Government surveillance isn’t new, but new wide-ranging technologies that can detect our faces and track our movements are making it more ubiquitous. While the tools have changed, the purpose remains the same: to chill independent thought, free speech, and dissent, bringing our country closer to 1984.

Millions of Americans are being watched as the US ramps up mass surveillance with help from AI, data brokers, and partnerships with private tech companies. Immigrants, people seeking reproductive healthcare, and activists are among the most intensely monitored, but tech like Flock cameras has brought the issue into communities across the country.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, police departments have increasingly deployed automated license plate readers (ALPRs) powered by AI to track drivers “without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.” And they’re doing this with little to no oversight or regulation.

Flock Safety is one of the largest ALPR vendors in the US. Their solar-powered, teardrop-shaped cameras capture images of all passing vehicles, storing the car’s make, model, and other identifying features. Any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can access the company’s nationwide database without a warrant.

As more communities wake up to the danger, the solution isn’t trading one brand of camera for another.

Flock cameras also track people. Their “FreeForm search” feature has allowed police departments to search the database using phrases like “male with tattoos” and “person on skateboard,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media.

DeFlock, an open-source project that maps license plate readers, has identified over 128,000 ALPRs in the US. Even my small town of around 20,000 people in Southern California has at least 35 ALPRs, most of them Flock cameras.

No independent research has shown that ALPRs can reduce crime. But there’s mounting evidence of the technology’s alarmingly high error rate. An analysis by the Roseville, California police department found that 71% of Flock’s alerts to the Roseville police incorrectly flagged vehicles as stolen or used in a felony.

Far from promoting “public safety,” the tech has led to wrongful arrests, profiling, and countless other abuses.

Flock reportedly has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Among other cities, Los Angeles recently suspended their use of Flock cameras amid mounting privacy concerns over who controls the data and how it’s shared.

Court records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that Texas deputies searched 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide to track a Texas woman across state lines because she allegedly “had an abortion.” In Dunwoody, Georgia, a public records request revealed Flock employees accessing cameras in children’s spaces at a community center as part of sales demonstrations.

Other reporting has found cops repeatedly misusing the Flock system to stalk exes.

More communities are organizing and fighting back against this unregulated AI technology. As a result, at least 100 cities have now rejected ALPRs, most of them Flock cameras. But Flock is only one cog in the machine. Cities can easily replace their Flock cameras with those from competitors like Axon, Motorola Solutions, or Genetec, as some have already done.

Mass surveillance remains the fundamental problem. Ever more companies collect our data through cellular networks, facial recognition, surveillance cameras, and ALPRs, among other sources.

The US government, in turn, purchases massive amounts of our data from commercial data brokers without obtaining warrants—bypassing our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. In tandem, multiple federal agencies now have sweeping access to Americans’ sensitive personal data through systems built by Big Tech company Palantir, following President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order that expanded data sharing across agencies.

This metastasizing mass surveillance state—what George Orwell called “Big Brother” in 1984—is eroding our privacy, freedom, and Constitution.

As more communities wake up to the danger, the solution isn’t trading one brand of camera for another. We need oversight and regulation of the entire surveillance industry, as well as the government agencies that rely on it.

Talk about unjust, unfair, or just plain not right: Here I am at 82 years old with children, grandchildren, and old (and I mean old!) friends, and (like me) our country and our world seem to be all too distinctly on the downhill slope. I could, of course, have added aided by my president, Donald J. Trump, and (except for the “my”) that would be anything but inaccurate. And yet, the very fact that a near majority of Americans (46.4% in 2016 and 49.8% in 2024) elected him president of the United States should tell you that the process was already well underway; otherwise, such a... you chose the word... parody or atrocity (or both) of American politics would never have been possible.

In short, after all these years—16 as an editor at Pantheon Books, a decade in a freelance editing (and writing) life, and almost a quarter of a century running and writing for TomDispatch.com, the website I created (and that’s now being run by the wonderful Nick Turse)—somehow, I still can’t believe (not truly) the world I find myself in. Phew! That was an exhausting sentence! (And no surprise there, since we’re on a distinctly exhausting planet.)

If there were a god (which, unfortunately, I doubt there is), he (she, it, they?) would surely be no less unable to believe the world we now find ourselves in. Of course, from the Stone Age on, humanity has always represented a difficult proposition. Our history is, in many ways, a running story of conflicts and wars, one seemingly grimmer than the next—a history that has anything but ended in our moment.

You would think, of course, that, with our very planet imperiled by climate change, which is slowly heating it to the boiling point, we might at least have taken a passing break from fighting each other. That would seem like an especially obvious thing to do, since war pours into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion the fossil fuels that are heating this planet so destructively. But no such luck, of course.

And imagine that, at a moment in 2025 when, from Europe to the United States, we increasingly had a planet that was all too literally in flames, whether from our wars with each other or our ongoing climate war on the planet itself, Americans sent a distinct flamethrower into the White House for a second time.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Even in Europe, a continent warming up approximately twice as fast as the rest of the planet, where only recently more than 300,000 people in France and Spain were displaced by heat and wildfires of a startling kind, there’s still an ongoing major war between Russia and Ukraine. And thanks at least in part to it, at a time when humanity seems incapable of putting much effort into fighting climate change, a whole new form of fighting each other (by drone) has been developed in a distinctly unnerving fashion. And of course, Europe is hardly alone, since wars continue to be fought across parts of the Middle East (thanks significantly to “my” president and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu), and in Somalia and Sudan in Africa. In short, despite everything we humans might theoretically learn from our past, nothing truly seems to get in the way of more of the same.

Only recently, of course, “my” president launched a war more or less out of the blue against Iran. Yes, Iran, a country that—my best guess—most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map of the world! And talk about learning nothing from the past, how totally mad that my country—theoretically still the greatest power on planet Earth—should start yet another war thousands and thousands of miles away, given that it hasn’t actually emerged victorious from a single one of the wars it’s fought since World War II. And that’s true, despite the fact that it continues to fund its military to the tune of about a trillion dollars annually, year after endless year. And note that “my” president, who only recently launched that seemingly random war on Iran, also appears all too determined to raise the Pentagon budget from a mere (just joking, of course) trillion dollars yearly to one and a half trillion dollars.

A Planet Heading for the Boiling Point?

And yes, I’m aware that, almost 25 years after I first began writing pieces like this, I’m distinctly repeating myself, which is hardly unreasonable given the repetitiveness of both my country and humanity when it comes to such crucial matters. Although, wait a second, I may not be giving Americans the credit they deserve! After all, there was nothing repetitious about Donald Trump (not until his second term in office anyway)! Historically speaking, he’s come about as close as anyone could to being a one-of-a-kind American president and something of a unique global leader as well. He’s certainly a distinctive reminder that, from time to time, we humans can indeed truly change the script (however dismally).

I mean, the country that once elected George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy (as well, of course, as Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, and Ronald Reagan) has certainly flipped the script entirely with Donald Trump in the White House. We’re talking, after all, about the man who is now building not an Arc de Triomphe or even an Arc de Trump in Washington, DC, but an Arc de Défaite (yes, that’s defeat in French!)—the largest on Earth. But perhaps that shouldn’t be considered even faintly strange, given what the American military has been unable to do—win a war—across this planet since World War II.

In the future, all of us could become a new version of migrants with nowhere to go (unless Elon Musk truly does settle Mars) on a planet heading for the boiling point.

And imagine that, at a moment in 2025 when, from Europe to the United States, we increasingly had a planet that was all too literally in flames, whether from our wars with each other or our ongoing climate war on the planet itself, Americans sent a distinct flamethrower into the White House for a second time. Who would have believed it once upon a time? (Of course, who would then have believed that humanity could potentially destroy this planet as a habitable place for life?)

Honestly, once upon a time, no one could have made all this up: the greatest power on Earth (oh, wait, that may now be China!) in the midst of the most stunningly dangerous “war” of all time, our war on the planet itself (all too mildly and pleasantly labelled climate change, rather than climate catastrophe, climate explosion, or climate hell) and led by—yes!—that living climate catastrophe Donald J. Trump, distinctly the madman-in-chief of a country in decline on a planet that itself is beginning to experience the kind of decline that would once have been unimaginable.

Whew, that was one long sentence! And imagine that, in the years to come, barring a surprise, we humans—incapable of stopping our wars and so much else—could all too literally heat this planet to the boiling point, leaving us all in the situation that hundreds of thousands of French and Spanish people recently experienced. In the future, all of us could become a new version of migrants with nowhere to go (unless Elon Musk truly does settle Mars) on a planet heading for the boiling point.

And in that context, imagine what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think about the fact that nearly 50% of American voters (twice!) elected Donald J. Trump, the planet-destroyer-in-chief, as president of the United States.

Excuse me, I’m starting to sweat...

Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving President Donald Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections…

And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under [Ronald] Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha, that if you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.

Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”

Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Richard Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey—who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam—when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.

When the FBI informed President Lyndon B. Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.

In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Spiro Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.

The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s reelection chances.

The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the Bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: It would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.

While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.

As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.

While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.

• He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
• A federal judge back last October ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and 10 months later they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
• Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
• Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.

So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.

We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seat belt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.

Therefore, Democrats must:

• Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
• If Trump tries to claim a national emergency—even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event—Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
• States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
• Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly 11,000 ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
• Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards, and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
• Prepare for Trump’s goons—federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys-Klan-types—around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
• Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
• Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
• Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of right-wing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.

People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.

While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: Lawyers, election officials, and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.

Contact your local elections office and volunteer to help out if you can; right-wingers are doing so right now, particularly in places where they can challenge mail-in vote signatures. We need to be there, too.

Better safe than sorry, as the old saying goes. Pass it along…

The bandwagon for Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president is rolling. She appears to have all the requisite qualities for success—smart, charismatic, passionate about her beliefs, and wildly popular among students and the left as well as among college-educated liberals. She is positioned as the successor to Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders after their successful Fighting Oligarchy series of rallies last year. And as a national candidate she could carry the social democratic banner forward, bringing, at the very least, tens of thousands of new members into the Democratic Socialists of America.

Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, believes AOC “can run a serious national campaign on the left and pull a movement behind it,” but in making his case he also points out a major shortcoming—she is not really a working-class candidate and doesn’t have a visceral understanding of class.

Sunkara frankly acknowledges that AOC, unlike Bernie, “sometimes drift(s) into the dialect of the progressive nonprofit and academic world, using terms more familiar in seminar rooms than union halls.”

For example, he points to the congresswoman’s response in 2022 to Democrats who objected to the use of Latinx, a term used by only about 3% of Hispanics. Sunkara says, “She suggested “Latine” as an improvement—a solution to a problem most Latinos didn’t know they had.”

Progressive dreams cannot become reality without extensive working-class support.

AOC’s promotion of the Green New Deal attempted to bridge the concerns of environmentalists and members concerned about social justice issues but suffered from her failure to frame it in terms of class. Sunkara describes her floor resolution as almost a parady of balkanized intersectionality discourse, He writes:

That resolution promised to repair the historic oppression of Indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, elderly people, unhoused people, people with disabilities, and youth. Of course, nobody on that list is unwronged. But itemizing members of the same economic class as discrete interest groups was the opposite of how the 2016 Sanders campaign spoke, and of how the left traditionally has. It was the scholarly language of intersectionality, not the commonsense solidarity she was trying to inspire.

Nevertheless, Sunkara is all in on an AOC candidacy in 2028.

I’m not.

My biggest concern is that we have scant evidence that AOC can succeed among working-class voters, especially white working-class voters. She has won election four times in an overwhelmingly Democratic district that is 52% Hispanic and only 18% white. New York’s 14th Congressional District, created in 2012, has never elected a Republican. Its predecessor, the 7th District, was represented by Democrats continuously from 1969 onward. AOC has yet to be tested in purple or red districts.

Sunkara points to the enormous crowds she and Bernie drew during their Fighting Oligarchy tour in conservative areas:

More than 12,500 people turned out for a rally in Nampa, Idaho, a bigger crowd than the number of registered Democrats in the entire county. Twenty thousand came out in deep-red Utah.

The Fighting Oligarchy tour certainly shows that the Sanders-AOC partnership has extraordinary appeal. It does not yet prove that AOC, by herself, can draw comparable crowds in red America.

