In July, the US launched the first of three controversial 2026 deep-seabed mining lease sales in the waters of American Samoa, to be finalized in August; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, to be finalized in November; and Alaska, to be finalized in December. Once the lease sales are sold, it is nearly impossible to reverse the sales unless they are purchased back from the federal government.

In Alaska, fishing is not just a sport; it is a critical element of food security for many Alaskans. As the Arctic faces increasing pressure on fish stocks, including but not limited to overfishing, marine pollution, and rising ocean temperatures, the US is now debating issuing deep-sea mining permits in Alaska waters, the use of which could further harm our marine ecosystems affecting everything from phytoplankton to whales.

Proponents of deep-sea mining argue that the minerals extracted from the seabed are critical to strengthening modern supply chains for technological advancement and national security. At this time, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is assessing the potential for Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to mine cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements.

At Pacific Environment, we are deeply concerned about the permits that BOEM is considering selling. Deep-sea mining isn’t just about sticking a vacuum on the ocean floor to surgically suck up particular minerals. It also involves large-scale exploration and extraction that will further disrupt already fragile ecosystems, creating increased pollution from discarded sediments, sharp increases in noise, and other potential dangers to the marine environment and food security of Arctic Peoples.

The Risks of Deep-Sea Mining in Alaska

Deep-sea mining would deploy mining equipment in some of the deepest and least understood areas of the ocean such as hydrothermal vents and seamounts. The wildlife that inhabit these areas—including plankton, corals, fish, and marine mammals—often exist only in those places and nowhere else on the planet. When damaged, these ecosystems are slow to recover, and the damage is likely to be permanent. Sea mining activities also result in massive sediment plumes that smother marine life on the bottom and in the water column.

When BOEM opened a commenting period for the public to weigh in on deep-seabed mining, over 90,000 comment letters poured in from individuals and groups opposing the sale of leases for this largely untested technology.

It is proven that noise in the ocean disrupts whale communication and migration and may also impact other communities of ocean life. Deep-sea mining will increase noise pollution in ways that are yet to be studied because it is challenging and costly to study deep ocean ecosystems.

Alaskans are already seeing declines in our salmon populations, creating a fishing crisis along the Yukon River and elsewhere, empty smokehouses, and Indigenous communities without a primary protein resource and with cultural traditions unpracticed. We are seeing whale strikes and die-offs along the Northwest coast of the United States, further negatively impacting coastal communities. We watch as the ocean warms; Arctic sea ice melts at a faster and faster pace and a critical tipping point for nitrogen—a critical element of ocean life—has passed.

Public Opposition Reflects Growing Concern

When BOEM opened a commenting period for the public to weigh in on deep-seabed mining, over 90,000 comment letters poured in from individuals and groups opposing the sale of leases for this largely untested technology. These comments highlight concerns about the lack of understanding of the long-term impacts these leases will have on Arctic waters that depend on intricate balances to support marine life.

While arguments can be made that we need to secure additional access to critical minerals, the risks of what we could lose are very significant. Arctic ocean ecosystems are fragile, not well understood, and already under intense pressure as the region warms four times faster than the rest of the planet. Alaska, and the world, depend on the marine environment for so many things; it makes no sense to jeopardize this sensitive ecosystem for an unproven and largely untested technology.

This piece was first published on the Pacific Environment blog.

“Nation” equals identity. I’m an American! Hurray!

It’s almost embarrassing to confess this, but yeah, that’s me (or used to be me), sitting back in my easy chair, waving a flag. My “nationality” is such a profound, lifelong part of who I am I rarely actually questioned it. At best I shrugged, then momentarily glared in anger at... the government, the media, whoever. Why do we have a trillion-dollar military budget, or a president who wants to up it to $1.5 trillion? Why do we always have an enemy or two or three, who isn’t as human as we are and must be defeated, or at least arrested?

At least being an American comes with a fair amount of rights—freedom of speech, freedom to question authority, and so-o-o much more—and usually I embrace those rights with a sense of hope that the future will be saner. But that sense of hope has been ebbing lately. I have come to realize over the years that I am no longer just an American. I’m a citizen of Planet Earth.

I say this with a sense of paradox. I love the life this nation has given me, and value much of what it claims to stand for, but I think it’s time for humanity to reach beyond nationalism and borders and connect with a larger god—a larger global organizing principle. And I do not claim that this will be simple or obvious.

The global military expenditures in 2025 were $2.9 trillion, a total that’s been increasing every year for the last 11 years.

But it’s time. “Nation” equals war. It equals “get outa here!” The more power it has, the more it sustains itself with the worst of who we are. This means it always needs an enemy... or two, or three, or 50,000.

And our enemy becomes the norm. Here’s where I truly lose hope that the human race can survive nationalism. We dehumanize our enemies, which gives us “permission” to kill them: to shatter their social structure, to erase them from existence. Ho hum.

For instance, here’s a quickie ICE update from ABC News the other day:

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 51,000 individuals in July, according to sources familiar with the data. The arrests are the largest in a single month in DHS history...

And guess what?

“Those being detained in some cases do not have criminal records and have valid work authorization or parole documents...”

And what does the phrase “in some cases” mean? Maybe a dozen of the arrestees were good guys? That’s what it sounds like, as you give the story a read. After all, remember Donald Trump’s words back in 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”

But all of them are aliens! They’re illegals (even if they’re not). They’re wrecking our country. They need to go.

And then, of course, there are the wars going on around the world, wreaking death and hell and genocide: Israel’s bombing of Palestine has killed over 73,000 people at this point, with more than 173,200 wounded. As PBS points out, over 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the so-called “ceasefire.” And, my God, the death and casualty toll in the Ukraine war, on both sides, is approaching 2 million people over these last four years.

This is just part of it. The global military expenditures in 2025 were $2.9 trillion, a total that’s been increasing every year for the last 11 years. As Connie Peck, founder of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Programme in Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention, wrote: “If similar increases continue, and NATO countries enlarge their expenditure to 5% as pledged, global military spending could reach 6.6 trillion by 2035—five times the level at the end of the Cold War.”

In other words, it’s getting worse. The more “they” spend, the more we have to spend. And the only way the world’s nations are safe from one another is by “mutually assured destruction”: a concept that, with the emergence of nuclear weapons, means the threat of planetary annihilation. I think it’s time to evolve beyond nationalism, which is not based on valuing life. It’s based on “winning.”

Peck writes: “Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?”

Let’s stash our cynicism and, as Peck writes, begin addressing the root causes of conflict. We are capable of looking beyond ourselves. She quotes from the UN Charter Preamble.

Here are the words from the Preamble that pierced me most deeply, as I imagined them helping to create a new form of government: “We the peoples of the United Nations (have) determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war... and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person...”

Hurricane season is upon us, and for many Disabled people across the US, it means a renewed sense of insecurity and uncertainty around their well-being. So often, Disabled folks are too often left behind in emergency preparedness and response efforts, and are ultimately treated as afterthoughts. With the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching and a continued climate crisis with no end in sight, this glaring oversight is ever present in the minds of Disabled people nationwide.

This isn’t an issue that’s unique to the US, however. It’s something that Disabled communities face on a global scale, and it’s time we took a hard look at what countries across the world can do to center Disabled people in ensuring the safety and security of their citizens.

Take Nigeria, for example. A new investigation from Deaf Nigerian filmmaker and journalist Alexander Ogheneruemu, "Forgotten People," tells, in part, the story of Ayoade Beyioku-Alase, a Deaf man who was nearly killed as a child in Kano because the violence closing in on his house came with no siren, no interpreter, no warning he could access. "A Deaf person can walk right into the middle of danger," he says in the piece.

It’s easy for those of us in the US to read a story like this and feel far away from it. It’s easy to think, ,“This isn’t us.” The truth is that, whether we want to accept it or not, it is us. It just looks a little different.

Disabled people in the United States are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured in a disaster than nondisabled people.

As a Disabled person who has worked in this space for many years, I can tell you that the system that has failed Disabled people during Nigeria's security crisis is the same system that fails us here in not just natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, but active shooter situations, and immigration detention as well. The threat might be different, but we have more in common with these failings than you’d be led to believe.

The alarm itself is the most direct parallel. Federal guidance from the Department of Justice acknowledges that most emergency warning systems in this country were built for people who can hear and see. Sirens, radio, television, flashing lights are all assumed to be visible to everyone. Tornado sirens across the Midwest and South are audio only, offering nothing to a Deaf person indoors when weather becomes a threat. The National Association of the Deaf has told emergency management agencies for years that mass notification systems don’t reach people who rely on video instead of standard calls. This is a serious and blatant example of ableism, where Disabled people are treated as an afterthought in emergency planning.

