FBI also blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already announced that DHS will be leading the investigation of the Border Patrol agent that murdered Pretti. To emphasize, the department that, before the investigation even began, fabricated a series of lies meant to publicly exonerate Border Patrol agents will be investigating their conduct.

Given this precedent, why exactly would federal agents show restraint? Why deescalate when excessive violence is unconditionally excused? Even if they murder someone, President Trump will only go as far as acknowledging “that mistakes sometimes happen” and “that 99% of our ICE officers are doing the right thing.” Following Pretti’s murder, Trump wasted no time defending Border Patrol. He claimed that federal agents “had to protect themselves” against “the gunman.”

While Trump highlights Pretti’s gun as some kind of excuse, whether he was armed changes nothing. This is America – a country with over 80 million gun owners whose right to bear arms is inscribed in the Second Amendment. A fact that President Trump and his allies are usually so eager to point out. Pretti had a permit to carry a concealed handgun. Not only was he completely within his rights to carry, no video shows him even holding it.

Even Noem refused to directly answer whether Pretti brandished his weapon. Instead, she insisted that “I don’t know of any peaceful protestor that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Yet, of course, she does. The J6 protestors were armed, attacked law enforcement and yet Noem supported Trump pardoning them. Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to another state, went to a peaceful protest armed, shot three people and received widespread praise from the Trump administration.

DHS is so blatantly lying that even staunch Trump supporters like Tim Pool are questioning the official state narrative.

The Trump administration’s careless indifference towards the truth means that, regardless of what they say, we must continue to record and share videos of federal agents. We simply cannot trust the words of an administration whose first impulse is to justify the death of US citizens.

But, there is a deeper worry. It may be tempting to see these lies as an attempt by the administration to justify the violence. An attempt to use the state’s massive propaganda machine—which includes media outlets like Fox News, the New York Post, Bari Weiss’s CBS and Elon Musk’s X—to convince the American public that federal agents are trying to faithfully execute their jobs.

By his own admission, Trump is only limited by his “own morality.” Even if his own supporters disagree with him, Trump remains steadfast–as he puts it, “MAGA is me.” Driven by narcissism, greed, and a litany of grievances, Trump shows little regard for the Constitution, Congress, court rulings, and the “international rules-based order.”

I would add to this list: the people. To think that Trump cares about convincing the public is to believe that Trump still cares about their opinion. Trump does not. He has ‘joked’ about cancelling the midterm elections. In August 2025, his administration quietly removed an online tool from Regulations.gov that allowed advocacy groups to collect and submit public comments to federal agencies. Doing so makes it much harder for individuals to weigh in on agency regulatory proposals. He also pursues a series of unpopular policies including seizing Greenland, occupying Venezuela and renaming the Kennedy Center.

Most Americans think ICE is making cities less safe, but Trump doesn’t care. Hours after Pretti’s murder, Attorney General Pamela Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) making three demands:

1.Walz’s office must share state records on Medicaid, and Food and Nutrition Service programs with the federal government

2.Repeal sanctuary city policies, force all state correctional facilities to fully cooperate with ICE, honor immigration detainers, and permit ICE to interview detainees to determine immigration status

3.Grant the Department of Justice complete access to the state’s voter rolls to confirm that its registration policies comply with federal law

These demands are a direct assault on the sovereignty of Minnesota. A day after a major statewide economic blackout and protest, the Trump administration is ordering Walz to betray the will of his own constituents. And to be clear, these are demands. As Bondi emphasized on Fox News, Walz “better support President Trump. He better support the men and women in law enforcement because if he doesn’t, we are.”

For the Trump administration, Minnesota is not about immigration enforcement or fraud. It is a trial run for his administration’s fascist apparatus. He is testing whether there are any limits to his power beyond his own judgment. After all, thus far Congress and the Supreme Court have utterly failed to keep him in check—not that either has really tried.

Walz cannot capitulate to the Trump administration. But we also cannot depend on elected officials to solve this problem. Now is the time for collective action—not just in Minnesota but across the entire country. After all, there is one thing that Trump definitely cares about: the economy. A nationwide economic blackout and protest would hit him where it hurts.

No matter which state you live in, you are not safe from Trump. Do not be fooled by victim-blaming narratives that fault Good and Pretti for being ‘where they were not supposed to be.’ The notion that we, as Americans, cannot protest unlawful law enforcement is a repulsive austerity policy masquerading as genuine critique. It is to surrender ourselves unconditionally to the whims of the state.

We vote for representatives, not kings. If ever our elected officials fail to reflect our will, then they must be made to submit—not the other way around. Trump has forgotten how things work; we would all do well to remind him.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wanted to change his agency’s dietary recommendations, he did something very simple. He took the food pyramid and turned it upside down. After years of promoting healthy grains, pulses, and vegetables, the agency was now favoring meat and dairy.

It seemed like a joke. It wasn’t.

Kennedy called his upside-down pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, “Eat Real Food.” A better name would be “Support Cattle Farmers and Have a Heart Attack.”

The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy approach applies to every aspect of American policy.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it.

The United States needs undocumented immigrants to maintain the economy by filling jobs in agriculture, the construction industry, and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.

The United States is the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare. So, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for people to access medical insurance.

The United States, before 2024, was the largest oil and gas producing nation on the planet, but needed government support to make the transition to clean energy. So, the Trump administration eliminated those clean energy subsidies and invested even more into expanding the fossil fuel sector.