And let’s put those numbers in perspective. In Idaho’s Canyon County, in which Nampa is located, there are roughly 68,000 registered Republicans, 32,000 unaffiliated voters, and only 12,000 registered Democrats. In Utah, more than 1 million voters (49%) are registered Republicans, while only about 14%, 250,000 or so, are Democrats. Those rallies suggest AOC could do well in Democratic primaries in red states, but they provide little support for the idea that AOC can break through the Republican advantage in deeply conservative areas.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say AOC wins the Democratic nomination in 2028. How might she fare against a Republican such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)?

Foreign policy experience is likely to be a major issue. AOC, to date, has no diplomatic, military, intelligence, or executive national security experience. Nor has she served on the House Armed Services Committee, where much of Congress’ work on national security takes place. Think what you will about Vance and Rubio, they have been immersed in foreign policy in the second Trump term. Convincing skeptical voters that she is prepared to lead the country through major international crises will be a significant challenge because of her lack of experience.

On the electoral front, AOC needs to prove to voters like me that she can appeal to the working class. Can she attract a broader base than the one she has needed to win reelection in her home district? One way to do that would be to challenge and beat Chuck Schumer for New York’s Senate seat and then defeat the Republican nominee in the general election. There’s a good chance she could win both races, and if she did we would have a much clearer picture of whether she can sell a progressive program to working-class New Yorkers who do not live in overwhelmingly Democratic districts.

That experience and the success that followed would make her a much stronger candidate for higher office. And what is the rush? Ocasio-Cortez is only 36 years old. It is not asking too much for her to gain more experience and learn how to translate her ideological commitments into the kind of class-centered politics that Bernie Sanders mastered. She will undoubtedly continue to inspire the DSA faithful, a younger and well-educated cohort, but until I see her build genuine enthusiasm among blue-collar and service workers, I’m choosing to remain skeptical.

As I’ve written before, progressive dreams cannot become reality without extensive working-class support. Let’s see her do the hard work of winning its allegiance.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024, in constant 2024 dollars, equal to the combined military spending of the next 18 countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multitrillion-dollar US war machine?

A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Gaza is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles, and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10 that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.

Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone, and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine.

By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq's air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK, and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.

In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.

The US has already depleted one-third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3, and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.

So the US is using multimillion dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500-poun GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the 60 it already had stationed in Israel.

The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry; the Pentagon top brass; and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.

The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the US armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”

Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes, and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.

The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.

But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.

Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.

In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers—not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multitrillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion—a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.

US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder—first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.

We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while President Donald Trump, a Republican, assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.

Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.

Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11: “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done… We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don't approve of what has happened.”

By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the United Nations and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11.

The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”

The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres, and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history—together with the outrageous cost—have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons, and false pretexts for war.

Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.

The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.

But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.

Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driven the US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.

Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.

On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit—for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war "on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs, or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.

The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.

As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control, and absurdly expensive war machine.

In the early 1930s moderate and leftists Germans attacked each other as badly as they attacked Hitler and the Nazis.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was a large democratic socialist party supporting parliamentary democracy, often joined Weimar Republic governments, and generally favored gradual reform.

The Communist Party ("KPD") considered themselves revolutionary socialists and believed that the capitalist system should ultimately be overthrown.

The SPD and KPD were both mass parties in the 1920-'30s, each getting millions of votes and turning out tens of thousands of people in mass demonstrations. But they considered themselves enemies. Their supporters literally fought each other in the streets.

The KPD considered the SPD to be "social fascists," as dangerous as the Nazis.

SPD leaders believed the KPD sought to destroy parliamentary democracy and regarded themselves as defenders of constitutional government against extremists on their left and right. SPD-controlled governments had also used police against KPD organizations and demonstrations.

In the last democratic elections in November of 1932, the SPD received 20.43% of the vote, the KPD received 16.86% of the vote and the Nazi Party received 33.09% of the vote. Thus the combined SPD and KPD received a Parliamentary plurality of 37.29% of the vote compared to the Nazi's 33.09%. But with the SPD and KPD refusing to unite, German President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. Soon after, Hitler outlawed both parties on the left, arrested many of their leaders, and subsequently started to send them to concentration camps.

Today, there are real political differences between Democratic so-called "moderates" and Democratic "progressives." But until the mid-term elections, the great danger that must be defeated is MAGA-style fascims. If Democrats do not win at least one (or hopefully) both Houses of Congress, there will be little to block at least two more years of escalating Trumpian authoritarianism which could effectively destroy the Republic.

Between now and November, Democratic moderates and progressives need to form a United Front against MAGA. They need to avoid the mistakes of the German left in the 1930s. For the immediate term—whether there are differences of opinion about Medicare for All or US aid to Israel—the focus must be on fighting MAGA and winning congressional seats for Democrats, whether the nominees in the general election are moderate or progressive.

On paper, Democratic candidates seem to be moving in this direction. In Michigan the moderate Democratic loser, Haley Stevens, and the progressive Democratic winner, Abdul El Sayed spoke on the phone and Stevens endorsed El Sayed. On social media, Stevens posted that she if offering El Sayed "my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November."

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke on the phone with El Sayed, and Schumer reportedly telling the Michigan nominee, "I don’t need you to like me. I just need you to win." “We had a really good conversation,” Schumer said. “I told him I think we’d agree on things: Beat Rogers, win Michigan, take back the Senate. He said I agree on all three.” Schumer added that his takeaway from the call was that “we have more that unites us than divides us."

But a meaningful Democratic United Front will take more than rhetoric. Control of Congress is likely to be extraordinarily close. Democratic moderates must not only say nice things about progressive nominees. They must use their money and their supporters to campaign as strongly for them as they would if their preferred moderates had won the nominations. And for their part, progressive nominees need to take a temporary break from attacking moderate Democrats as mere corporate tools. In a post primary interview, El-Sayed described Schumer as “pragmatic”—a pulled punch if ever there was one.

But it's concerning that some so-called moderate Democrats are more intent on the progressive nominees losing the general election than on defeating MAGA. Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, a leading corporate-friendly Democratic group told the New York Times that it is preparing a new $15 million effort "to discredit" democratic socialism. According to the Times, the "group plans to target the Democratic Socialists of America movement, which he believes poses a 'mortal danger' for Democrats. Cowan told the newspaper that the effort "would include opposition research into DSA, polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the 'DSA dodge'— flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label."

Meanwhile, former Bill Clinton campaign advisor James Carville proclaimed that Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom a majority of New York Democratic voters chose to run for Congress, should not be seated by the Democratic caucus if she wins the seat, as is likely. He said of Chevalier, “I ain't in the same party as you,” and explicitly proposed that Democrats consider the word “schism.” Comedian Bill Maher—who now describes himself as "left of center, slightly"—recently said that if progressives dominate the Democratic Party, he would consider supporting JD Vance or Marco Rubio in 2028.

These so-called "moderate" Democrats are imitating the 1930s German left. If their efforts help MAGA to retain Congress they will be repressed along with the "progressives." Eventually, they could all end up sharing the same jail cells.

In 1998, my 6-year-old son walked onto his Los Angeles elementary school campus and into a preventable crisis.

A school gardener wearing a full hazardous materials suit was spraying pesticides, unaware that children were nearby. My son, unprotected, was sprayed directly in the face with a toxic pesticide. Within minutes, he struggled to breathe and suffered a severe asthma attack.

He recovered. But one question stayed with both of us: How could this happen at a school?

The contradiction was impossible to ignore: If the pesticide required an adult applicator to wear full protective equipment, why was it considered safe to use where children could be exposed?

California's experience demonstrated that schools do not have to choose between controlling pests and protecting students. They can accomplish both.

Children are not simply smaller adults. Pound for pound, they breathe more air; consume more food and water; and their brains, lungs, immune systems, and endocrine systems are still developing. These differences make them uniquely vulnerable to environmental chemicals. Research has linked exposure to certain pesticides with asthma, learning and developmental problems, neurological effects, endocrine disruption, and other long-term health concerns. Children cannot choose where they spend their days, nor can they protect themselves from environmental hazards created by adults. That responsibility belongs to us.

My son's exposure changed the course of my life. It led me to establish California Safe Schools, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children from harmful environmental exposures. I worked with parents, educators, physicians, scientists, and school officials to create the groundbreaking Los Angeles Unified School District Integrated Pest Management Policy, one of the first of its kind in the nation. Rather than relying on routine pesticide spraying, the policy embraced the Precautionary Principle: When there is credible evidence that a chemical may harm children's health, schools should take preventive action even if every scientific question has not yet been answered. Simply put, children's health should come before convenience.

The policy also established the public's Right to Know, recognizing that parents, teachers, and school employees deserve timely information about pesticides used on school campuses. Families cannot make informed decisions or advocate for their children's health if they are unaware of when or what pesticides are being applied. Transparency became a cornerstone of protecting students.

The Los Angeles policy became a model for California and helped pave the way for the Healthy Schools Act of 2000, which required schools to notify parents and staff before pesticide applications, maintain records of pesticide use, and encourage schools to adopt Integrated Pest Management practices that emphasize prevention and least-toxic pest control methods.

California strengthened these protections even further with AB 405, authored by Assemblymember Cindy Montañez (D-39), sponsored by California Safe Schools, and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger in 2005.The law prohibited the use on school sites of experimental pesticides, pesticides under conditional registration that had not completed all required health and environmental testing, and pesticides that the US Environmental Protection Agency was phasing out because of health or environmental concerns. The legislation recognized a simple but important principle: Children should never be exposed at school to pesticides that have not been fully evaluated for safety or that regulators have already determined should be removed from use. AB 405 closed important gaps in school pesticide protections and reinforced California's commitment to putting children's health first and protecting more than 6 million students, teachers, and staff.

Over the past 28 years, California Safe Schools has continued to work with parents, educators, students, scientists, physicians, school officials, and policymakers to advocate for safer school environments. One lesson has remained constant: Pesticide exposure in schools is almost always preventable.

Pesticides are designed to kill living organisms. While they target insects, weeds, fungi, and rodents, many also pose risks to human health. The question has never been whether schools should control pests. They should. The real question is how they do it.

For decades, many schools relied on routine pesticide spraying as the first line of defense. Yet experts have long recognized that safer, more effective approaches exist. Integrated Pest Management, or IPM, focuses first on prevention by eliminating the conditions that allow pests to thrive. Better sanitation, sealing cracks and openings, repairing leaks, improving waste management, and monitoring pest activity often reduce or eliminate the need for chemical pesticides. When pesticides are necessary, IPM emphasizes choosing the least hazardous products and applying them only when children are not present or when they could reasonably be exposed.

California's experience demonstrated that schools do not have to choose between controlling pests and protecting students. They can accomplish both.

Unfortunately, protections remain uneven across the United States. While some states and school districts have adopted strong Integrated Pest Management programs, others continue to rely heavily on pesticide applications with fewer safeguards. Parents may receive little or no advance notice before pesticides are used, and school staff may lack training in safer pest management practices. As a result, children's protection often depends on where they live rather than on a consistent national standard.

This is particularly troubling because children spend approximately 1,000 hours each year at school. Schools should be among the safest places in a child's life, not environments where unnecessary exposure to hazardous chemicals remains a possibility.

The good news is that we already know what works.

Integrated Pest Management has been successfully implemented in thousands of schools across the country. It reduces pesticide use while maintaining effective pest control, often lowering long-term maintenance costs by addressing the underlying causes of infestations rather than repeatedly treating the symptoms. Prevention is not only safer; it is also smarter.

Every school district should adopt comprehensive Integrated Pest Management policies that prioritize prevention, maintenance, monitoring, and least-toxic methods before chemical pesticides are considered. Hazardous pesticides should never be applied when children are present or could reasonably be exposed. Parents, teachers, and school employees should receive timely notification before any pesticide application so they can make informed decisions. School personnel and pest management professionals should receive ongoing training to ensure these policies are implemented consistently and effectively.

Most importantly, policymakers should recognize that children's health deserves a precautionary approach. When credible scientific evidence suggests a pesticide may pose a risk to children, protecting them should not depend on waiting years for absolute certainty while exposures continue. Prevention should always come before regret.

Nearly three decades after my son's exposure, we should still think about the question that was asked that day: Could it happen again?

The answer should be no.

No parent should have to wonder whether their child will be exposed to toxic pesticides during the school day. No child should suffer an asthma attack or another preventable health consequence because adults failed to take reasonable precautions.

We have the knowledge. We have safer alternatives. We have decades of successful experience showing that schools can manage pests without unnecessarily exposing children to hazardous chemicals.

The remaining question is whether we have the will to make those protections the standard in every school across America.