In Ogheneruemu’s "Forgotten People,” produced by the Disability Justice Project, the journalist says that 4,654 lives were lost in Nigeria's insecurity crisis last year. Our own numbers are just as alarming. Research compiled by the Center for American Progress and the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies puts it bluntly: Disabled people in the United States are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured in a disaster than nondisabled people.

During Hurricane Katrina, people over 60 years old, who included many Disabled folks, made up 73% of storm-related deaths in Louisiana. According to the National Council on Disability, 68 of those victims died in nursing homes, some abandoned by staff who left rather than arrange evacuation. Twenty years later, not much has changed. When the Eaton Fire tore through Los Angeles in January of 2025, at least 3 of the 27 people killed were Disabled, and NBC News reported that Disabled people displaced by disaster are almost twice as likely not to return home.

Then there's our own man-made violence. Nigeria's crisis comes from armed conflict, and ours also often comes from gun violence. More than 100 US school shootings have happened since Sandy Hook in 2012, and the response drilled into an entire generation of children is to run and hide. Inherently, this completely excludes Disabled kids. The Washington Post and The Mighty have both documented children left alone in hallways, forgotten in therapy rooms, and locked out of safe zones during lockdowns because there wasn’t a plan that accounted for them. New Jersey only recently passed legislation forcing districts to build disability-specific evacuation plans after families spoke out. The message we’re sending to Disabled kids here is that they’re on their own.

The Disability Justice Project's own reporting has already shown us what this looks like at our own border: a Deaf asylum-seeker was held for five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention without a sign language interpreter, ultimately unable to explain to anyone why he was afraid to go home. If disability access can vanish inside a US federal detention facility, we have no standing to act shocked that it vanishes during a flood or a fire.

This isn’t the kind of thing that’s unknowable, either. The data is out there, and the stories are plentiful. It’s simply not prioritized by those in power, and more often than not it’s unfunded. Disability still makes up just 2% of philanthropy, despite Disabled people comprising about 25% of the US population. Every dollar that goes toward disaster response, school safety, or immigration oversight without disability at the center is putting more Disabled folks in harm’s way. And even if that isn’t you, it could be your mother, father, child, friend, or neighbor. That’s why funding disability is more important than ever. We don't need another report to tell donors and policymakers that Disabled people die preventable deaths in emergencies.

Instead, we need them to stop treating that fact as new information every single time it happens. Funders, just like lawmakers and others in positions of power, need to wake up and see for themselves just what the disability community is up against.

If we can learn one thing from the security crisis in Nigeria, it’s that Disabled people deserve the same protections and safeguards that nondisabled people have in dangerous and precarious situations. It’s already too late, but in the US, in Nigeria, and in countless other countries, there’s still time to save many more Disabled lives.

Yes, it should be possible this November to elect enough Democrats to stop MAGA and undo some of the damage Trump et al have done. But without the support of the working class the progressive wish list will remain just that—a series of unfulfilled wishes.

Despite big hopes and a likely small majority, we won’t see Medicare for All, an increase in the federal minimum wage, a green New Deal, job security for working people, labor law reform to facilitate unionization, a billionaire’s tax, elimination of big money from politics, the break-up of mega-corporations, and affordable housing for all, to name just a few.

None of these ambitious and popular reforms will pass as long as the blue-red margins remain narrow, ensuring that there are never enough votes to enact major reforms even if the Democrats control all three branches after the 2028 elections.

Ask any labor leader and they will tell you the sad and maddening 50-year story of failed attempts to level the labor-management playing field, despite Democratic tri-fectas during Obama and Biden. And because of these slim margins one of the biggest recent Democratic victories, Obamacare, is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption relying on corporate subsidies, massive costs, and spotty coverage that has failed to deliver universal and affordable health care.

Bad stuff can be stopped and maybe some of the worst MAGA policies reversed, but there won’t be a progressive majority to win the big stuff even if the Democrats win the House, the Senate and the presidency in 2028.

So, instead of pushing toward a more just economy, we sail in the opposite direction and are increasingly dominated by what Bernie derides as the billionaire class.

We just assume these days that razor-thin blue-red margins are a fact of life, the result of increasing political polarization, money in politics, gerrymandering, and misinformation, etc. But not so long ago there were times, under FDR and LBJ, when progressive political majorities were massive. That’s when the Democratic Party included and could count on most working-class voters (roughly defined as those without college degrees). That is no longer the case.

The numbers are stark, especially among white working people.

• In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 53 percent of the white working-class vote. In 2024, only 33 percent voted for Kamala Harris.
• In a working-class county in the heart of coal country in West Virginia, like Mingo County with its fierce union tradition, Bill Clinton received 70 percent of the vote in 1996. After 3,000 of the county’s 3,300 coal jobs disappeared, Harris got a miniscule 12 percent in 2024.

If a sizable majority of those voters returned to the Democrats’ fold, one could imagine enough votes to enact major economic reforms. Could that happen?

How do Democrats win the working class back?

My comrades at the Center for Working Class Politics have spent years showing that working-class candidates, especially with union backgrounds running on a strong progressive economic program, can win in contested districts. Their arguments are persuasive. But the current handful of successes leave most of the working-class swimming on their own in red America, where the Democratic Party is dead and gone.

For example, of the roughly 1,211 state legislative seats in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, the Democrats don’t even run candidates in 40 percent of them.

The Democratic Party needs to be reformed dramatically if it is to adopt CWCP’s strategy. But we have just learned from the missing chapter in the Democratic Party’s autopsy report, released this week by its author, that the party’s functionaries have become “generationally wealthy off politics.” Sponging off the status quo, whether they win or lose, the party’s ecosystem of pollsters, consultants, ad agencies, and such has grown fat, rich, and happy. This is not a political culture open to radical reform.

DSA to the rescue?

The Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the most vibrant political organization in America today (though the bar isn’t high), have attempted to reform the Democrats by knocking off establishment Democrats in primaries and replacing them with DSA-backed candidates. They have succeeded this year in heavily Democratic urban areas, such as New York City, but will now be tested in Michigan, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed gained a narrow victory in the Democratic Senate primary this past Tuesday. Similarly, Francesca Hong, another DSA candidate, is the favorite to win the upcoming Wisconsin gubernatorial Democratic primary in another state won in 2024 by Donald Trump. Can El-Sayed, not a DSA member but a very progressive candidate, and Hong win in purple states?

Ironically, DSA members and the establishment Democrats generally come from the same class – the class of the college educated. El-Sayed reportedly ran “strongest in communities with young voters, college students and educated and wealthy white voters.”

DSA claims to be speaking on behalf of the working class, but according to its own 2021 survey, only four percent of its members are blue-collar workers, and another six percent work in retail, food service, or similar occupations. Roughly 40 percent are teachers, academics, white-collar professionals, tech workers, or students. Of those 25 years old and older, more than 80 percent have bachelor’s degrees, compared to only 39 percent nationally.

Working people did not disappear from the much redder parts of the Midwest and the Great Plains when their jobs moved to Mexico and China, but the Democrats did.

More importantly, what they put forth as their program did not grow out of a dialogue with non-college working-class folks or even union leaders. If they had had those discussions they would have learned that many of their positions, like abolishing “the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor,” would be opposed by the working people they say they champion.

We will learn more this fall about how DSA candidates adapt and fare with working people in red areas. But as DSA is now structured, it is unlikely to recruit many people without college degrees.

The path to a progressive majority?

Clearly, it is essential that the Democrats win back enough working-class voters to disrupt the MAGA onslaught. Let’s hope and pray they do. But unless huge numbers of Trump voters stay home for the midterms, and the working class breaks heavily for the Democrats, the margin of victory is not likely to be nearly enough to produce the political majorities necessary to rework the economic order.

Bad stuff can be stopped and maybe some of the worst MAGA policies reversed, but there won’t be a progressive majority to win the big stuff even if the Democrats win the House, the Senate and the presidency in 2028.

The Democratic Party brand is just too tarnished among working people for them to readily join in significant numbers. Sure, go ahead and run more union candidates, and let’s see if the DSA can overturn the Democratic Party’s establishment and even spread into the working class. But it would be wise to have Plan B—a parallel, not substitute, strategy.