In other words, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to harm people and the planet. They are like comic book villains, and they don’t even realize it

The upside-down nature of Trump’s approach to policy can perhaps best be seen in the foreign policy realm.

Donald Trump has talked over and over again about the importance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked about his New Year’s wish this year, he said, “Peace on Earth.”

But all he has done recently is promote war. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The United States invaded Venezuela right after the New Year in order to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The administration is now preparing to attack Iran. Trump has insisted that the United States must seize Greenland, by force if necessary. And the US president expects that the government in Cuba will fall as well, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will one day be that country’s leader.

The Trump administration has emphasized the critical importance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t want any other country or any international institutions interfering with US policies.

However, the Trump administration doesn’t care about the sovereignty of any other country. Trump believes he can intervene anywhere. Even close allies are not off limits. He has suggested absorbing Canada. And he seems willing to fight a fellow NATO member, Denmark, in order to control Greenland.

Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock principle of the United Nations. All states rely on this principle to safeguard their borders and protect against the interventions of other countries. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order.

This contempt for international treaties and institutions led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. This year, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations. These include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for the yearly Conference of Parties (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in the United States dropped 20%, a rare bit of good news from a country with the second-highest rate of emissions in the world. Last year, under Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4%.

Trump has nothing but contempt for international law. He has done more than just denounce legal bodies like the International Criminal Court. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened even more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding document to ensure that Trump and his cronies are never prosecuted for the war crimes that they have most definitely committed.

The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from international institutions, and the contempt for international law: These all form a different kind of war. The Trump administration has launched an offensive against the very edifice of the world order. He wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.

This is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller recently told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Power, as even authoritarian leaders learn, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by force alone. They are overthrown by peaceful protests. They are tried in court and sent to jail.

History is littered with the wreckage of empires that attempted to rule by force alone. That is the iron law since the beginning of time.

And it is just a matter of time before the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding together to fend off any attempt on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and cannot do, with even the conservative Supreme Court ruling recently that the administration cannot send the National Guard to Chicago against the wishes of the mayor and the governor.

And popular protests continue throughout the United States, most recently to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a young mother in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it. An upside-down pyramid is not stable. Eventually, it will collapse.

Climate change isn’t looming somewhere down the road. For millions of families, it’s already showing up as higher insurance bills, higher utility costs, flooded roads, closed schools, and budgets stretched past the breaking point. And for others, it’s far worse—lost homes, lasting health impacts, and lives cut short. The damage from the climate crisis isn’t a distant projection. The bill is real, and it’s already due.

The problem is who’s paying it.

Right now, American families and state governments are picking up the tab for climate disasters while the fossil fuel companies that knowingly caused the damage keep raking in record profits. Every storm that wipes out a neighborhood, every heatwave that overwhelms hospitals, every wildfire that shuts down a school adds another line item to public budgets, and another cost pushed onto taxpayers and our families.

That imbalance is why, from January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a Make Polluters Pay Week of Action. It’s the opening push of the 2026 legislative session and a clear signal that polluter accountability is no longer a fringe idea, but a governing priority.

Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill.

The logic is simple: If you caused the harm, you should help pay for the repair.

This is how we already handle toxic waste, oil spills, and industrial contamination. We don’t send the cleanup bill to families who live nearby. We send it to the companies that made the mess. Climate superfund laws apply that same common-sense principle to the climate crisis, and voters understand it.

In fact, support is growing fast. Recent polling shows that 77% of voters now support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages, including majorities of Republicans and Independents. Support has jumped more than 10 points in the past year as the real-world costs of climate damage become impossible to ignore.

In 2024, Vermont and New York became the first states in the nation to pass climate superfund laws, requiring fossil fuel companies to contribute billions toward disaster recovery and climate resilience. In 2025, nearly a dozen more states introduced similar legislation. In 2026, that momentum is only accelerating.

The Week of Action reflects that reality. Across the country, states will introduce new climate bills, hold lobby days and town halls, deliver petitions, publish op-eds, walk out of classrooms, and rally public support—all aimed at starting the year with one message: Taxpayers shouldn’t be the default insurer for fossil fuel pollution anymore.

This push is happening now because delay has a cost. Every year we fail to act, the damage compounds and the bill gets bigger. A recent study found that climate costs to the US economy likely topped $1 trillion in 2025. That’s money coming out of household budgets, local tax bases, and already stretched state services.

This is also happening as federal accountability collapses. Agencies meant to protect communities and prepare us for disasters, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Weather Service, are being gutted, with another 1,000 FEMA jobs reportedly on the chopping block just as disasters intensify. At the same time, President Donald Trump is cozying up to fossil fuel executives, helping them dodge accountability and fight efforts to make polluters pay.

Every dollar collected from polluters is a dollar that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Climate superfund funds can build flood protections, harden the grid, prevent wildfires, create lifesaving cooling centers, and keep hospitals and schools functioning during disasters. It also supports good jobs, since rebuilding roads, bridges, and energy systems requires skilled labor. For families, stronger grids mean fewer outages and repairs, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and loopholes can free up billions to lower utility costs, expand clean energy access, and invest in communities instead of corporate giveaways.

The fossil fuel industry wants this conversation to feel radical. It isn’t. What’s radical is a system where companies profit while the public pays, where disasters are treated as unavoidable acts of nature rather than the predictable result of decades of pollution.

Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill. The Make Polluters Pay Week of Action is about answering that question with action. Not someday. Not after the next disaster. Now.