A safe school environment should never be left to chance. It should begin with a simple promise: No child should be placed in harm's way by preventable pesticide exposure.

Most people recognize that Donald Trump and his kids are stealing from us with both hands every day. But they are not as outraged as they should be because most have the view that everyone does it. While I will never defend the Democrats as paragons of honesty (what the hell are those crypto contributions?), they are not in the same ballpark as Trump and his crew.

Part of the confusion stems from the media’s refusal to ever put big numbers in context. They all know that the vast majority of their audience is not clear on the distinction between millions, billions, and trillions, and have no idea how large the federal budget is, but they refuse to take the ten seconds and ten words that would be needed to give readers a clearer sense of what is at stake.

The other source of confusion is that the Republicans spent four years endlessly hyping the “Biden crime family.” They used Congressional hearings, as well as thousands of appearances on TV news, shows to yell (often literally) about Biden family corruption.

And it’s clear it was not zero. Hunter Biden, while struggling with drug addiction, openly traded on his family name to land a well-paying perch with a Ukrainian energy company. He also managed to sell his artwork, which is not obviously of great value, for $50K a painting.

Joe’s younger brother James also seems to have traded on the family name, but the sums involved appear to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and mostly during the years 2017-2019, when Joe Biden was not even in public office.

It is a bad practice for family members to profit from their ties to a vice-president or president, but there is zero evidence that Joe Biden ever did anything to directly benefit his son or brothers in their business dealings. We can be pretty certain of this fact because Republicans in Congress and the White House, both in Trump’s first term and his current term, have left no stone unturned in trying to show Biden’s corruption. (Trump’s first impeachment was over his effort to extort Ukraine’s president to lie about Biden’s corruption.)

While it is difficult to get clear numbers on the extent of the corruption of Trump and his family in his current term, since they disclose as little as possible, and no one can accept what they do disclose at face value, we can try to put some numbers on it. At the very least, it should be totally clear that Trump’s corruption, by any measure, is in a totally different universe from even the worst imaginable story that can be told about Joe Biden and his family.

The list below is far from exhaustive. We will probably not know all the ways that Trump put money into his and his family’s pockets until long after his presidency, and maybe not even then. But this should be a good start.

Venezuela’s Oil: $13 billion

Trump has repeatedly said that “we” got $13 billion from selling Venezuela’s oil. This is after he kidnapped Venezuela’s president Nicholas Maduro, and put his vice-president Delcy Rodríguez in charge of the country. According to Trump, she is taking her orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Any money that the US gets from selling Venezuela’s oil is essentially stolen from Venezuela. It is their oil. But to make matters worse, there is literally zero accounting of this money. Under the law, any money obtained from Venezuela should go to the US Treasury. Any spending from this money should be approved by Congress.

Instead, Trump has sent the money to an account in Qatar, and it is unclear what is happening with it. Until it can be shown otherwise, it is reasonable to assume that Trump has personally pocketed it. If that is not the case, Trump should be able to document what has happened to this money any day of the week. Until he does show what happened to the money, we might as well assume it went into Donald Trump’s pockets.

Trump Family Crypto: $1.4 billion

Trump created his own crypto coin, $Trump, which people could buy as a way of currying favor with him. Melania Trump also made a crypto coin, $MELANIA. Trump’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has also put out a crypto coin. In addition to making money from selling the coins directly, Trump also profits from transactions in the coins, since they pay him a fee.

Trump’s “Gift” Plane from Qatar: $1.1 billion

A gift to the president while they are in office is a gift to the United States government. Nonetheless, Trump plans to take the plane that Qatar gave him back to Mar-a-Lago when he leaves office in less than two and a half years. The plane itself was worth $400 million. In addition, the Pentagon is spending between $400 million and $1 billion to install protective equipment which was already in place for the two existing versions of Air Force 1. I have included the middle figure of $700 million.

Trump Truth Social Insider Trading Sales: $1.2 billion

Donald Trump recently announced that he will sell a special subscription service where, for $100,000 a month, investors could get advance notice of Truth Social posts that are likely to move markets. We don’t know how many investors will ultimately pay for the opportunity to trade on inside information. But if it ends up being 1,000, Trump will pocket $1.2 billion a year from this scam.

Selling pardons: $10 million

Reuters did an investigation of Trump’s pardons, noting that 96 percent did not follow the normal procedure. They noted that just ten prominent pardon recipients contributed over $10 million to Trump campaign funds. The full amount given by all the people receiving pardons is surely considerably larger. The New York Times had an excellent piece back in March on the pardon industry that has arisen around Trump.

Melania Trump’s Documentary: $28 million

Melania Trump was given a contract by Amazon for rights to a documentary about her life. According to the Wall Street Journal, her take was $28 million. The film grossed $16 million.

Jared Kushner Hedge Fund Investments: $5.4 billion

Shortly after leaving the White House following Trump’s first term, first son-in-law Jared Kushner started a hedge fund, Affinity Partners, that quickly drew billions of dollars of investments from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries. While Kushner cannot directly put this money into his pocket, he is certainly positioned to get hundreds of millions in fees from the fund, especially if his proximity to Trump allows for his investments to have large payoffs.

Trump Sons’ Military Contracts: $315 million

Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump have recently taken an interest in several companies that are now getting contracts from the military. The Washington Post puts the value of the current and likely future contracts for these companies at $6.3 billion. If we say 5 percent will go to the Trump kids, this comes to $315 million.

While this list hopefully captures the biggest windfalls that Trump and his family are receiving from the presidency, it is certainly not a complete list of Trump family corruption. For example, Donald Trump, Jr. is a paid advisor to the Kalshi betting market and an investor in Polymarket. The Trump administration has worked aggressively to block regulation of these markets that might hurt their profits.

Donald Trump also trades stock frequently, often buying shares in companies just before they get a major government contract. The Trump family business has been blessed with favorable treatment of hotel and resort projects in countries seeking lower tariff rates on their exports to the United States. And the Trump family openly hawks their merchandise at the White House and on official websites. But most of these items would likely to be small potatoes compared to the graft listed here.

The Biden Crime Family’s Haul

As with the Trump numbers, these are crude guesses. People can also decide for themselves the extent to which they represent presidential corruption. For example, when Hunter Biden gets payments from shady Chinese businesspeople in a period where Joe Biden is a private citizen, is that presidential corruption?

Anyhow, here is what I get.

Hunter Biden Burisma Payments: $4.0 million

These were payments made to Hunter Biden for serving on the board of Burisma, a large Ukrainian energy firm. Hunter Biden served on Burisma’s board starting in 2014, when Joe Biden was vice-president, and remained on the board until 2019, leaving before Joe Biden’s term as president.

Hunter Biden Payment from Chinese Businesses: $2.6 million

Hunter received $2.6 million in payments in 2017 and 2018 from Chinese business owners with dubious business practices. These were years when Joe Biden was a private citizen, his term as vice-president having ended and more than two years before his term as president began.

Hunter Biden Art Sales: $1.5 million

Hunter sold 27 paintings between 2021 and 2023 that netted him approximately $1.5 million. Demand for his artwork has fallen considerably after his father left the White House.

Jim Biden Payment from Chinese Businesses: $500,000

It seems that some of the money from Hunter Biden’s business associates may have also gone to his uncle (Joe Biden’s brother). It’s not clear how much this might have been, but as with the payments to Hunter Biden, this was a period where Joe Biden was a private citizen.

If anyone is wondering, I did not forget to put the Biden numbers on the graph. They are just too small to be visible next to the Trump graft numbers.

The point here should be obvious to everyone. Joe Biden’s family members, or at least Hunter Biden, behaved in ways that most of us would likely view as unethical. But even if we blame President Biden for actions in which he had no direct involvement, his corruption is not anywhere near the level of corruption of the Trump administration.

Trump and his family seem to view the government as a massive candy store from which they can take whatever they want as long as Donald Trump is in the White House. And as long as Republicans control Congress and the Supreme Court, they might be right.

One year ago, the Trump administration brought 800 National Guard troops to occupy the streets of Washington, DC, part of the "Safe and Beautiful Task Force." There are now approximately 5,000 troops from 15 states deployed here, with some officially moved in and set to stay through 2029.

This does not include the alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies swarming our neighborhoods across the city, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Agency, Park Police, and more.

The National Guard can be found meandering around metro stations, museums, and grocery stores there for mere posture. Despite crime being down before they were deployed here. A new analysis from the Center for American Progress found the Guard deployment has not had a measurable impact on violent crime. They are not even trained in "civilian policing," and are unable to make actual arrests.

“This was never about reducing crime, especially not violent crime,” said Chandler Hall, who wrote the study. “This has been a show of force without any evidence to bear that it’s actually working."

"If my neighbors could experience military protection as something imposed upon them, what did civilians overseas think when American forces arrived in their communities?"

The cost of the Guard is estimated at $3 million a day, with some troops said to make close to $9,000 a month, including salary, lodging, and food per diem. It is hard to track the multi-year total in billions of dollars as the administration is far from transparent with the process.

The wasteful spending from the Department of War is unsurprising. Despite the Pentagon never passing an audit, the Department of War's proposed budget is record-breaking at $1.5 trillion for one year and does not include the recent billions for the Iran war and additional billions to Israel to further the genocide in Gaza and ongoing destruction in Lebanon.

Some of the reasoning for more troops in DC was for the Freedom 250 nationalism events, beginning with a UFC fight, State Fair, and Fourth of July festivities, all of which were disastrous, from cancellations, evacuations, and heat strokes to stage parts falling, nearly killing performers. The millions of dollars that went into these spectacles strained the local community. On July 4, my friend Nicky, a 71-year-old EMT, worked an 18-hour double shift for $27 an hour while constant military flyovers cost over $1.2 million.

Karen Degraphenreid, a veteran of the US Air Force as a Major of 10 years, got involved with Free DC when the military occupation in DC began. She describes her reflections from her time overseas to experiencing the guard takeover here at home.

"Washington is the only place in the country where more than 700,000 American citizens can have troops deployed to their streets by leaders they have no voting representation in choosing. We pay federal taxes, serve in the military, and fulfill every obligation of citizenship, yet Congress can override our local government and impose decisions that fundamentally reshape life in our city. That reality forced me to reconsider what 'protection' actually means," she said.

She continued:

Many of my neighbors never asked for soldiers outside their neighborhoods. Many openly opposed their presence. To them, the deployment did not feel like reassurance. It felt like a federal government exercising power over a city that has long been denied full democratic self-government.

And that realization led me to a question I had never seriously asked during my years in uniform.

If my neighbors could experience military protection as something imposed upon them, what did civilians overseas think when American forces arrived in their communities? When we said we were bringing security and stability, did they experience it as protection? Or did they see armed strangers exercising power over places that belonged to them?

Karen is also a member of Common Defense, which holds trainings for veterans to verbally confront the National Guard. Other veterans are speaking out to encourage their fellows and active-duty members to do the same. Groups like About Face have been welcoming anti-war veterans to become more organized for years, many of whom were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are actively opposed to the genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran.

At a press conference commemorating one year of the occupation, Luke Filomena, a registered nurse with National Nurses United, expressed the imperialist boomerang we are all witnessing

I’ve seen this administration and every administration prior instead choose to spend hundreds of billions, now trillions of dollars, yearly, to go toward countless amounts of death and destruction through endless imperialist wars overseas and the funding and arming of a genocide in Gaza. I’ve been forced to watch as hospitals filled with patients and fellow healthcare workers, as well as schools filled with children, are indiscriminately bombed in Gaza and in Iran, and as the US blockade of Cuba leaves hospitals without fuel and supplies to power lifesaving medical equipment and provide care for their patients.

"Over the past year, under the Trump regime, we’re now seeing the imperialist boomerang come back, with its sights locked on the Black, brown, and immigrant communities here in DC; those who I see each day at the bedside," Filomena explained.

It's one thing to be aware of connecting the dots, and it's another to act on it. DC has been public about its opposition to the military takeover of the city. When the occupation first launched, we disrupted Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's photo op at Shake Shack in Union Station. A month later, Trump and almost his entire cabinet went out to dinner at a restaurant near the White House, and we disrupted it, chanting, "Free DC, Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time." We later drowned out a public appearance by Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and hundreds of National Guard at Malcolm X Park.