An Independent Workers Party of Their Own in Red America

Working people did not disappear from the much redder parts of the Midwest and the Great Plains when their jobs moved to Mexico and China, but the Democrats did. In red America there is no spoiler problem because in hundreds of state races and congressional districts the Democrats have abandoned ship. That has left an enormous vacuum and few political choices for working people. We can now see a very few working-class candidates trying to fill the void, but there is no organization that ties them together.

A new political organization of working people should be constructed where working people can gather and speak in their own voices about what they want to see changed in America—an organization that recaptures the voice and power they once had in the region.

Building that formation will be difficult, but maybe not as difficult as taking over the Democratic Party. For starters, it will require an anchor tenant, a large union or state labor federation, that realizes that most of its members have given up on the Democrats and want something new. So far there have been no takers, though clearly some labor leaders, like the UAW’s Shawn Fain, share at least some of our analysis of what’s necessary.

But that will change, I believe, as union leaders come to the recognition that they can no longer sell the Dems to their own members. And if one or two unions or state labor federations set up a new independent operation in red America, I think they will be pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm it generates. Our polling suggests that working people just might come running.

If this organization takes off, it becomes much easier to imagine working-class political alliances with enough power to secure substantive economic change. Something working people are sure to need soon as AI and the billionaires take a wrecking ball to what’s left of their livelihoods.

Someone, somewhere, sometime must build something new so that working people can develop their own political voice, just as the Populists did 150 years ago.

Is this the only solution to our problems? Maybe not. I’m wide open to other strategies. I just haven’t heard any that don’t start and stop with reforming the Democrats, whose elites are not about to give up their power and access to riches.

And I don’t see how DSA gets deep enough into red America as long as it’s an organization of college grads talking to themselves about what’s best for the working-class. Even if El-Sayed and Hong win in the general election this year, the wealthy party fuctionairies will still be in power.

By all means, go for it. But someone, somewhere, sometime must build something new so that working people can develop their own political voice, just as the Populists did 150 years ago.

Am I howling in the wind? Maybe. I guess that’s what I do. My contribution is to get you to square up to the problem: We need a serious strategy that leads to serious progressive change.

Placing all of our chips on reforming the Dems is a bad bet, even if we deem it a necessary one in the near future. At the very least, I think, that bet needs to be hedged by building a new independent political organization of working people in red America, an organization that’s responsive to and expressive of their political needs. That’s far better than abandoning working-class families to the next round of Republican charlatans.

There are plenty of principled, humanitarian reasons for opposing US support for Israel’s current government. Multiple human right groups, United Nations bodies, international courts, Israeli politicians, and genocide organizations have accused Israel of engaging in war crimes, including genocide, in Gaza and the West Bank. The invasions of Lebanon and Iran are likewise criminal humanitarian disasters.

There are also practical foreign policy reasons for opposing the influence of Israel and the Israel lobby. Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares argue convincingly, in "Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed," that Israel encouraged most of the US foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and Africa:

In 1996, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.

The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

The US followed through with military actions against all those countries, which now lie in ruins, except for Iran, which Israel and the US are in the process of destroying. As Sachs and Fares wrote, “Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the US.”

Israel has corrupted US foreign policy, causing the country to fight unnecessary wars and create unnecessary enemies.

Aside from the humanitarian and foreign policy reasons for opposing the influence of Israel and the Israel lobby on American politics, there are also political reasons. Foremost among them is that Israel and the Israel lobby have repeatedly lent their substantial financial and political influence toward helping elect Republicans, including President Donald Trump, and toward electing Democrats disliked by many Democratic voters.

Multiple US presidents, including Presidents Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, made efforts to break away from staunchly pro-Israel policies but eventually succumbed to pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists threatening them with electoral opposition.

During the Republican primary debates in 2016, Trump criticized the invasion of Iraq and said that US policy in the Middle East needed more balance: more support for Palestinian rights. But during the general election campaign, Trump had a meeting with Sharon and Miriam Adelson, who promised to help fund his campaign (source). From that point on, Trump has been staunchly pro-Israel.

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson donated approximately $100 million to pro-Trump super PACs during the 2020 election cycle.

You could call this a representation deficit: Democratic politicians become more responsive to a donor network than to Democratic voters.

The New York Times reported in 2021 that the Adelsons’ contributions to GOP campaigns and organizations had totaled around half a billion dollars since 2010.

In 2024 Miriam Adelson donated $100 million to help elect Trump and spent a further $500 million on other Republican causes. According to OpenSecrets, from 2023 to 2024, pro-Israel PACs gave $5.4 million to candidates, almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent over $14 million supporting Trump since 2020. The New Republic says that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent $45 million in the 2024 elections.

In 2024, Trump ran as the peace candidate, promising to stop the war in Gaza. Kamala Harris’ support for Israel was a significant cause of her election loss (source, source).

Polls (this and this) have shown that among Democratic voters, support for Israel has plummeted. In April 2026, Pew found that 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents viewed Israel unfavorably, up from 69% in 2025 and 53% in 2022. Gallup found in July 2025 that only 8% of Democrats approved of Israel’s military action in Gaza. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released August 4, 2026 found that only 16% of Democrats supported continuing military and economic aid to Israel, while more than 80% of liberal Democrats considered reducing aid important or essential.

The victories of socialist and pro-Palestinian candidates (e.g., Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary) during the 2026 primaries—despite tens of millions of dollars spent by the Israel lobby to defeat them—further illustrate the fact that the Democratic base is rejecting mainstream Democrats who support Israel.

Of course, AIPAC does not represent the views of all American Jews. Roughly 7 in 10 Jewish respondents in a March 2026 survey identified as Democrats, and younger Jewish voters have become significantly more critical of unconditional aid.

The Democratic Party’s congressional leadership has continued defending a position overwhelmingly rejected by its own voters. That creates several electoral injuries:

• Young voters conclude that Democratic leaders do not represent them.
• Arab American and Muslim voters feel deliberately disregarded.
• Anti-war progressives see the party as morally compromised.
• Other voters see wealthy donors overriding public opinion.
• Republicans can run as outsiders or supposed “peace candidates,” however dishonestly.

You could call this a representation deficit: Democratic politicians become more responsive to a donor network than to Democratic voters.

In 2024, the Israel lobby helped unseat Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). Republican-aligned billionaires should not be able to determine which candidates Democrats are permitted to nominate. In 2026 the Israel lobby helped unseat Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), one of Trump’s biggest Republican critics.

Though the Israel lobby gives to Democratic candidates too, its political strategy is not simply bipartisan support for Israel. Its effect is asymmetrical: It helps Republicans win national power while policing the Democratic Party from within. It supports Republicans directly, then spends heavily in Democratic primaries to defeat candidates who challenge Republican-backed Israeli policies. Democrats therefore bear the electoral cost of unpopular policies while Republican candidates receive both financial support and an issue with which to divide the Democratic coalition.

In short, powerful pro-Israel organizations are harming the Democratic Party. This is not because support for Israel is inherently Republican, and not because Jewish voters are disloyal Democrats—many Democrats strongly oppose Israel’s policies—but because these organizations increasingly enforce a Republican-aligned foreign policy inside a Democratic electorate that rejects it. They finance Republicans, import Republican donor money into Democratic primaries, punish dissenting Democrats, divide the Democratic coalition, and bind Democratic leaders to policies that damage the party’s moral credibility and electoral prospects.

Democratic Party leaders and activists should stop allowing a pro-Republican, pro-war lobby to distort its policies and chooseits candidates.

The Israel lobby, for its own sake, should think hard about whether it wants to support a quasi-fascist movement. For more on this, see "Supporters of Israel Will Eventually Regret That They Allied With Fascist Trump."

Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.

Once upon a time, the working class was understood as people in capitalist economies who don’t own the means of production and must sell their labor to owners. But as economies grew more complex, anomalies piled up. What about managers who aren’t owners but make lots of money doing the bidding of owners? What about technical employees whose specialized skills give them bargaining power? What about small-business owners of modest means who hire employees? Turns out there are lots of “contradictory class locations.”

I’ve never been a manager, had any specialized technical skills, owned a business, or made big money, but my class status is rife with contradictions and conundrums.

Work History

My paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was a blacksmith in a small town in North Dakota, but my father had no interest in the family trade. After a lackluster college career on the GI Bill, he got a job as an insurance adjuster—a white-collar working-class job for which he wore a shirt and tie to the office but got paid like a laborer. My mother, whose family had a similar trajectory, stayed at home with four kids until we were all in school and then took a series of low-paid office jobs.