Opportunities to confront the administration are rarer than daily encounters with the Guard. The same week budget cuts to Supplemental and Nutrition Assistance Program were being discussed in Congress, I asked a group of troops, who often appear to be aimlessly wandering our neighborhoods in groups of four, if people in their communities would be hit by this. I've asked them if they know their neighbors and what services they could use and be funded versus them being deployed here to hang outside of a convenience store. When the forest fires created thick smoke across DC, I asked why they were here and not putting out the fires.

In these conversations, they almost always nod their head and reach for their pamphlet, telling me and others who confront them to contact their supervisor. They come from states from Mississippi to Michigan, and there have been state-by-state campaigns to get the Guard to go home. Many of them are here voluntarily, not simply "following orders" as we are led to believe.

While we have 800 military bases abroad, the war economy is inescapable for most people within the United States as well. The predatory trap the military-industrial complex has on young people of color or those in poverty means they are heavily recruited to join the various branches of the military. The increased amount of data centers across the country is also making the war economy ever more apparent.

But the state can't use the excuse of job creation anymore. The Climate and Communities Institute shows us that employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades, from an estimated 3.2 million workers during the Reagan military-spending peak in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million workers in 2020. The drop occurred despite Pentagon budgets rising 22% over the same period (not accounting for inflation costs). The alternative is a care economy, a system of paid and unpaid labor, services, and relationships that support human health, well-being, and daily life, that moves away from dirty, violent jobs that rely on weapons manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry.

We cannot normalize troops on our streets. But we must address the roots that cause normalization. We've been taught to salute combat veterans for their service no matter their history; we're used to discounts for military personnel and TV shows and Hollywood movies glorifying lower-level cadets to high-ranking commanders. While militarized superheroes are a common staple in US popular culture, teachers are buying their own school supplies for their classrooms, social workers have overwhelming caseloads, EMTs are working overtime while underpaid, and many veterans are unhoused or waitlisted at the VA.

Washington, DC does not need occupation; it needs fair representation. We don't need billions of dollars going toward policing our neighbors and militarization of our streets to make our communities safer—we need housing, education, healthcare, and a commitment to climate justice for true national security. In the meantime, we have only seen our community grow stronger to protect each other—more trainings, skill sharing, documenting, court support, fundraising, and more. Every day we are supporting each other by radically building community through getting to know our neighbors more deeply in real life.

Tallying the results of Washington, DC’s first ranked-choice election in June took about 10 days—longer than many voters are used to. In an age when artificial intelligence can generate an answer in seconds, waiting days for election results can feel old-fashioned, inefficient, even suspicious. And it is about to matter far more widely. This November, 17 states, cities, and counties will use ranked-choice voting, including Maine and Alaska statewide, in races that could help decide control of Congress. More voters than ever will watch results take days to resolve, and more will be asked to trust a count they cannot see.

But that slowness may be one of its most democratic features.

I come to this question from health informatics, where I study how even AI-generated information that sounds clear, fluent, and helpful still requires careful review before it reaches a patient. The same verification problem applies to elections. The more authoritative a system sounds, the more important it becomes to make sure the output can be checked.

DC’s June 16 primary followed a system that requires more than a simple tally: Voters rank candidates, and if no candidate receives more than 50% of first-choice votes, lower-performing candidates are eliminated, and votes are redistributed according to voters’ next choices. New York City already uses ranked-choice voting in local primary and special elections.

AI may soon be able to produce election results in seconds. That does not mean it should.

There is nothing wrong with ranked-choice voting, but it must be carried out with verifiable results. Because election counting is not just a math problem; it is a trust problem, especially in the US today, where election workers face harassment, routine counting delays are recast as fraud, and many voters already doubt institutions before a single ballot is counted.

In this climate, counting ranked-choice votes in a way that allows for public verification might take longer than people are used to. Every ballot must be tied to a voter-verifiable record. Every round of tabulation must be explainable. Every disputed outcome must be auditable by people who can inspect the evidence themselves.

AI is not yet counting votes, but AI and machine-assisted systems are already touching elections before ballots are counted, including information voters receive, and how their signatures are reviewed. In 2024, X’s Grok chatbot gave users false information about ballot deadlines; after election officials from five states complained, X changed Grok so election-related questions directed users to Vote.gov, the federal government’s official voting information website. In North Carolina, 10 counties piloted automated signature-verification software for absentee-by-mail ballots in 2024. The pilot did not affect whether any ballot was counted, but later reporting found reliability problems: The software failed to match about 11% of signatures, most software-flagged signatures were approved after human review, and technical issues complicated the test. Neither example is the same as artificial intelligence counting votes, but both show how software can shape what voters are told or what happens before a ballot enters the count.

I have seen the problem in my own research. AI systems can cite studies that do not exist, with titles, authors, and journals that look real until you check them. A 2026 Nature analysis⁠ warned that hallucinated citations are polluting scientific literature, and OpenAI researchers have warned⁠ that some training and evaluation systems reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty. A system that gives a confident answer may look more useful, even when that confidence is misplaced, than one that says, “I don’t know.”

That matters because elections often turn on ballot conditions that are not immediately machine readable and need human review: stray marks, undervotes, overvotes, damaged ballots, or ambiguous voter intent. In races where the margin between the candidates is narrow, a few disputed ballots can change the result. These questions should not be resolved by a system whose rules, error rates, or decision process the public cannot understand or meaningfully examine. They should be handled through documented procedures, human review, paper records, and public audits.

Human counting is also imperfect. But precisely because humans are fallible, democratic systems have developed safeguards such as paper ballots, bipartisan observation, chain-of-custody rules, cure processes, recounts, and post-election audits. Risk-limiting audits⁠, for example, hand check samples of paper ballots and can trigger a fuller count if the sample does not support the reported result. Colorado was the first state to conduct a statewide risk-limiting audit in 2017; today, all Colorado counties conduct one before results are certified. Other states have since adopted, required, or piloted risk-limiting audits.

The best election systems do not ask voters to trust either a person or a machine. They produce evidence. That is where current policy is behind the curve. States have moved quickly to regulate AI-generated deepfakes in campaign communications, because fake videos and robocalls can mislead voters. But far less attention has been paid to the AI inside election administration itself. That gap should close before AI moves deeper into election administration, especially into decisions that could affect whether a ballot is accepted, cured, rejected, or counted.

Federal and state governments should establish clear standards for AI used in anything election related. The Brennan Center for Justice⁠ has called for such safeguards around quality, transparency, consistency, certification, and monitoring. Election offices should have to explain to the public what an AI system does, who checks it, and how voters can verify the evidence. AI systems whose rules, error rates, or decision process the public cannot understand or meaningfully examine should not make final decisions about whether a ballot counts.

Voters have a role, too. Ask your local election officials whether AI tools are being used anywhere in election administration and how those decisions can be audited. Ask how voters will know if the AI setup gets something wrong. And volunteer as a poll worker. You don't need a background in elections; local officials train you. Democracy needs more people who understand how ballots are handled, checked, and verified.

AI may soon be able to produce election results in seconds. That does not mean it should. The labor of democracy is not a bottleneck in need of streamlining. It is part of the safeguard.

The media spent a lot of time this summer examining whether a certain Maine oysterman and Marine veteran seeking federal employment should have been better vetted by those around him.

Even after Graham Platner abandoned his US Senate bid, his friends and foes argue about whether service-related conditions—which earned him a 100% disability rating from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—contributed to past substance abuse, mental health problems, and aggression against intimate partners.

Now, in the same state, the spotlight has shifted to David Brouillette, a troubled Afghan war vet who might also have been better off harvesting oysters. Brouillette spent eight years in the US Army and state National Guard before getting hired for not one, but two federal jobs. Thanks to an ill-advised push to recruit more ex-military personnel for law enforcement roles, without proper background checks, he got to carry a gun again.

Last month, after serving as a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) police officer, a prison guard, and then joining the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Brouillette fatally shot Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, a young Colombian immigrant, during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine.

The Vet-to-Cop Pipeline

Thanks to Congress allocating $30 billion to create 10,000 more positions for that agency between 2025 and 2030—and job cuts at other federal departments, which often employ veterans—more ex-soldiers are getting hired into a paramilitary workforce, with insufficient screening, minimal training, and leaders who valorize brutality. Those who have already been cops go to the head of the line for signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

Brouillette is among the 200,000 veterans disproportionately represented in the nation’s nearly 1 million law enforcement jobs, ranging from local police departments to the fast-growing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

During a 10-year period, nearly one-third of more than 500 cops involved in a shooting incident were veterans.

For their own good and the welfare of all Americans, some of these vets should not trade one uniform for another. That’s because past military service not only produces Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); it can also leave former service members with traumatic brain injuries that trigger aggressive and impulsive behavior.

In the case of Maine mass shooter Robert Card, a longtime Army Reserve grenade range instructor who never served in combat, that condition led to the slaughter of 18 neighbors at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, almost three years ago. Far more common is the rocky personal transition to civilian life typified by twice-divorced Brouillette, whose father and brother also served in the military.

Mental Health Issues

According to Brouillette’s first ex-wife, Ashley, he first became verbally and physically abusive after joining the military in 2007. His subsequent misbehavior, she told The New York Times, included choking her, slamming her to the floor, and pushing her against a wall. In 2012, such “threats and harassment were so persistent,” she fled the state to escape him. “He has mental health issues, he’s short-tempered, he’s reactive, [and] he should be in treatment,” she says.

Seven years later, his next ex-wife sought a restraining order against Brouillette after he “broke her door down, destroyed her belongings, and dumped her clothes over a bridge,” and spat in her face. In her court filing, she expressed fear about his stalking her by “coming to my home or sitting in the parking lot of my work.” So, as CNN found, a judge twice issued temporary orders requiring Brouillette to relinquish any firearms in 2019 and 2021.

To make matters worse, when Brouillette retrained to become a firefighter in 2021, a heavy I-beam fell on his head, inflicting serious damage. In a lawsuit over the accident, he confessed to having “impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo, and high sensitivity.”

Long before he fired the shots that killed Guerrero, he had already worked among VA patients and staff in Maine, as part of an agency police force with its own troubled history of using excessive force. And then he moved on seamlessly to ICE last December, despite a checkered court record and non-military head injury that should have been disqualifying.

A Bad Career Choice

When we were researching an earlier book on veterans, two retired Army officers, both West Point grads, expressed deep concern about policing, of any kind, as a post-military career among veterans at risk for substance abuse and suicide because of PTSD, chronic pain, or traumatic brain injuries.

Daniel Sjursen, a much-decorated major who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, told us that, “when you leave the service, there’s no de-programming…They just load you up on meds, and then you go straight to the police academy.” Because “military-style of policing is based on the notion that high-crime areas should be treated like occupied countries, a guy can come back to Baltimore, Camden, or Detroit and function the same way we did when occupying Kabul or Baghdad.”

As his fellow officer, a Gulf War combat vet and military historian Andrew Bacevic noted, “To the extent that we’ve got a bunch of damaged young people, then maybe the last thing we want to do is put them in a job where they carry a gun in an environment that’s going to make things worse.”

So don’t hold your breath waiting for justice for Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero. For the last 18 months, federal immigration agents have operated with far less public oversight and accountability than any local police department.

Even during Barack Obama’s administration, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) was not listening to such knowledgeable insiders. Instead, the DOJ provided local police departments around the country with tens of millions of dollars to fund veterans-only positions.

As noted in a 2017 report by the Marshall Project, “When Warriors Put On the Badge,” this combination of special funding and preferential hiring mandated by state or federal law has made it harder to “build police forces that resemble and understand diverse communities.” The new hires benefiting most have been disproportionately white, because 60% of all enlisted men and women are not people of color.

Inappropriate Use of Force

Under the first Trump administration, the DOJ had little interest in tracking the later job performance of recently hired veterans or how their military background might affect their behavior.

By that time, however, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) had already raised concerns about “the integration of military personnel” into law enforcement. In their own 2009 hiring guide, the IACP noted that, in the case of returning combat veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan, their combat environment and their policing environments may appear surprisingly similar.”

As a result, prior military service in the Middle East “may cause returning officers to mistakenly blur the lines between military combat situations and civilian crime situations, resulting in inappropriate decisions and actions, particularly in the use of lethal force.”

Cosponsored by the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, this IACP report also noted that vets who have PTSD and related “depression, anger, withdrawal, and family issues” may have “a low tolerance for civilian complaints” and greater propensity for the “inappropriate use of force.” Some police chiefs interviewed reported that veterans under their command had come back “ill prepared for the civilian world” because their PTSD left them with “exaggerated survival instincts.”