No matter what my job or level of pay, I knew I was a worker who didn’t own or control capital. I also knew I had a pretty cushy life compared with most working people.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, money was tight in our family. I didn’t get shiny new things, and family vacations were low-budget affairs that involved staying with relatives or in a borrowed camper. We always had a house and ate regularly, and I didn’t feel poor, but I knew the difference between myself and the affluent kids at school.

By the time I was in high school, my father had moved into a sales job and was making more money—enough that he could join the cheaper of the two country clubs in town. He quit bowling in a league (a working-class activity) and focused on golf (the appropriate middle-class game). In modest ways, he transcended his working-class roots, financially and socially.

Our family’s class status changed but not our working-class respect for hard work. As soon as we were old enough, my siblings and I earned money. In North Dakota before snow blowers were common, I had ample opportunities to shovel snow profitably. In the summer, I carried golf bags at the fancier country club in Fargo. Once I turned 16, I bagged groceries and worked in a building supply warehouse unloading trucks. To pay college tuition, I bused dishes and set up tables for hotel banquets.

After college, I worked as a journalist, starting at a small weekly newspaper that paid poorly. While covering a county government meeting at which the income levels for subsidized housing were set, I realized that on my “professional” journalist’s salary, I qualified. Eventually, I worked my way up to bigger newspapers and better pay, and after graduate school I settled into a comfortable middle-class life as a professor.

No matter what my job or level of pay, I knew I was a worker who didn’t own or control capital. I also knew I had a pretty cushy life compared with most working people. I was a working-class guy, sort of, but one with a Ph.D. and more autonomy than most.

Whatever my class status, I retained a sense of obligation to work as hard as I could at whatever job I had. During my 26 years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, I never took a sabbatical. UT didn’t offer the regular research leaves common at other universities, and I never chased the outside grants that allow professors to take time off. I taught a full load, sometimes with a voluntary overload class, without feeling oppressed. When other professors were shocked that I never had even one sabbatical semester, I pointed out that no one I knew outside of academia thought they had a right to be paid for time off. I liked teaching and had time to write books in the summers—a pretty sweet deal.

Class Culture

I retired at 60, even though I still loved teaching, because I wanted to get out before I burned out. Because I’ve always been frugal, at least in comparison with my middle-class peers, early retirement was financially feasible. That’s also part of my internal sense of class—I don’t have expensive habits and hobbies. Because I grew up not-poor but not-affluent, my expectations were modest. Reactions to childhood economic circumstances vary—some kids yearn for expensive things, and others make it a badge of honor to not need them. Backpacking through Europe on summer vacation was never on the agenda when I was young, and tourist travel doesn’t appeal to the elderly me. I covet not coveting much.

Today I live outside a small town in New Mexico, the kind of place realtors call “rural residential.” There are a few other retirees and professionals on our road, but most of my neighbors are without a doubt working class—tradespeople, laborers, small farmers, and ranchers. I met many of them through the acequia association, a communal irrigation system that is maintained through shared labor. I take pride in working as hard as anyone on ditch-cleaning days and joining every work detail, not just the one I’m obligated to show up for. Most people here don’t ask about what job I retired from, and if they do, I say that I had been a teacher. They probably assume I taught public school, which is viewed as an honorable job. I don’t admit that I had been a university professor unless pressed for details, because it feels uppity.

The unfairness of capitalism doesn’t negate the importance of a strong work ethic.

I came out of the working class. I never aspired to be in the owning class but lived comfortably as an educated professional. Today, I can pass as working class when I show up in my 30-year-old pickup with a shovel and saw. I live on my Social Security check, but I have a retirement account to draw on for emergencies.

Have I ever been “authentically” working class? I don’t know what criteria to use to make that call. I continue to oppose an economic system that creates wealth inequality and undermines community life, a radical working-class politics. But I also advocate for the strong personal work ethic that I think is needed to enhance community life, a value often considered conservative. Both things are important to me.

A final story about that balance, from a friend who ran a nonprofit that employed teenagers from economically depressed neighborhoods to work on a small farm and also took on college-student interns. One year he was telling the interns that one of the goals of the organization was to foster a strong work ethic in those teenagers, and an intern cautioned him: “Telling people in poor communities they have to work hard is a tool of capitalism.” My friend was exasperated. Yes, rich people often accuse poor people of being lazy, lecturing them about working harder to get out of poverty. But the desire to work hard at productive tasks is healthy, no matter what the economic system. The unfairness of capitalism doesn’t negate the importance of a strong work ethic.

In my new book, This I Don’t Believe, I write that we all need opportunities to prove to ourselves that we are competent to run our own lives. One way I’ve done that is by taking work seriously, learning to do work well, and being proud of my work—all part of the core of a working-class identity, even if I’m not part of the working class. It’s my way of trying to live honestly in my contradictory class location.

You won’t find “Medicare for All” printed on any Michigan ballot from Tuesday’s primary. What you’ll find is a name: Abdul El-Sayed, the Ann Arbor physician who literally wrote the book on single-payer healthcare and then built his Senate campaign around it.

El-Sayed co-authored Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, with a foreword from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), laying out how the country could guarantee healthcare as a right instead of rationing it by income. He wasn’t a candidate who discovered Medicare for All in a focus group. He ran because of it, and Tuesday night he routed the Democratic establishment’s chosen candidate, Haley Stevens. That’s as close to a referendum on single-payer healthcare as American politics gets, and voters delivered a verdict.

El-Sayed didn’t soften his message for the donor class. He paired “Medicare for All” with a blunt indictment of a country rich enough to end medical bankruptcy but too captured by insurance money to bother. Voters in Washtenaw and Kent counties answered.

What makes this remarkable is who El-Sayed beat and how. Stevens had every advantage institutional Democratic politics can hand a candidate: Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) early backing, a late endorsement from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and roughly $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates, the largest single-race investment in that organization’s history. This was one of the most expensive Democratic primaries ever run, a fire hose of establishment cash aimed at burying a single-payer candidate. It wasn’t enough. Voters weren’t buying what millions in outside spending were selling.

As a practicing physician assistant who has spent years advocating for Medicare for All and working in electoral politics, I've heard the same warning over and over: Don't run on single-payer. Michigan suggests that conventional wisdom deserves another look.

That should terrify the consultant class that has spent a decade telling Democrats Medicare for All is political poison in a state like Michigan, that it scares away suburban moderates. El-Sayed’s night says otherwise: an unapologetic healthcare message is exactly what turns out voters a low-turnout August primary usually leaves behind. Reporting pointed to a young, energized base and a ground game that outperformed expectations where turnout can’t be bought with television ads.

The country is catching up to what El-Sayed put in writing years ago. Over 85 million working-age Americans are uninsured or underinsured, per Commonwealth Fund research, shut out of the system or paying premiums that still leave them exposed the moment they get sick. Millions are one diagnosis away from medical debt they’ll spend a decade paying off. Public patience with an industry that profits by denying claims has curdled into open contempt, visible in viral outrage over coverage denials and a for-profit sector that ranks among the least trusted in America. Strip away the euphemisms, and the arithmetic is obscene. Insurers post billions in profit by finding reasons to say no to sick people, skimming a cut off human suffering as a business model. The United States is the only wealthy industrialized democracy that treats healthcare as a product to be underwritten, means tested, and denied rather than a right owed to its citizens. El-Sayed didn’t invent that anger, and he didn’t just write a book about it. He built a winning campaign on the promise that Democrats don’t have to keep managing that anger on behalf of the industry that causes it.

There’s symbolic weight here too. El-Sayed lost a bruising primary for governor in 2018, written off as unelectable in a state supposedly too uneasy about a candidate named Abdul. Eight years later, running on the same conviction that no one should go bankrupt getting cancer treatment, he built a coalition big enough to beat back one of the most heavily financed efforts to defeat a progressive candidate in recent Democratic primary history. That’s proof of where the Democratic base stands on healthcare, no matter what the party’s risk-averse, industry-funded strategists have told candidates for two decades.

As a practicing physician assistant who has spent years advocating for Medicare for All and working in electoral politics, I've heard the same warning over and over: Don't run on single-payer. Michigan suggests that conventional wisdom deserves another look.

Michigan shows the old fear, that Medicare for All is too risky to run on out loud, was always a story told by people who never tried telling voters the truth about their premiums. Michigan is a battleground state, not a safely progressive one, and El-Sayed won by refusing to hide the ball. He put guaranteed healthcare at the center of a statewide campaign and let voters decide. They decided. That’s not a fluke. It’s a preview of what happens when a candidate treats single-payer healthcare like the popular, morally obvious policy it has always been. AIPAC and the insurance lobby’s allies spent a fortune trying to prove otherwise and lost.