Officer-Involved Shootings

Researchers at the University of Texas School of Public Health found that Dallas Police Department officers with military experience used their guns while on duty more than non-veterans. During a 10-year period, nearly one-third of more than 500 cops involved in a shooting incident were veterans. Those who had been deployed overseas were nearly three times as likely to have fired their weapon; those who had not been deployed were still twice as likely to be involved in a shooting. This study, published in the Journal of Public Health, concluded that some veterans employed by the Dallas police department lacked “critical thinking skills” when confronted with “high stress scenarios.”

The Marshall Project reported similar findings after it studied use-of-force complaints and fatal police shootings in several cities. In Boston and Miami, officers with military experience generated more civilian complaints of excessive force. Nearly one-third of the Albuquerque officers involved in a total of 35 fatal shootings between January 2010 and April 2014 were veterans. One of the officers sued after killing an unarmed motorist was an Iraq War veteran whose PTSD caused flashbacks, nightmares, and blackouts. Nevertheless, as the Marshall Project discovered, he was “assigned to patrol a high-crime area of town known as ‘the War Zone.’”

“To ensure public safety and guarantee a stable, reliable, and productive workforce,” Marshall Project researchers cited the need for clear and consistent police department policies to “evaluate employees’ mental and physical fitness. Yet local police department screening practices, around the country, remain far from standardized or effective. Some agencies employ the use of administrative interviews and psychological evaluations to assess how veteran officers will perform the essential functions of their position, while other agencies revert to their department medical officer, or lack any policy at all.”

No Local Constraints

Whatever unhelpful contribution to militarized policing has been made by hiring too many post-9/11 vets, new and old cops in Dallas, Boston, Miami, and other cities at least walk the streets without masks on. They display badges with their names and, in most places, wear body cameras as well. If they screw up in a high-stress situation, they are subject to internal affairs investigations or civilian police review board questioning, particularly if an officer-involved shooting has occurred.

When an Army veteran named Derek Chauvin put George Floyd in a fatal choke hold six years ago in Minneapolis, he was even prosecuted and sentenced to a long prison term. When another military veteran named Jonathan Rose—a former machine gunner in Iraq deployed in the Twin Cities last winter as an ICE agent—fired on Renee Good, did he face any criminal charges for killing a gay non-immigrant mother of three? Not yet.

So don’t hold your breath waiting for justice for Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero. For the last 18 months, federal immigration agents have operated with far less public oversight and accountability than any local police department. In the process, they have killed 23 people under circumstances that homicide detectives and local prosecutors have been blocked from properly investigating.

The Department of Homeland Security has just doubled down on its policy of not releasing the names of officers involved in these fatal encounters. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been directed to stop investigating claims by those, like David Brouillette, who say they used lethal force in response to being endangered.

Under current circumstances, no friends, family members, or employment counselors of young veterans should encourage them to answer the siren call of ICE—no matter how much they need a job. As one former ICE official told the Boston Globe, ”We should all be concerned… that they have lowered standards, that they have rushed hiring, and they have made offers to people before their vetting is complete.”

Even if applicants from military backgrounds lack the self-confessed “cognitive deficits” of Brouillette, wearing camo again—while stopping traffic, knocking down doors, brandishing automatic weapons, and engaging in car chases—is not a healthy career choice, for them or us.

By late summer of 2026, the campaign against America's democratic institutions had become almost dizzying in its reach. It moved through turbulent waters from the Strait of Hormuz to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, raised new tariff barriers and imagined golden ballrooms, revived Jim Crow at the polls and McCarthyism at the State Department, and found time, between denunciations of Canadian wildfires and Democratic Socialists of America, to take aim at the Smithsonian Institution.

The widely admired museum, established “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” and celebrating the 180th anniversary of its founding on August 10, 2026, became the object of a sustained assault. Complaining about the institution’s allegedly “woke agenda,” the Trump administration displaced the Smithsonian’s traditional Folklife Festival by holding something it named "The Great American State Fair" in its place. Notwithstanding the failure of the latter, the Smithsonian’s celebration of the US Republic’s Semiquincentennial also drew the administration’s ire.

The resulting “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” Executive Order (July 24, 2026) demanded “content corrections” and warning notices across Smithsonian exhibits and buildings. On August 4, a federal funding cut of more than 10% reduced the Smithsonian’s budget to its lowest level in over a decade.

If there was any doubt that the censorship and the budget cut belonged to the same antidemocratic project, Samuel J. Redman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and student of Smithsonian history, notes that he cannot “recall a single instance where exhibits have been directly wrestled with by the upper echelons of the federal government.” Among the administration’s grievances was the Smithsonian’s depiction of race relations. The White House report specifically objected to the Smithsonian framing civil rights activist Emmett Till’s murder as being “not just part of a racist past” but a reflection of “our ongoing present” (p.113). It also decried a Smithsonian web page featuring the bullet-riddled historical marker showing where Till’s body was found in 1955.

Crises become politically meaningful only when people build institutions, practice disruption, invent new forms of solidarity, defend truth, sustain hope, and connect local struggles to global ones.

Grappling with this history and its antidemocratic turn, I sat down to have a conversation with two prominent scholars of social movements, Dr. Aldon Morris of Northwestern University and past president of the American Sociological Association, and Dr. Nara Roberta Silva of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and author of an award-winning Brazilian book on the #Occupy movement in the US, for a better understanding of this moment.

The situation in the United States is, after all, not completely unique. Brazil and the United States are both headed into pivotal national elections this fall. Both countries experienced violent coup attempts in 2020. And the two multiracial giants of the Americas are both countries where Black leadership in the struggle for democracy remains critical.

For Dr. Morris, the administration’s consternation at the Emmett Till story is suggestive of the conversations that authoritarians wish to preempt. Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mom notably insisted on an open casket at his funeral, “I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.” And so, the world saw Till’s mutilated body and his community’s grief, sparking a global movement. It is “the story about how a mother ignited and fired up the country and therewith the world about racial inequality,” Morris observes.

Before drawing general lessons about the long struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, Morris and Silva pause to reckon with the immediate crisis. Both begin from the creativity and agency of social movements, yet Morris—speaking for a generation shaped by the Civil Rights Movement—admits to a profound sense of historical surprise. “We had no idea that we would be here right now,” he reflects. “We did not think that truth itself would become something that was to be banned.” In his view, the administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian is therefore not only a dispute over museum exhibits or Black history. “He is not simply attacking Black history,” Morris argues. “He is attacking the distribution of truth about the relationships between human beings, races, and nations. An attack on something like the Smithsonian is a flash point revealing the kind of trouble we face.”

For Dr. Silva, a scholar of US movements as well as those active in her native Brazil, the administration initiatives are a “defining feature of our historical moment” characterized by “the erosion of the public sphere.” In fact, looking at former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s negative impact on that country’s democratic project, Silva concludes, that the “very idea of public has been severely damaged.” Although Morris and Silva disagreed about the extent of erosion, both were similarly concerned about authoritarian historical revisionism. Invoking one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite quotes, “Truth, crushed to Earth, will rise again,” Morris outlined a hopeful, but by no means certain path into the future. “I think that work like that of Nara and myself shows that human agency among the oppressed is a very important social change factor, and it has to be ignited and energized to make a difference.”

Both thinkers are extremely sober about the prospects for democratic change. Looking at the structure of authoritarian movements in Brazil, Silva suggests that we have to address its broad base, even if it is minoritarian in nature: “Coordination exists at the top, but, as a system, the structure is hydra-headed, with several foci working to galvanize followers, create narrative lines, and break new ground.” As such, progressive projects, while themselves broad based and majoritarian in conception, must necessarily carry out institutional reform and enact “a socioeconomic program that meaningfully addresses the crises that brought about the reemergence of authoritarianism.”

Taking a long view, Morris cautions: “What we see is a dialectical process between oppression and efforts of change, social movement activity... We fought a civil war to overthrow slavery in the 1860s. [W. E. B.] Du Bois showed that it was the agency of the slaves themselves that essentially freed the slaves through the general strike. So we get this brief period that looks like we're finally going to have democracy, equality between the races. That lasts for about 11 or 12 years, and then we get the overthrow of Reconstruction, and all of what came after that. All of the violence against Black people, the lynching, and the Jim Crow regime, right?” The US continued “in this oppressive situation and then comes the Civil Rights Movement” and only to be followed by the current, long rollback. “My sense,” Morris avers, “is that social movements, especially the effective ones, are always trial and error.”

Following along with Silva, Morris offers a transnational vision: “We need grassroots movements connected from the United States to Brazil, to South Africa, to Gaza—to all over including the Congo. What I'm saying is that the struggle has always had these global dimensions, but the world has never been so globalized as it is now. We have to be much more concerned with worldwide democracy, worldwide transformation, because what we know is that the systems of oppression are global.”

Before outlining the elements of a hoped-for transnational, pan-democratic movement, Morris finds hope in the face of dismal, on-the-ground facts: The shared global attention to Gaza. This point often confounds liberal and conservative commentators alike, as seen in the handwringing over Michigan US Senate nominee Abdul al-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both whom have been outspoken on Palestine. But, for Morris, recalling the Emmett Till moment, “It is hard for large numbers of people across the globe to really wrap their minds around 20 to 30 thousand babies being starved to death and killed, to whole families being wiped out, and 90% of the population and more dislocated, the destruction of every university in Gaza, the destruction of hospitals, and so forth. This is the one place that seems to be generating some kind of international coherence.”

Silva agrees that a transnational human rights politics is well established, but she is concerned, “We are still a little lost about how to operate in the new terrain of digital media ecosystems, fragmented and precarious workforces, declining organizations, and unstable party systems.” Further, she laments that movements that often put hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people onto the streets nevertheless may secure few immediate positive outcomes or even significant media attention—a point explored adroitly in several national contexts by journalist Vincent Bevins in If We Burn. For Bevins, as with Silva and Morris, the capacity to formulate demands, move beyond mere mobilization to develop organization and leadership, explain the discrepancy between the scale of popular mobilization and outcomes.

Morris shares this concern: “Another March on Washington to celebrate the 1963 March on Washington is not going to accomplish anything as long as it is merely ritualized behavior. The real challenge is whether this generation of activists will be creative again—whether they will figure out how to engage in protest that matters. Marches and demonstrations become ritual when they don’t create social disruption against oppressive forces.”

Silva sees a version of this dilemma in Brazil, as social movements gained greater access to the state under Workers’ Party administrations but also saw their capacity for independent mobilization and disruption decline. Yet recent experience shows that protesting can still exert considerable leverage—in September 2025, nationwide demonstrations blocked attempts to further entrench oligarchic control. Some of the most effective moments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's current administration have come precisely when pressure from below has reinforced, or forced, action from above. For Silva, the Brazilian experience suggests that the challenge for social movements is not simply to mobilize large numbers of people but also to disrupt political routines.

Over the course of our conversation together, the two sociologists reach agreement on the following lessons for durable democracy:

1. Crises matter, but they do not by themselves produce successful mobilizations. Prompted by a question about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota, Morris and Silva emphasized that the decisive issue is how people transform moments of crisis into collective action. Morris’ scholarship on the US Black community’s early bus boycotts during the Civil Rights Movement offers one such example. On the other hand, Silva writes about how Brazilian protests over bus fares were initiated by leftists but later co-opted by the far right.
2. Movement institutions and organizations matter. Durable movements require infrastructure: legal support, sustained dialogue between activists and scholars, leadership development, and the patient work of building organized communities.
3. Disruption is necessary. Alluding to my own South African heritage, Morris asked me, “What did Mandela’s ANC do? It made Apartheid ungovernable.” Returning to the United States, he continued: “It wasn’t just marching. It wasn’t just singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ It was crippling the economy in Birmingham. The activists mastered the process of social disruption.” Channeling Dr. King, Morris recalled the wisdom of creating crises “so crisis-packed that the oppressors have got to deal with us.”
4. Truth is a social movement resource. Neither Silva nor Morris is tempted by epistemological relativism. As Morris put it, “We are not going to go backwards and act as if the truth doesn't matter anymore.” The attacks on the Smithsonian, museums, books, and critical race theory matter because authoritarianism seeks to monopolize historical understanding. A democracy movement, by contrast, depends on an accurate account of history and the public institutions capable of sustaining it.
5. If truth is a democratic resource, so too is hope. But hope should not be confused with naïveté. It requires acknowledging the seriousness of authoritarian movements while recognizing that history still offers grounds for optimism. Hope arises not only from past victories, but also from democratic possibilities emerging in the present—from global solidarity with Gaza to neighbors standing with neighbors in Minneapolis and Chicago. These moments remind us that ordinary people continue to discover new capacities for collective action and democratic renewal.
6. Internationalism is indispensable: Democracy must become transnational. In response to Silva’s statement that Brazilian and US authoritarian movements are already global, Morris calls for “pan-democracy movements.” Democracy movements must become equally interconnected, for “the local and the global are now inseparable.” Yet, befitting a social scientist who made local organizers visible where others had often emphasized charismatic leaders, Morris also cautions: “You can't forget what's happening at the local level and just go global, but you can't just concentrate on the local and not go global.” Both thinkers view recent electoral insurgencies in the United States as promising precisely because they have incorporated global themes, international solidarity, and organizing among immigrant workers—the most globalized of local actors.
7. Finally, people discover themselves through struggle. Reformulated several times over the course of our conversation, this point gathers the preceding lessons together: Crises become politically meaningful only when people build institutions, practice disruption, invent new forms of solidarity, defend truth, sustain hope, and connect local struggles to global ones. In that process, movements do more than oppose domination; they also create the capacities, organizations, and democratic subjects needed to overcome it.

For me, then, the attack on the Smithsonian is about far more than the fate of public museums or competing interpretations of the past. It is part of a broader struggle over whether democratic societies can sustain the institutions, historical memory, and public spaces needed to preserve truth, solidarity, and collective action. Morris and Silva remind us that authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor self-defeating: Democracy endures only when ordinary people organize creatively, disrupt oppressive arrangements, build durable institutions, and discover new capacities through struggle. If there is a lesson from US history and from contemporary Brazil for this moment, it is that the next democratic turn will not be granted from above; it will be ignited from below.

For Washington, war usually begins with decisions made behind closed doors and explained through familiar terms such as security, deterrence, and national interest. It is then presented through images of aircraft and missiles moving toward targets thousands of miles away. But for ordinary people, war often arrives more quietly: through the fuel pump, grocery bills, transportation costs, and household budgets that leave less room for basic needs.

The Iran war demonstrated this reality once again. A crisis in the Middle East quickly became connected to one of the world’s most sensitive energy choke points: the Strait of Hormuz. Concerns about disruptions to global energy flows showed how a conflict far from American shores can affect domestic economic conditions. For most Americans, the consequences are not measured through military operations or geopolitical calculations, but through higher energy costs, rising transportation expenses, and pressure on living standards.

Yet the cost of war extends beyond immediate economic effects. Measuring conflict only through oil prices or military spending overlooks a deeper question: what a country cannot invest in because resources are directed toward war.

No national budget is unlimited. Every billion dollars allocated to military operations, weapons purchases, troop deployments, or rebuilding stockpiles cannot be spent simultaneously on infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing, or other public priorities. This is the social opportunity cost of war: the value of needs that receive fewer resources because military commitments take precedence. Defense spending appears clearly in budgets, but the school never built, the infrastructure project delayed, or the public service left underfunded often remain invisible.

A country that spends vast resources on war in the name of security must also ask whether those choices strengthen or weaken the society that security is supposed to protect.

The economic consequences of war also spread through markets, supply chains, and production costs. Conflicts involving major energy-producing regions create uncertainty that eventually reaches households. However, these burdens are not shared equally. A wealthy family may absorb higher fuel or food prices with limited disruption, while a family already struggling with housing, food, and energy costs may be forced to sacrifice another necessity.

The cost of war is therefore not simply national; it is social. Those with the least influence over decisions about war do not necessarily experience the smallest consequences. The civilian impact of conflict extends beyond battlefields. An American worker whose purchasing power declines or a family facing higher living costs also becomes part of the economic burden created by war.

Supporters of military action argue that these costs must be weighed against the dangers of inaction. They maintain that failing to confront threats abroad could create greater instability and eventually produce even higher costs. This argument deserves consideration. Governments have a responsibility to protect citizens and maintain the capabilities needed to respond to serious threats.

However, national security cannot be measured only through military strength. Military power is one element of national power, but it depends on other foundations: a productive economy, reliable infrastructure, an educated workforce, effective institutions, and a society with economic stability. The central question is not whether the United States should maintain defense capabilities, but whether military spending always strengthens security or whether excessive commitments can weaken the foundations that make security possible.

This is where militarism becomes a political issue. Militarism is not simply the use of military force; it emerges when military solutions become Washington’s default response to international crises and increases in defense spending are treated automatically as greater security. Under these conditions, domestic priorities are repeatedly delayed while the costs of war become immediate and certain. The opportunity cost of war is therefore not only economic; it reflects how the United States defines security and allocates national resources.

The costs of war also continue after military operations end. Rebuilding weapons stockpiles, maintaining readiness, supporting deployments, and preparing for future conflicts can keep public resources tied to military spending for years. War is therefore not only a short-term decision; it can create long-term commitments that shape national priorities long after fighting stops.

Over time, this dynamic can contribute to a war economy: a cycle in which conflict increases demand for military production, that demand creates contracts and budget commitments, and those commitments make continued military spending politically easier to sustain.

Within this cycle, the role of the defense industry becomes an important democratic question. Greater military demand creates more orders and revenue for defense companies, while the costs are distributed nationally through public budgets and debt. This does not mean defense contracts are inherently corrupt, but it raises a fundamental question: Are the voices that benefit from continued military spending more influential in shaping security priorities than the citizens who ultimately pay for them?

War is therefore not only a foreign policy decision but also a domestic democratic issue. When the costs of conflict are distributed among millions of citizens while decisions about war are made within a limited political circle, accountability becomes part of national security itself. Citizens must be able to evaluate not only whether military operations achieve their goals, but whether their costs are proportionate to their results.

From this perspective, diplomacy should not be viewed merely as a moral alternative to military power. If war creates economic risks, energy instability, and long-term financial burdens, reducing tensions can directly protect national resources. Diplomacy is not a substitute for strength; it is a way to prevent unnecessary costs and avoid cycles of confrontation that consume economic and strategic capacity.

Ultimately, the question is not whether the United States should abandon military power or ignore external threats. The question is whether military power remains a tool for protecting national strength or becomes a substitute for it.

The Iran war has placed this issue before the United States in concrete terms. A country that spends vast resources on war in the name of security must also ask whether those choices strengthen or weaken the society that security is supposed to protect.

National power is not defined only by America’s ability to wage war. It also depends on the economic and social foundations that sustain that ability. If repeated conflicts transfer resources away from infrastructure, healthcare, education, and economic opportunity toward permanent military commitments, the United States may increase its short-term capacity to fight wars while weakening the foundations required to remain strong over time.

A nation that consumes its economic and social capital to preserve its power may finance more conflicts. But eventually it must answer a deeper question: D oes it still possess the strong society that this power was originally meant to defend?

Almost 60 years ago, in his book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, historian Howard Zinn wrote a speech for Lyndon Johnson in which the then president announced a withdrawal and the end of the US attempt to control Vietnam. Unfortunately, Johnson did not embrace Zinn’s sensible approach. Instead, he announced the end of his reelection bid, and the US war effort continued for another six years, with the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, or eight years, with the ending of the war and the reunification of Vietnam.

President Donald Trump is at least as concerned as Johnson about not looking like a loser. So, my effort to compose a speech for Trump certainly seems like a quixotic effort. Many of my comrades in the struggle for peace and equality aghast at Trump’s attacks on democracy might question any effort to do anything related to Trump other than protest and try to drive him from office. I, too, am so inclined, but the loss of life in the Ukraine and Iran wars, the genocide of Palestinians, and the danger of escalation to nuclear war are too great to not try.

Here is the speech I think Trump should deliver.

Dear America,

During the 2024 campaign, I often declared, “I will settle Russia-Ukraine while I’m president-elect.” Although I later said that I’d been joking, I really expected I could do it. Some might say I have a short attention span and an exaggerated sense of my own abilities. That may be true. I believe it’s important to always put on an appearance of strength.

In my second Inaugural address, I promised, “We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety, and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed.’” I also said, "My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

The most prominent realist scholar, John Mearsheimer, expected me to follow through on these initial inclinations and be a peace president. Mearsheimer credited me with being different from most foreign policy makers. Less than two weeks into my second term, he said, “Trump is not a war monger... Trump is not interested in fighting wars.”

I had one significant peace achievement at the beginning of my presidency. I forced Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. I even persuaded the United Nations to support the establishment of a Board of Peace for Gaza with me in charge. I admit that no golden age of peace and prosperity has arrived for either the Palestinians or the Israelis. My idea that the Palestinians should leave Gaza was a nonstarter, and I stopped paying attention.

My worst mistake was getting sucked in by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attacking Iran. It didn’t work when we did it last year in the 12-day-long Operation Midnight Hammer. This year’s attack, Operation Epic Fury, has failed to achieve the regime change we sought. Equally unfortunate from our point of view is that Iran is more likely to seek nuclear weapons today than it was before the war.

With Operation Epic Fury, I was able to claim a victory with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding. I should not have listened to the naysayers and stayed with it. It’s time to return to that memorandum and to end our 47-year-old conflict with Iran. Changes in Iran toward more freedoms will be up to the Iranian people.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has also gone on too long. Although I wasn’t able to end it before taking office or in the days that followed, I believe it is time to recognize the reality that our expansion of NATO eastward, overthrow of the neutral Ukrainian government in 2014, the plan to bring Ukraine into NATO, and the arming of Ukraine were the causes of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Many have called the Russia-Ukraine war a proxy war by the US and its European allies against Russia. The commitment of European allies to join us in trying to weaken Russia is one reason it hasn’t been easy for me to negotiate an end to the conflict. I had a cordial discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, but a solution evaded me. I’ve gone back and forth between tamping down and escalating our participation, all to no avail. It’s time to bring that conflict to an end.

There appear to be two options. Both involve recognizing the reality—often denied by both government spokespeople and the mainstream media—that Russia is winning. We don’t like it, but prolonging the conflict just means more deaths on both sides, especially of Ukrainians.

Option one is to agree to an armistice like the one that ended the Korean War. That means a frozen conflict along the final battle lines when both sides—the US, Europeans, and Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other—are ready to say enough.

Option two is to negotiate an agreement that recognizes Russian territorial gains and permanent Ukrainian neutrality.

My fellow Americans, please write me to give me your opinion of which of these two options you prefer. I must tell you that, while option two may sound more sensible and peace minded, the opposition to it will be immense from important sectors of both of our major political parties and from our NATO partners and from the Ukrainians. Those realities are why I’ve made so little progress thus far in ending that conflict.

In any case, it’s time to end the back-and-forth policy and to stick to ending our participation.

We come to the most difficult but also the most important choice we must make. I haven’t paid much attention to the Palestinians. My Board of Peace has accomplished little. The United Nations supported my initiative despite my negative views about that body. We should reciprocate by supporting UN rulings on Palestinian rights. We will no longer vote against UN resolutions in the General Assembly nor veto Security Council resolutions.

We shall advise Israel that we will no longer provide military assistance to it while it is killing Palestinians and occupying Palestinian land.

To sum up, we are returning to support the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, ending our support for the war in Ukraine and for military aid to Israel while it attacks Palestinians, and working with the United Nations to secure Palestinian rights and peace in the region.

My fellow Americans, I have spoken frankly to you tonight. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent, I ask for your support in helping me to put our country and the world on a path toward peace. Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.

On August 6, five weeks after the Supreme Court rejected his first birthright ban, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship and ending “birth tourism.”

Birthright Ban 2.0

The first denies automatic citizenship to babies born in the US to two noncitizen parents if at least one of them is: an “alien enemy,” a member of a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO), a government employee, or has “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.” While the scope of this is technically narrower than his first birthright ban, it is ultimately vague enough that the Trump administration could effectively weaponize it against anyone.

Consider this: On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order designating Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as FTOs. In March, Trump issued a proclamation declaring that all Venezuelan noncitizens 14 years or older who are members of TdA “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” The very same day, the administration announced the deportation of nearly 300 Venezuelan nationals it accused of being members of TdA.