Party insiders will insist this was about mechanics, not Medicare for All. They said the same after every progressive upset this cycle, right up until they had to explain the next one. For one night, the closest thing Michigan had to a ballot question on national healthcare got its answer, and it wasn’t close.

Tuesday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, at the Organization of American States, a body historically committed to investigating crimes against humanity committed by governments in the Americas, held a hearing in Washington, DC against the Trump administration for its treatment of protests held against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, crackdowns in the US.

The delegation, represented by Thomas Becker and Nicholas Rodelo, for the University Network for Human Rights, presented evidence of attacks of rights to free assembly and free expression by the Trump administration.

Becker has previously successfully prosecuted a civil lawsuit against former Bolivian President and US ally, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, over 2003 crackdowns and extrajudicial killings of protesters.

This is the first challenge against the Trump administration on protest crackdowns by an international court, and one of the first legal challenges generally. Speakers included Antonio Romanucci, the attorney representing the family of Renee Good, and former counsel of George Floyd; Reverend David Black, who was struck in the head by federal agents at the Broadview Detention Facility; and Naureen Shah, the director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Speakers and observers at the hearing argued that the commission must be empowered to investigate fully and act decisively, warning that the region is entering a new era of authoritarianism even as many of its democracies remain young and fragile.

During the hearing, video evidence and testimony were presented documenting the alleged abuses, prompting a response from State Department lawyers who argued that the incidents represented isolated cases still under investigation, that the United States has rights the commission should respect, and that the IACHR ought to focus its attention elsewhere in the hemisphere, a suggestion that drew scrutiny given that the US has faced far fewer cases before the commission than many other member states.

State Department representatives further contended that federal agents operating under significant stress could not be expected to act "perfectly," and maintained that any agents found to have violated standards would face penalties, though they were unable to answer specific questions from commissioners about ongoing cases or offer evidence of any such penalties actually being imposed, saying only that they would "write down" the questions and respond later.

The commission and the civil society delegation renewed a request—thus far denied by Washington—for an IACHR delegation to visit the United States, likely Chicago, to assess conditions on the ground.

Petitioners also singled out National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) as a central mechanism of the crackdown, arguing it chills freedom of expression by recasting protesters and dissidents, including anti-capitalist, "anti-Christian," and anti-fascist activists, as "terrorists." Blacklists of prominent leftist actors have also been compiled, with state resources used to prosecute them. "This is the new McCarthyism," the delegation added.

They pointed out that resources once dedicated to investigating internal abuse by immigration enforcement agents have instead been slashed, citing an internal FBI memo halting investigations into Department of Homeland Security officers, and that officials tasked with oversight are now regarded within the agencies as "internal adversaries" rather than watchdogs.

"These are the exact same tactics used by Latin American dictatorships from the 1970s," said Becker. "These tactics have been propped up by the US for decades, and are now coming back here, to be used against Americans," he added. The commission was created in the wake of the rise of military dictatorships in Latin America, backed by the US during the Cold War, including Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Rafael Videla in Argentina, and Hugo Banzer in Bolivia.

Becker also argued, "This is not the first time that agents backed by the US government target priests," alluding to the past abuses and killings of religious opposition leaders in Central America.

Speaking to Drop Site News, Dr. James Cavallaro, former president of IACHR and law faculty at Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard, added that "there is a conviction from those in power that they can suppress dissent" and rule through power and violence to "impose their ideology," where "opposition must be crushed."

This is the first time the commission has held any hearing of this type concerning domestic repression against the US government, which was the main force behind the founding and funding of the IACHR and the Organization of American States (OAS). “For years, the commission has heard testimony about attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships. Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses,” said Cavallaro.

The US government, including figures in the current administration like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has historically been supportive of the IACHR and the OAS, but may see the IACHR as a new target, as it continues its campaign against international legal organizations including the International Criminal Court.

Locke Bowman, attorney for Reverend David Black, shared, "What happened to Rev. Black was emblematic of the physical abuse that ICE and CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] officers directed at conscientious folks in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere around the country who bore witness to the Trump administration's cruel immigration policies with their voices, their prayers, and their cellphone cameras."

He added: "There has been no accountability whatsoever for the officers responsible for the pervasive violations of free speech and human dignity. We turn to the Inter-American Commission to ask that the commission join us in demanding accountability."

At the hearing, the University Network for Human Rights also published a detailed report, submitted as part of its formal petition to the commission, laying out documented instances of excessive force, free expression violations, and lack of accountability tied to the crackdown on ICE protests.

The commission is now expected to weigh whether the evidence and testimony presented warrant further inquiry, including a possible on-the-ground visit to the United States, before issuing findings or referring the matter further within the inter-American human rights system.

The last hearing against the US government, sponsored by the ACLU, was held in the context of dozens of extrajudicial killings by US forces in the Caribbean and Pacific, against "drug boats," which experts say violate US and international law, violate local sovereignty, and kill civilians without due process, all without helping to solve the drug crisis. Previously, the IACHR had held proceedings in the context of detainee treatment at Guantánamo Bay, among other cases.

Speakers and observers at the hearing argued that the commission must be empowered to investigate fully and act decisively, warning that the region is entering a new era of authoritarianism even as many of its democracies remain young and fragile. Crime and migration are increasingly being used as pretexts to suspend democratic norms, enabling interference in elections; extrajudicial killings; bans on opposition parties; declared states of exception; suspended protest rights; the jailing of dissidents; militarized policing; and the dismantling of checks on military, intelligence, and presidential power.

This is the most serious test facing democracy in Latin America since the Cold War, with echoes of the Reagan-era doctrine that once propped up authoritarian allies across the region. Now, the United States is again playing that role, installing, arming, backing, and protecting governments that suppress dissent, and reaching for sanctions, tariffs, and even support for coups to keep them in power.

If I told you that Big Tech billionaires have accomplished something rare in our incredibly divided country, you might laugh and assume I’m joking. But I couldn’t be more serious.

Through the data center buildout boom, Big Tech has done the impossible—they’ve united people from across the political spectrum around a singular issue: against data centers and AI. More than 70% of Americans oppose a data center being built near them.

There was a right way to roll out data center expansion and build support locally and nationally with a few basic but essential ingredients: transparency; local benefit; clean energy; and respect for peoples’ wishes to not be subjected to pollution, noise, added expenses, and wasteful water use. Like the best recipes, this would have been a little slower, deliberate, and less prone to burning.

But this sector—run by the mega rich, unconcerned with the struggles of everyday Americans—has instead delivered a masterclass on how to manufacture dissent.

Our communities, waterways, parks, and kids’ futures are not for sale.

How did they build such intense opposition so quickly?

Let’s start with secrecy. Tech companies—including the giants Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and Google—have forced local elected officials across the country to sign non-disclosure agreements while they pursue data centers. The first time local residents hear about a data center being built in their hometown is often after it is already a done deal.

Communities get no say, but they do get higher utility bills. That is the next move in Big Tech’s playbook: increasing costs for communities when life is already unaffordable, so billionaires can become trillionaires.

Next comes round-the-clock noise from cooling fans that emit a constant low hum. When diesel backup generators are being tested or used continuously, it’s like living beside a helicopter taking off. And it’s not just the noise—communities suffer from air pollution impacts too. While many Big Tech companies were formerly champions of clean renewable energy, the Trump era has seen them embrace fossil fuels and power their data centers mostly with coal and methane gas. A Caltech and University of California Riverside study projects that data centers could contribute to 1,300 premature deaths and 600,000 asthma cases across the US in 2028.

Case in point: Microsoft, which just released its 2026 “environmental sustainability report”—quite the Orwellian title given the company’s ballooning pollution. Microsoft’s real-world emissions from powering its data centers have grown 178% from the start of the AI boom in 2020 to 2025, with a 2 million ton increase in carbon dioxide since just last year. That doesn’t include the estimated 15.5 million tons of carbon pollution expected to be emitted by just three mega data center projects announced this year. Microsoft’s voracious appetite for energy reached 37 million megawatt hours (MWh) in 2025—equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Ireland. That’s what partnering with Chevron gets you.

Trying to spin these numbers into a climate-friendly narrative just adds fuel to the fire—as Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa saw firsthand recently at a PNW Climate Week event at Seattle City Hall. Audience members posed question after question challenging Nakagawa on the company’s talking points, while protesters chanted, “Microsoft, you can’t hide. We can see your dirty side.”