Among these deportees were those whose only crime was having a tattoo that immigration officials had designated as a sign of gang affiliation. Such tattoos included: “stars on shoulder,” “crowns,” “firearms and grenades,” “trains and dice,” “roses and predatory felines,” gas masks, clocks, and even the iconic silhouette of Michael Jordan dunking—the Jumpman. Notably, unlike other gangs, TdA does not require its members to obtain any tattoos. The Trump administration simply used this as a pretext to deport innocent people to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

No child is responsible for the circumstances of their birth—even if their parents are guilty of a crime, they are innocent.

Under this latest executive order, the US-born children of those accused of being a member of a FTO—no matter how baseless the allegation—would have their citizenship status jeopardized and more than likely denied. In doing so, it would pave the way for more family deportations. Notably, the Trump administration has already deported several US-born children along with their parents.

Moreover, while TdA and MS-13 are real organizations, the Trump administration has already designated at least one fictional group as a FTO: the Cartel de los Soles. In 2025, the State Department alleged that this organization was “headed by [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime.” This was a strategic lie. Like antifa, Cartel de los Soles is not a formal organization with a clearly defined leadership structure. Rather, experts describe it as a loose network of individuals broadly involved in the drug trade.

Nevertheless, that designation gave the Trump administration the pretext to invade Venezuela, kidnap Maduro, and put him on trial for his alleged narco-crimes. After his capture, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revised its indictment of Maduro and abandoned its claim that Cartel de los Soles is an actual organization. Whereas the old indictment made 32 mentions of the fictional cartel, the new one refers to it twice. It claims that Maduro, like former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, participated in, perpetuated, and protected this “patronage system.”

While the DOJ altered its indictment of Maduro, Cartel de los Soles is still formally classified as a FTO by the State Department.

Herein lies the real danger: The Trump administration lies and lies often. For an administration this corrupt and xenophobic, this new birthright ban offers it the ability to accuse any noncitizen, under whatever false pretenses, of being a member of a real or fictional organization to target their children. And, make no mistake, if the Supreme Court allows them, the Trump administration certainly will.

Ending Birth Tourism

The other executive order aims at ending birth tourism, or the practice of traveling to another country to give birth, thereby allowing the child to automatically acquire citizenship. While Trump insists that there are “hundreds of thousands” of such births each year, the Migration Policy Institute notes that the most expansive estimate puts the figure at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually in the US due to birth tourism—or less than 1% of all births in the country.

That number, however, is disputed. In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 9,576 babies were born in the US to mothers who list their official address as outside the US. A 2026 study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that birth tourism accounted for less than 0.3% of all US births in any given year between 2014 and 2024.

This executive order authorizes the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security “to issue or adopt rules, policies, operational guidance, or other guidance” designed to stop foreign nationals from entering the country via a temporary visa if they have the goal of giving birth on American soil.

Notably, while the executive order decries the purported dangers of birth tourism, it is vague with respect to how the State Department or DHS would actually go about identifying these people.

Since the first executive order explicitly targets the children of noncitizens who “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States, or a territory of the United States, to give birth,” these departments would be empowered to deport law-abiding visa holders and deny their children citizenship based solely on their own discretion—no matter how disingenuous.

In short, together, these two executive orders would allow the Trump administration to further accelerate its mass deportation agenda while denying citizenship to whoever they want.

Protect Birthright Citizenship

Given the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, these orders should be ruled unconstitutional. Regardless of whether the parents engaged in fraud or were members of a real (or fictional) terrorist organization, their US-born child would still be a citizen under the 14th Amendment. No child is responsible for the circumstances of their birth—even if their parents are guilty of a crime, they are innocent.

So, what then is the point? Perhaps the Trump administration believes that by framing their birthright ban in terms of terrorism and fraud that the Supreme Court might see things differently.

Perhaps it believes that returning to the birthright issue will help Republicans in the midterms. While Trump is broadly unpopular, 8 in 10 Republicans continue to support his immigration policies. An April 2026 poll by Reuters found that 62% of Republicans support ending birthright citizenship.

Once again, we are put in a position where we must trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing. And once again we are forced to reckon with the fact that we cannot take for granted that it will.

Perhaps the point is to stoke more fear within immigrant communities in hopes that more people will self-deport.

Perhaps the cruelty is the point.

Whatever the reason, the reality is that birthright citizenship is once again under fire. People’s constitutional rights are once again being threatened by a xenophobic administration with no regard for the Constitution or the rule of law. Once again, we are put in a position where we must trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing. And once again we are forced to reckon with the fact that we cannot take for granted that it will.

For the sake of ourselves, future generations, and the country, we cannot allow this to become the new normal. We must continue to protest the Trump administration’s abuses, support the journalists documenting its atrocities, and demand that Congress take actions to rein in its corruption.

A major dereliction by the feeble Democratic Party leadership is their unwillingness to address the political amnesia they have allowed corrupt, lying, cruel, outlaw tyrant Trump to enjoy with political impunity. Trump has been more than willing to fill the vacuum created by this abdication. That is his business and political modus operandi (MO). His daily lies, boasts, and fantasies have polluted the political landscape. Moreover, his false claims are rarely rebutted by the haughty Dems who view his diatribes as beneath them to counter.

The Democratic Party leadership needs a compelling “REMINDERS” platform for their current electoral campaigns that they can pin on the Trump rubber-stamping GOP candidates at the Congressional and state levels. Here is a sample:

1. Trump was a failed gambling czar and a frequent user of bankruptcy as a competitive tactic, as he brazenly described it, to stiff his creditors, employees, and consumers. He also used hundreds of undocumented workers for his construction projects, whom he exploited with low wages and bad working conditions.

2. Trump is a serial sexual abuser of women. There are dozens of credible accusations and legal actions against him by his victims. Michael Cohen— Trump’s former personal lawyer even arranged to pay Stormy Daniels to cover up the story about Trump’s 2006 sexual encounter with her. Remarkably, since 2019, the Dems have been AWOL on this predator’s past, while eating their own for a tiny fraction of Trump’s transgressions. (See the February 24, 2020 OPEN LETTER TO THE WOMEN IN CONGRESS).

Political amnesia by the public is easy to fall prey to because it is so often covered up by the culprits and allowed by incompetent opponents.

3. Trump derided and minimized for weeks in early 2020 the spreading COVID pandemic. A Columbia University report conservatively estimated that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths were attributable to the failures of the Trump administration’s delays. Have you heard much about his lethal, arrogant incompetence in the Democrats’ campaigns?

4. Trump’s tax cuts for the super-rich and giant corporations mean huge deficits and a lack of these tax dollars for public services, public works and jobs in communities everywhere. Democrats can highlight what specific and recognized needsthese communities were denied because of Trump’s tax giveaways to the fat-cats.

5. Trump is the consummate climate denier. Each time there are uncontrollable wildfires, floods, heat domes related to climate disruptions by burning of fossil fuels, Democrats can remind people of his ridiculous assertions that global warming is a “hoax” or a “scam,” and start naming these disasters “Trump Hurricanes,” “Trump floods,” “Trump wildfires.” Doesn’t he like things named after him?

Moreover, he has starved the budgets of FEMA and other agencies that combat the impact of these disasters. He is also refusing to pay the underpaid firefighters a living wage and or to expand OSHA’s authorization to protect their safety.

6. Dems should remind people how Trump is the extorter-in-chief. He has discriminatorily cut back on FEMA assistance, mass transit assistance, and other federal outlays for Democratic blue states to punish them for their pro-electoral resistance, including their refusing to give his outlaw regime control over state election data and machinery.

7. Trump has never backed down from his outrageous claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The Dems are too sporadic in condemning Trump’s massive drives TO STEAL this Novembers’ elections. Democratic Party leaders almost never use the word “steal” against Trump, compared to his constant harping falsely about the 2020 election being stolen from him. (See The Wrecking Ball Comes For the Midterms by Jonathan M. Winer).

8. Trump is a major league racist against African Americans and Hispanics, among countless other groups with his stormtrooping ICE, his selective military firings, his shattering of safety net programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps disproportionately needed by low-income ethnics, his sick frothing such as “shit-hole” countries, unlawful deportations, and only admitting as “refugees” white South Africans.

9. Trump has pardoned hundreds of convicted violent criminals and fraudsters, politically on his side, many of whom have since committed crimes. By comparison, in 1988 the GOP used unfairly against presidential candidate Michael Dukakis the Willie Horton case (Horton committed a crime while on a prison furlough) to inflict considerable damage on Dukakis.

10. Trump’s words about “law and order” exclude his corporate crime cronies. He has dismissed well over a hundred pending Justice Department cases against corporate crooks stealing from and harming innocent Americans, virtually closed down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and thrown out SEC cases—especially against his cryptocurrency buddies from whose shenanigans he and his family have personally profited. “CORRUPTION” IS THE UNPRECEDENTED “COIN OF THE TRUMP REALM” — THIS IS THE MESSAGE THAT SHOULD RING THROUGH THE LAND.

11. Trump’s cruelty to children knows no bounds. He supports strip-mining the successful Head Start programs, cutting budgets for children’s services, exposing children to unregulated toxic pesticides, and refusing to put forward an authentic child tax credit. His barbaric actions affect both conservative and liberal families.

12. Trump enabled the criminal enterprise DOGE, led by Elon Musk, to rampage through federal agencies in 2025, closing down some vital lifesaving programs and pushing out the door tens of thousands of civil servants doing their work daily for the public. The DOGE criminals were unleashed gangsters goaded on by the hateful, vengeful, unstable Trump. Never in American history has an administration broken or destroyed a sliver of what Elon Musk’s DOGE did on Trump’s orders. Millions of poor people and children abroad will die because of the closing of USAID with its medicines, vaccines, food supplements, and safe drinking water. The annual cost of operating this lifesaving agency is less than a week and a half of the current bloated Pentagon budget that crooked Trump wants to increase by another $500 BILLION!

13. The Dems should remind people of Trump’s crazed hatred of solar and wind energy—life-sustaining—in favor of goodies for the homicidal oil, gas, and coal corporations heating the planet. Psychiatrists, you are needed here. (See the Statement from Medical Professionals, Congressional Record—Senate, April 30, 2026).

14. Finally, voters will be stunned by Trump’s plethora of vote-losing epithets such as “losers and suckers” to describe those who are killed in combat, like those buried World War II GIs in a French cemetery, as this draft dodger related to his chief of staff, retired General John Kelly. Or “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situations.” Or “I like this inflation,” or in 2016, “American workers are overpaid,” and endlessly more. The Dems should demand that Trump’s Republican candidates publicly disavow these and other outlandish lies and defamatory claims during debates.

It is, of course, true that the Democrats have to run on what they are for. Their leaders, who don’t like progressive mandates, have rejected putting forward such cohesive, long-overdue pledges as given them by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, or by the undersigned (see Robert Reich’s “What Democrats Must Pledge to America” December 5, 2025; and my column “LONG OVERDUE DOMESTIC COMPACT FOR AMERICA” August 29, 2025). It is up to the candidates in the field to offer such authentic compacts or their own cohesive agendas.

Most GOP candidates are running on their unbreakable fealty to Trump. Therefore, they should be held accountable for all the ugly drawbacks of Trump that they have been backing to the hilt including his cruel and vicious Cabinet secretaries.

Political amnesia by the public is easy to fall prey to because it is so often covered up by the culprits and allowed by incompetent opponents. The Democratic Party knows how to lose. It allowed Trump’s worst GOP in history to win in 2024!

In what, I believe, will be seen as this year’s most significant election; Dr Abdul El-Sayed won a victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. It was a close contest—a nail-biter, as we say—but it was an important win that marks a watershed moment in US politics.

It was the first time that Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and massive US military support to Israel became central themes that were actively debated across the state. This issue has come up in a few other races. But this Senate race was different. There were daily discussions about the fact that the US has been subsidizing Israeli policies that have taken such a huge toll on Palestinians and Lebanese. From the results it is clear: Israel and the candidate that supported Israel, four term congresswoman, Rep. Haley Stevens, both lost.

Another major issue actively debated in this contest was the role of “dark money” and other independent expenditures. We’ve seen dark money dominate campaigns in the past. But never at this level. At last count, Stevens had received upwards of $70 million, with the bulk of these funds coming directly from pro-Israel groups, led by the Israel lobby, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In contrast, El-Sayed’s campaign was fueled largely by small donors. Overall, Stevens and AIPAC outspent El-Sayed by a margin of over 11 to one! In the end, dark money and AIPAC were resoundingly defeated, proving that money can prop up a candidate but can’t automatically win an election.

The El-Sayed-Stevens contest also became a national face-off between the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the party’s establishment, with leading Democrats from both wings endorsing and campaigning in the state. El-Sayed’s win in this bellwether Midwestern battleground state represents a major win for progressives. It demonstrated that the “establishment” itself has become toxic to many Democratic voters.

I am hard pressed to find an election that was more consequential and broke ground in more areas than this Michigan primary contest.

This election also marks a huge victory for Michigan’s Arab Americans. Four decades ago, the leading candidate for mayor of Dearborn made “What to do about the Arab problem?” a central issue in his campaign. Since then, that community has continued to organize, register voters, and win elections. Much maligned after registering their discontent with the Biden administration’s support for Israel, they came roaring back by helping to elect an Arab American as the Democratic Senate nominee. Not only that, but in the contest in the Dearborn area for the nomination to represent Democrats in the November election for Michigan State Senate, Abbas Alawieh won a decisive victory. Abbas was the leader of the 2024 “Uncommitted” movement.

I am hard pressed to find an election that was more consequential and broke ground in more areas than this Michigan primary contest. Now it’s on to November.

Democratic Connecticut Congressman John Larson is a bulldog on behalf of the over 70 million Americans who rely on Social Security’s earned benefits, and the millions more Americans who will rely on those benefits in the future. As advocates for Social Security, who represent seniors, working families, and people with disabilities, we have had the opportunity to work alongside Rep. Larson. We can testify to the depth of his commitment: When it comes to fighting for Social Security, no one has worked harder than Rep. Larson.

A determined and relentless champion of Social Security beneficiaries, Larson has consistently pounded the pavement in his outreach to members across the entire ideological reach of the Democratic Party from the progressive Squad to moderate New Democrats to Democratic leadership and virtually everyone in between. In the last Congress, Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act earned in the last Congress support from over 90% of House Democrats, representing all corners of the Democratic coalition. His legislation would keep Social Security strong for decades to come, and increase benefits for everyone.

Rep. Larson refuses to give up. When faced with a political consensus that assumed it was necessary to cut Social Security’s hard-earned benefits, Larson worked to change the entire conversation about Social Security. Thanks to his hard work, Democrats are now united around strengthening Social Security by making the wealthy pay their fair share, and even some Republicans are beginning to come on board. Larson is working closely with Democratic Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY) on plans to bring a Social Security expansion bill up for a vote once Democrats regain control of the US House.

Importantly, Larson has gone face to face with Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” and has stood up to them, fighting for every inch when it comes to protecting Social Security from vicious DOGE attacks.

Larson understands that Social Security’s future is a question of values, not affordability.

Rep. John Larson’s enviable ability to propel a positive, far-reaching vision in the public debate, while working pragmatically with his colleagues to ensure consensus, is a rare combination of attributes. Larson understands how essential it is to protect and expand Social Security’s modest benefits, and he has the road map needed to get there.

One thing is certain: Congress must act on Social Security during the next few years. Without action, Social Security faces an automatic benefit cut of roughly 20% around the year 2032. Larson has a crucial role to play in ensuring that Congress addresses this the right way—by making the wealthy pay in at the same rate as the rest of us.

He will lead the charge. When the Democrats win back the gavel in the House of Representatives, Larson will chair the Social Security Subcommittee of the all-powerful Ways and Means Committee. That comes from his seniority. Whether Social Security is expanded or cut will be decided by the leaders in Congress. His voice, together with his knowledge, his tireless work effort, and his personal connections to colleagues achieved over his years of service, will make the difference whether benefits are increased or cut.

Larson understands that Social Security’s future is a question of values, not affordability. He possesses the moral vision to fight for the type of society that treasures everyone, especially people living through their most difficult and vulnerable moments. By pairing this sense of direction and purpose with a canny ability to understand and persuade his colleagues, Larson is indispensable to make sure legislation to protect and expand Social Security goes the distance.

While Americans worried about rising costs at home and another war in the Middle East, President Donald Trump spent much of June talking about construction projects at the White House.

According to a Washington Post analysis of the president's speeches, interviews, social media posts, and other public remarks, he discussed his construction and beautification projects on nearly 4 out of every 5 days in June—more often than healthcare or wages, and about as often as inflation and prices.

That focus has become so pronounced that veteran White House reporter Maggie Haberman recently remarked that roughly "70%" of President Trump's attention appears devoted to his renovation projects.

The issue isn't just President Trump's construction projects. It's what they reveal about this presidency's priorities. Again and again, this administration has devoted extraordinary attention, taxpayer dollars, and even the power of government to projects centered on the president himself instead of the challenges facing the American people and the core responsibilities of government.

Americans should expect the same urgency in pursuing justice for survivors and greater transparency that this administration showed in protecting a presidential monument.

To begin with, consider where President Trump has chosen to focus his attention.

Over the past several months, President Trump has repeatedly returned to his new White House ballroom, the rebuilt Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, triumphal arches, portraits, flagpoles, and other additions that bear his personal imprint. When asked who his proposed triumphal arch was intended to honor, he answered with one word: "Me."

But few presidents have devoted so much attention to themselves while Americans confronted far more pressing challenges. Families continue to struggle with the cost of groceries, housing, childcare, and healthcare. Students and parents are trying to pay for college. Small businesses face rising costs and tariff uncertainty. Conflict in the Middle East threatens American service members, regional stability, and higher energy prices here at home.

Second, consider how those same priorities have shaped the way taxpayer dollars have been spent.

A recent New York Times analysis found that the known costs of the president's construction projects total roughly $1.2 billion. In my home state of Illinois, that same money could restore Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for almost all families expected to lose them this year or preserve Medicaid coverage for nearly 130,000 residents at risk of losing it.

Finally, the most troubling example is how this administration has used the power of government.

The Justice Department aggressively pursued people accused of damaging President Trump's Reflecting Pool. One defendant, former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, faced a felony carrying up to 10 years in prison before prosecutors acknowledged last week that the damage was caused by a botched installation—not vandalism—and dropped the case.

Since Jeffrey Epstein's 2019 federal arrest, no one beyond Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell has been criminally prosecuted in the United States for participating in Epstein's sex-trafficking network, yet acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has defended the administration's refusal to release additional Epstein records while arguing there is no current basis for further prosecutions.

Years of litigation, congressional investigations, investigative reporting, and millions of pages of records have documented the network around Jeffrey Epstein. Leon Black paid Epstein more than $158 million. Lesley Groff spent 18 years as Epstein's longtime assistant, scheduling thousands of massages while Epstein abused underage girls. Yet the Justice Department has shown little urgency in pursuing accountability beyond Epstein and Maxwell.

The administration rushed to bring a felony case over alleged damage to President Trump's Reflecting Pool before acknowledging the damage resulted from a botched government installation—not vandalism—and dismissing the case. Yet when it comes to the people who enabled one of the largest sex-trafficking operations in modern history, that urgency has been nowhere to be found.

Every prosecution must rest on the evidence and the law. But Americans should expect the same urgency in pursuing justice for survivors and greater transparency that this administration showed in protecting a presidential monument.

The presidency is a public trust. It should be measured not by the monuments a president leaves behind, but by whether Americans are stronger, more secure, and more prosperous because of the choices he made.

In the weeks since the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding collapsed, Washington and Tehran have used the time to strengthen their respective positions in the event negotiations resume.

For the United States, this has largely taken the form of overt threats by President Donald Trump himself and hints that an even more comprehensive US bombing campaign against Iranian strategic targets is on the table. For Iran, the strategy is familiar: ensure maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is kept to an absolute minimum.

US and Iranian officials continue to give conflicting accounts of where negotiations stand. Despite Trump’s repeated declarations that Tehran is begging for a deal, the Iranians stress no talks are occurring with the United States. Still, both sides seem to agree that any pending agreement will center on the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has proved capable of shutting down at will.

Various schemes have been proposed between Iran and Oman, the two countries on either end of the strait. While a deal is not finalized, Iran will most certainly retain more power over the strait’s traffic than it did before the war began in February.

The question now is whether tolls or fees will accompany any arrangement worked out between Tehran and Muscat. The Trump administration is dead set against acceding to any fee structure because it would provide the Iranian government with additional revenue and represent visible proof that Trump’s preventive war was a strategic mistake. Referring to the Strait of Hormuz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated the US position in July: "If we create a precedent in the Middle East where a nation-state can decide that they are going to control an international waterway, charge a toll…we have created a very dangerous precedent which will repeat itself in other parts of the world.”

Of course, permitting an Iranian toll or fee structure isn’t ideal. Before the war, such a hypothetical would have been difficult to imagine. The strait at that time was free and open, and roughly 120 to 150 ships relied on the route each day to get their products to customers worldwide.

The United States wants Iran to return to this status quo. Yet Iran has no intention of doing so — and to expect otherwise is to be completely ignorant of how events have played out since.

Trump’s war handed Iran the perfect excuse to leverage its geography, and the Iranians didn’t hesitate to do so. Originally, Tehran’s shuttering of the strait aimed to increase the cost on Washington and eventually convince US partners in the region to pressure Trump into ending the war. But over time, the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to Iran’s more aggressive posture toward its neighbors writ-large, has become something far more valuable: a strategic card Iran can play whenever Trump threatens to accelerate military operations.

Re-opening the strait is now as important to the United States as containing Iran’s nuclear program, if not more so. The question is how to do it.

Trump originally tried to pursue this objective through military force, hoping US strikes could degrade Iran’s military capacity to such an extent that the IRGC would have to stop shooting at ships. The strategy overestimated the US military’s power to force a change in Tehran’s strategic calculus and underestimated Iran’s ability to manufacture and launch cheap drones and missiles at scale. Every US strike merely reaffirmed the Iranian government’s belief that the war was existential for them. Instead of capitulating, Iran fought back, targeting vessels that used the southerly route near Oman’s coast and making it clear that heavier US bombing would compel more Iranian attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure.

US military attempts to bring the strait back to its pre-February state have failed and will likely continue to fail. If the Trump administration seeks to extricate itself from a war without end, its best option is to accept a toll or fee structure in the regional chokepoint. Hawks on Capitol Hill would no doubt scream bloody murder, and some of Trump’s own political allies will have a difficult time explaining how such a scheme is appealing. But if the choice is between swallowing fees or endless conflict, then the former is the better option. The Trump administration may not like paying for the privilege of using the strait, but its decision to go to war in the first place created the situation the United States is now in. Bad policies have unintended consequences.

Fortunately, fees in the strait would not be the end of the world.

This wouldn’t be the first time a country located next to a critical trade chokepoint received some form of compensation. The most obvious case is the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia, where shipowners contribute to a voluntary fund, administered by Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, for navigational assistance, maritime safety, environmental protection and search and rescue. A similar arrangement in the Strait of Hormuz would thus not set a precedent. In fact, shipping companies and the insurance carriers that underwrite them might even view these voluntary payments as in their own interest if it helps prevent even costlier disasters or accidents.

There’s no use brushing the obvious under the rug: US acceptance of Iranian tolls or fees would be an embarrassing acknowledgment that Iran is now a principal arbiter of the strait. Moreover, depending on how high the fees are — Tehran is reportedly demanding 7% of the value of a ship’s cargo — the Iranians would be collecting revenue they wouldn’t have had prior to the war.

But even this scenario is not as dire as many assume. In practice, Iran’s leverage dissipates with every month that passes by. The Gulf Arab states are not sitting still and watching the new status quo helplessly. Rather, Tehran’s neighbors are increasingly adapting to Iran’s machinations by tapping into pipelines that bypass the strait altogether and exploring future projects that make their energy infrastructure more durable and less vulnerable to a single chokepoint.

Saudi Arabia is using its cross-country east-west pipeline to export more crude oil through the Red Sea. While this alternative route remains vulnerable to strikes by the Iran-aligned Houthis and doesn’t fully compensate for the loss of normal traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, it has still allowed the kingdom to avoid shutting down production entirely. Ditto the United Arab Emirates, which is sending more crude through its Fujairah export terminal, located outside the strait. Fujairah’s share of UAE exports increased to 66% in July from 51% a month earlier. Iran’s actions during the war will only reinforce Persian Gulf oil producers’ desire to diversify their routes, reducing Tehran’s ability to obstruct energy flows in the future.

Negotiations on reopening the Strait of Hormuz continue. If there comes a point where fees for passage are unavoidable, then US policymakers should keep a cool head. Ceding the point would be the most efficient way for the United States to remove itself from a foolish conflict at minimal cost.