As if all this was not enough to fuel public backlash, it is clear that our children’s future job prospects are also in jeopardy. Collectively, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have already laid off tens of thousands of employees thanks to AI. It is no wonder that executives delivering commencement speeches about the wonders of AI have been booed off the stage.

“But why stop there?” tech barons seem to ask. How about a data center that threatens the actual river from A River Runs Through It? Yes. Native American land? Sure. National Parks? Certainly. The Great Salt Lake in Utah, a refuge to 12 million migrating birds? Of course. Each overstep brings legions more into the big tent of data center resistance.

Finally, when protest reaches a fever pitch, criminalize it. The US Department of Justice seems to be targeting people who oppose data centers. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have all embraced President Donald Trump, making this deeply unpopular sector even more despised.

If the tech sector wants these built, they need to do the opposite of everything they’ve done so far. Data centers must be done right, or not at all. Otherwise, community opposition will continue to grow and local politicians will fall in line with public opinion—as we’ve seen in hundreds of jurisdictions across the United States. And if AI’s purpose is to steal our kids’ jobs, create new demand for fossil fuels, and make the rich even richer, there is little hope for a recovery.

Our communities, waterways, parks, and kids’ futures are not for sale. The tech sector has demonstrated incalculable greed and adopted radically antidemocratic practices. It needs to now, somehow, convince people that it cares even a little about communities and our country. If they don’t change course fast, the dissent they manufactured will crush them and their data centers.

Kirkpatrick Sale has it half right in his lament over today’s Democratic Socialists of America, “Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave.” The imagined spinning stems from post-mortem distress at what its founding leader would make of the organization today. Sale—best remembered for SDS, his history of Students for a Democratic Society, the seminal 1960s “New Left” organization—calls himself Harrington’s “close friend and traveling companion,” and feels that today’s DSA “has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.”

While I cannot claim to have been Harrington’s friend, I did know him and arguably qualify as one of his colleagues, in that I was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, his prior organization whose 1982 merger with the New American Movement created DSA. I remain a member of the organization to this day, and when serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives was once one of DSOC/DSA’s handful of public elected officials. From my vantage point, while I understand Sale’s real–and Harrington’s imagined–distress at some of what he sees in today’s DSA, not only does he ignore developments that would have made Harrington proud, but I also think his take on Harrington’s politics is not quite right.

As a flat statement, Sale’s contention that DSA “is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist” is wrong, but he is not wrong in identifying parts of 2026 DSA that would seem unlikely to have appealed to Harrington. Sale clearly recognizes that the roots of the organization’s dramatic changes—its 20-fold inflation from the 6,000 member group of the 90's—lie in Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. He errs, though, in calling Sanders “a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress.” Sanders actually was not then, is not now, and so far as I know has never been an actual member of DSA—counterintuitive as that may seem.

After Sanders introduced “democratic socialism” to millions of American living rooms in his debates with Hillary Clinton and politically “lived to talk about it,” a whole lot of people who’d also been thinking about the idea googled the term and found DSA; some joined. They were then followed by some who indeed did not identify with the democratic socialist tradition but recognized that this was now where the action was—the hazard of success.

The result is generally understood as a “big tent” organization—a tent thus far large enough to contain both US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Democratic New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani—figures for whom I cannot imagine Harrington having anything but admiration—along with caucuses by no means committed to that approach, groups that Harrington would consider bizarre and out of place (as does this writer.) It contains serious divergences between local chapters and a tenuous national organization. How long this tent holds up is anyone’s guess. As for Sale, if he would actually consider the entirety of organization (the best description of which I’ve seen was recently published in a German Left Party newspaper—"Von Degrowth bis ML" Jungle World, July 30, 2026) he might well see similarities with the late years of SDS (an organization Harrington subsequently regretted having failed to productively engage with.)

Among those similarities is a certain not-ready-for-prime-time quality common in organizations trying to cope with the increased glare of the public attention spotlight. Foibles and foolish statements surface from the past. My personal nomination for the dumbest left slogan of recent years is “Defund the police”—its rational kernel of re-evaluating government’s approach to certain types of public safety situations smothered in a seemingly naive call for an end to law enforcement. And yet, even someone like Mamdani who is generally considered to possess masterful political skills—correctly, I think—has had to walk that one back.

On some points of his critique of current DSA, Sale seems perhaps frozen in time, such as his noting that “Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.” That “new Israel” has changed quite a bit in the thirty-seven years since Harrington has been gone. Would he remain a champion of a nation now planning a prison for Palestinians that includes a moat stocked with crocodiles – a proposal temporarily stalled by consideration of the animals’ subsequently repealed protected status? Sure hope not.

But where I really think Sale is just wrong is in essentially arguing that Harrington was not actually a socialist. Yes, Harrington did talk of being “the left wing of the possible,” and that “generally meant working within the Democratic Party”—as do most current DSAers running campaigns to do something for the American working class in the here-and-now. And while Sale is accurate in saying that the DSA of Harrington’s day “put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like,” his contention that back then there was “Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism” makes it sound like Sale missed a lot of meetings—and maybe didn’t keep up on his reading so well either. Even the small DSA had differing strands of thinking. One major one was all about imagining how to reach a genuinely democratically controlled economy beyond the “welfare state” and capitalism, something you will find reflected in Harrington’s writing.

So would the imagined Harrington be troubled by some of what he’d see in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would. And would he be positively thrilled by some of what he found in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would.

The atomic age began with a lie.

Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane, flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a second city.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another 100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the blasts. Over 90% were civilians.

The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie. The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.

In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.

Because the United States had broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.

As Gar Alperovitz convincingly explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics, not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.

Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s capitulation.

A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8, 1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.

Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam, Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war against Imperial Japan.

“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who won’t be killed.”

US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff, agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”

Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.

The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to 1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers through starvation. And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.

In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.

The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning lies.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote fears of an imaginary threat.

The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths.

This year President Donald Trump returned to the right-wing dream of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims were both lies.

The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.

Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable fires, crop destruction, drought, famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.

With just 100 days left until the midterms, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on CNN to deliver Democrats’ closing message. “Life in this country is far too expensive,” said Jeffries, rolling out a new "Fighting for an Affordable America" tagline. Americans do not have “enough food on the table, not enough gas in the tank,” and they’re “unable to actually regularly and consistently afford to pay the rent or pay the mortgage.” Jeffries blamed President Donald Trump’s costly war of choice in Iran, tariffs that have cost everyday Americans thousands of dollars per year, and the largest cut to Medicaid in American history.

Later that afternoon, in a steel workers union hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Jeffries joined Gov. Josh Shapiro at a joint campaign event for Bob Brooks, a LeHigh Valley firefighter running for Congress in Pennsylvania’s seventh Congressional District. Together, the three Democrats pointed to both the corruption plaguing our national politics and the high financial cost Americans have been forced to bear since Trump took office as causes of the affordability crisis. They implored voters in the “swingiest swing state in the country” to shift the tides of Washington, DC by voting against Republicans’ cost-raising policies and for Democrats’ cost-lowering solutions in November.

Democrats are right to highlight the impacts of giant cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, along with the rising cost of gas and utilities fueled by wars abroad and billionaire-backed corruption schemes at home. Uniting a broad electorate around an “affordability” agenda, akin to the messaging and policy success of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, will bode well for Democrats around the nation going into an intense midterm election where the winds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s terror, mobilization against AI data centers, and widespread opposition to war is at the left’s back.

But mysteriously missing from Democrats' messaging about costs that have gone up as a result of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a key expense that 40 million Americans are battling in the shadows—student loans. For many student debtors, the increase in their monthly student loan bill will be their largest bill increase of the year by a significant margin. This leaves a massive hole in Democrats’ messaging cadence that must be filled immediately. A successful affordability message requires engaging with the true reality of Americans’ purses, and holds a mirror to the specific financial burdens that working people lose sleep over each night.

A willingness to ignore such a massive systemic cost increase reveals that Democrats, at least in this moment, are not taking their own "affordability" messaging seriously—posing grave electoral problems.

Take a typical student debtor in a family of four who earns a median US household income of $81,000. Under former President Joe Biden’s SAVE plan, their monthly student debt payment was $36. Under Trump’s Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) plan, that payment would increase to $440—well over 1,000% more than under SAVE. In an internal Debt Collective survey of more than 1,500 student debtors on the SAVE plan, 50% of student debtors reported an average expected payment increase of $500 a month—just a few bucks shy of the average monthly payment for a newly used car. Yet despite this grave expense, of which Trump and his Republican allies are solely to blame, student loan bill increases have seldom made it to Democrats’ November stump speeches. Except for a few sparing moments of attention—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has used his platform to showcase the absurdity of rising student debt for seniors—student loan bills have largely fallen off the radar for congressional Democrats. But for the millions on the receiving end of the Department of Education’s confusing and frightening emails, student loans dominate workers’ ability to make financial decisions.

Massive errors have rendered the student debt system dysfunctional at an unprecedented level. Millions of debtors have payments gone uncounted by their servicer, inaccurate balances, are awaiting cancellation for relief programs they’ve been eligible for, or are in limbo to simply enroll in a repayment plan that works for them. Weeks ago, Secretary Linda McMahon’s Department of Education admitted to a massive glitch in which thousands of student debtors were wrongfully told their monthly payment would be $50 a month, only to find out weeks later that the plan they’re now stuck in requires a monthly payment hundreds of dollars more. In recent days, debtors serviced by MOHELA were wrongfully sent delinquency notices asserting that they owed back-payments for the months in which courts have legally paused their payments. Separate ongoing litigation moving its way through a DC district court has called out a “shadow repeal” of the REPAYE plan, asserting that the Trump administration's refusal to allow student debtors to enroll in a repayment plan that may be their best option is illegal. Today, no member of Congress has called on the Trump administration to reopen the plan.

Worse than remaining quiet on student debt, some Democrats have seemingly regressed on the issue. In July, a dangerous student debt bill that would exempt—yes, exempt—state-based lenders from transparency laws passed in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. If the vote advances further, the new law of the land could give schools a financial incentive to push predatory loan products onto desperate students seeking to use private loans to pay for school. Nine out of 11 Democrats sided with Republicans on this measure, ensuring bipartisan support for deepening the student debt crisis and worsening the lending system.

Democrats' silence on the rising costs of student debt will fall flat with voters in November, many of whom are already dejected from the Biden administration’s botched attempt to cancel student debt broadly and the Supreme Court’s decision to side against debtors. A willingness to ignore such a massive systemic cost increase reveals that Democrats, at least in this moment, are not taking their own "affordability" messaging seriously—posing grave electoral problems.

The Debt Collective—the nation’s first union of debtors whom I organize with—is calling on Congressional Democrats to step up to the plate. At this moment, Democrats could call for an immediate pause on student debt payments—which Trump was the first to administer through executive authority in 2020—amid significant administrative errors, a costly rise in payments amid a worsening economy, and ongoing litigation. Without mentioning the one monthly bill that, for millions of Americans, rivals their mortgage, the blue wave Democrats will need to take back the House may resemble something more like a small splash.

On August 1, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a Salvadorian migrant imprisoned at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, died.

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) insists that Lopez-Cornejo “received proper medical care and was seen by medical professionals” while in custody, there are reasons to be doubtful. In May, 300 detainees launched a labor and hunger strike protesting medical neglect, being fed spoiled and rotten food, and other “torturous” conditions.

In June, Gothamist reported that more than 70 detainees at Delaney Hall had filed federal lawsuits alleging medical neglect. That includes 30 who claim they were denied prescribed medications for chronic conditions such as asthma, epilepsy, diabetes, and cancer.

Lopez-Cornejo likely experienced the same. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) said he spoke with ICE officials who told him Lopez-Cornejo had expressed feeling dizzy and fatigued earlier that day. Menendez further added, “We asked certain medical questions, which ICE couldn’t give us answers to.”

Detention centers have always been deadly. Under Trump, ICE is doing everything it can to make them even more dangerous.

Lopez-Cornejo had been prescribed medication for diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures—conditions that, if not properly treated, can lead to those symptoms as well as death. In an interview, his mother, Maria Cornejo, explained, “That is one of the reasons that I believe caused the death of my son, the negligence—that he wasn't given his medication that he had to take.”

Lopez-Cornejo is at least the 23rd person to die in ICE custody this year. In 2025, at least 33 people died in detention centers—the highest total in more than two decades according to the National Immigration Project.

Importantly, those numbers only represent the deaths that ICE has reported. During his visit to Delaney Hall on August 3, Menendez learned that another detainee had died at the detention center last month. That death was not reported because ICE agents had granted him a “discretionary release” in the middle of his medical emergency.

In June, ICE rescinded a Biden-era policy that required them to report on the deaths of detainees that occurred within 30 days of their release. ICE is now exploiting this change to obscure their death count.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In July, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) purchased the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the California City Detention Facility for $1.5 billion from the private prison company CoreCivic.

According to an ICE spokesperson, these purchases were necessary because “the state’s sanctuary politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible.” Shifting ownership from CoreCivic to the federal government circumvents these measures, thereby allowing ICE to retain “crucial” detention capacity.

This, however, is not all it does. In 2025, California passed legislation that granted its Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight to regularly inspect and report on the conditions of “county, local, or private locked detention facilities in which noncitizens are being housed or detained for purposes of civil immigration proceedings.” In June 2026, the California DOJ found that conditions at Otay Mesa were overcrowded and dirty. Medical recordkeeping was “disorganized and violated PBNDS [Performance-Based National Detention Standards] requirements” which resulted in “lapses in basic care.” At California City, the department found that detainees spent “unnecessarily long periods locked down in their cells” and experienced “extremely cold temperatures, with leaks during rainy periods.” California DOJ reported that healthcare infrastructure and systems at the center were “inadequate,” including “crisis-level health care understaffing.”

By taking ownership of those detention centers, the Trump administration is placing them beyond the reach of state inspections. As Alexa Van Brunt, the Director of the Illinois office at the McArthur Justice Center, explains, inspection reports are crucial in lawsuits alleging constitutional violations. Without them, it is far more difficult to obtain evidence of ICE’s wrongdoings. “To that point,” she remarks, “it will make it more onerous to hold DHS liable.”

It is also worth emphasizing that while ownership is being transferred, CoreCivic will remain in charge of managing those facilities. Same management, same abuses, but now with less oversight—the perfect recipe for more unaccounted detainee deaths.

In July, CBS News reported that only 15 of the 45 detention centers holding 500 or more people had been inspected by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight in the last 12 months. This follows a shift in ICE’s policies whereby dedicated facilities, which exclusively hold ICE detainees, are now inspected once a year rather than twice; and non-dedicated facilities, such as county jails, are inspected every other year.

Notably, ICE’s detention center purchases extend beyond sanctuary cities. On August 5, CoreCivic announced that ICE had purchased the Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota and the Midwest Regional Reception Center in Kansas for a total of $734 million. Both facilities were previously shut down—the former in 2010; and the latter in 2021 as the Biden administration shifted away from private prison contracts. CoreCivic had been struggling since last year to reopen Midwest Regional amid protest from local residents—in a famously pro-prison town that Trump won with more than 60% of the vote in 2024—and legal challenges from city officials. Now it will, despite their objections and with possibly fewer guardrails.

Officials with CoreCivic and The Geo Group—which owns Delaney Hall—have reportedly discussed selling several more sites to the Trump administration.

By rescinding policies that mandate accountability and oversight, while simultaneously purchasing privately held detention centers, the Trump administration is working to hide the abuses, death, and violence occurring at their facilities. At the same time, these purchases have been a major windfall for CoreCivic, which has used our taxpayer dollars to pay down its $600 million debt.

Detention centers have always been deadly. Under Trump, ICE is doing everything it can to make them even more dangerous. Before it's too late, Congress must act immediately to not only abolish ICE, but punish everyone involved in enacting their campaign of domestic terrorism and death.

Last month Immigration and Customs Enforcement killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father and Houston construction worker, on the way to a job site. Just six days later another ICE agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Guerrero on his way to work, who left behind a partner and 3-year-old daughter.

When I helped organize the fight for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), we put young people in caps and gowns and asked the country to see them as exceptional, college bound, English speaking, worthy of protection in a way that set them apart from the majority of undocumented people, who were not students but workers. It was a strategy built for a specific moment, and it won us what respectability politics ever can: temporary inclusion that separated us from the rest of our community. Many of us also shied away from the economic argument on principle, even though mainstream organizations were already making it, because it had become associated with more middle-of-the-road groups. We narrowed our own lane instead of widening it.

That caution has run its course. Two men were killed on their way to work within a week of each other. No amount of careful language changes it.

What's needed now is to say plainly that this happened to people doing exactly what all workers do every day, and that everyone who depends on immigrant labor, starting with employers and extending through the broader labor movement, has to decide what they owe them.

Employers, unions, and labor organizations cannot afford to look away while businesses that have relied on workers like Lorenzo and Johan for years stay quiet as their own workforce is targeted by the government.

None of this is about making immigrants prove they deserve safety by pointing to what they contribute. Nobody should have to justify their right to exist with a paycheck.

But there's a difference between demanding immigrants justify their worth and simply describing how this economy runs. Construction, hospitality, agriculture, food delivery, garment production, whole industries in this country would not function without an estimated 10 million undocumented workers, most without any union protection at all. That labor isn't a contribution to the American economy. It is the American economy.

My mother came to this country to work, and to build something for her family, and so did the workers I've spent my career organizing alongside. That desire, to work hard and provide rather than be given something, isn't unique to immigrants.

Every night, at kitchen tables across this country, whether the family is undocumented or not, people are asking each other, "How was work?"

Wanting to work and provide for the people you love is one of the most ordinary parts of being human, and there is real pride in the work itself. That labor is an identity, not just the exploitative relationship it's so often reduced to, one that wouldn't change even if our immigration status did.

I organized car wash workers in Los Angeles, in shops where owners stole wages and denied bathroom breaks because workers had no path to citizenship and no union behind them. A boss who can threaten to call ICE on one worker has leverage over the whole shop floor, and in plenty of workplaces that threat is the boss' whole labor strategy, cheaper and more effective at stopping organizing than firing people or hiring anti-union law firms ever was.

Employers have a different kind of leverage too, not the threat they can hold over a worker, but the influence of being a major employer, the kind that gets a phone call to the White House answered, or makes silence too costly to just sit on.

Last year, farmers raised alarms about the raids loudly enough that President Donald Trump's own agriculture secretary carried the message to the White House, and enforcement paused, for four days, before Stephen Miller pushed to reverse it and the raids resumed.

In Minneapolis this year, more than 60 CEOs signed a joint letter calling for "de-escalation" after federal agents killed two residents. The letter didn’t name ICE, and it didn’t ask for anything specific. The letter added to the scrutiny that was already mounting against ICE and Border Patrol after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Within a day, the Border Patrol commander was pulled from the city. Within two days, Trump himself was using the language of de-escalation. A vague joint statement helped move that. Imagine what an actual one could do.

The choice to speak up for workers, clearly and specifically, should be harder to dodge in the days since the killings of Lorenzo and Johan.

Rather than address why agents opened fire on unarmed men on their way to work, the administration's border czar, Tom Homan, went on Fox News and warned that there would be more "bloodshed" unless Democrats who criticize ICE stop talking. Homan is trying to make silence about these ICE killings the price of safety, and to put the blame for these two deaths anywhere but on the agents who pulled the trigger.

Every employer, every union, every business owner who has ever depended on an immigrant showing up to work now has to pick a side. Either stand with the workers whose labor built their businesses and industries, or fall in line behind a White House that is driving a white nationalist agenda. There is no third option where staying silent counts as staying out of it.

The administration isn't waiting to see whether employers choose workers or fall in line. The same crackdown that's killing and deporting workers who are already here is also causing real labor shortages in construction, agriculture, and dairy, and the administration has an answer for that shortage that has nothing to do with accountability.

This year alone, it has added 65,000 new H-2B guest worker visas and, for the first time, opened dairy farms to guest workers under a program where a worker's legal status, housing, and wages all depend on the same employer. Advocates have documented what that leads to for years: wage theft, confiscated passports, and workers threatened into silence because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Formerly enslaved people fought for this same principle a century and a half ago, insisting that only full citizenship, not tolerated presence, guaranteed they wouldn't be treated as less than fully human. This summer, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that exact principle when it struck down Trump's attempt to strip citizenship from children born to undocumented parents.

If the labor and immigrant rights movements don’t make the case ourselves, loudly and now, that immigrant workers deserve full rights and not just a job, that’s the model we’ll be handed. The alternative gets built for us either way, one where people are welcome only as controllable labor and for exactly as long as an employer finds them useful.

Employers, unions, and labor organizations cannot afford to look away while businesses that have relied on workers like Lorenzo and Johan for years stay quiet as their own workforce is targeted by the government. Unions and labor advocates also have a responsibility to clearly say that worker safety does not end at the shop door. Workers have the right to get to a job and get home without risking their lives.

Two men are dead because they went to work, and the mistake the immigrant rights movement cannot afford right now is forgetting that it is also a labor movement.

They called them cockroaches.

It was meant to reduce them—to make millions of young people seem small enough to squish and contemptible enough that no one would mourn their extermination.

But instead of crushing them, the insult only made them multiply.

Every blow from a police lathi—a long, heavy club used by Indian police—brought more bodies into the streets. Every attempt to scatter them revealed how many there were. What authorities dismissed as an infestation became an uprising powerful enough to drive India’s education minister from office and deliver one of the sharpest popular rebukes yet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule.

When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.

At the center of the revolt was a test that promised merit and delivered betrayal.

India’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, or NEET, determines admission to undergraduate medical programs. More than 2 million young people took the examination, often after their families had sacrificed for years to pay for specialized coaching. The test presents itself as an impartial judge: Everyone receives the same questions, the same clock, and the same numerical verdict.

Then the questions were leaked and reportedly sold in advance.

Young people told to outstudy one another discovered that some contestants might simply have purchased the finish line. The test promised an even starting line, but the marketplace had filled some lanes with hurdles and cleared others for the wealthy.

Their fury grew into weeks of mass protest that forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on July 25, 2026.

The movement took its name from a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing unemployed young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit activist from one of India’s historically oppressed caste communities, seized the slur and sent it crawling back toward those in power. “What if all cockroaches came together?” he asked online.

From that question emerged the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)—a name that mocked Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

The great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy celebrated the CJP members as “young roaches riding in on the rain,” as protesters poured into Delhi beneath the monsoon skies. Their numbers were formidable, but so was their irreverence. When police aimed water cannons at them, young people dared the officers to turn them on—then danced in the spray. The state brought water cannons into the streets to produce fear. The protesters transformed the streets into a stage and danced in the spray.

In a Democracy Now! interview, Roy described a movement alive with “mockery and humor,” “dancing,” and “singing”—a rebellion defined by “exuberance.” Protesters joked that fleeing police lathi attacks was helping them maintain their running streaks on Strava, a fitness-tracking app. They turned footage of the chases into video-game parodies and posted mock influencer-style “get ready with me” videos and “fit checks” featuring helmets, goggles, and homemade protective gear. One demonstrator held a placard declaring, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

That creative humor—an intelligence no standardized test could measure—was not an escape from struggle, but rather one of the movement’s weapons. They met contempt with laughter, intimidation with choreography, and isolation with an expanding circle of solidarity.

The uprising forced Modi to announce a national task force to overhaul the examination system, while the government proposed stronger penalties for exam fraud. The Cockroach Janta Party also secured commitments to compensate families of students who died by suicide amid the crisis and withdraw criminal cases against protesters.

While no single event explains a suicide, movement leaders linked the deaths to the despair produced by a system that made one examination appear capable of determining an entire life—then revealed that the exam could be bought.

Near the main protest site in New Delhi, students erupted in celebration. Dipke reportedly fell to his knees, raised his fist, and declared, “We have done it.” He called the result “a victory for the people of India” and “a defeat for the dictator.”

But the government did not accept defeat quietly. The movement called off its demonstrations after officials agreed to its central demands, including withdrawing criminal cases against protesters.

Within days, however, the Cockroach Janta Party reported that students and protesters were again being detained and arrested in several states. Movement leaders accused the government of violating the agreement and threatened to return to the streets.

The government subsequently announced that most Delhi protesters would face no further action. But organizers warned that closing proceedings was not the same as formally withdrawing the cases—and that the movement would resume if the government again broke its promises.

The government had retreated—but only far enough to gather itself for another attack. After officials agreed to withdraw cases against protesters and promised that no punitive action would follow, authorities began detaining and arresting students across several states, with Muslim and Dalit participants reportedly among those singled out. At least 100 people were arrested, many on stringent non-bailable charges, as the movement accused the government of backtracking on its agreement. By then, however, the students had done more than expose an examination leak. They had opened a crack in the façade of the system itself.

Why would a compromised examination provoke an uprising powerful enough to force out a cabinet minister—and frighten the government into trying to seal that crack through repression? Because a high-stakes test is never merely a collection of questions. It is a promise about how society works. It tells young people that wealth, caste, language, and power do not matter—that the future belongs to whoever studies hard.

When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.

Whether in India or across the world in the United States, standardized testing is one of capitalism’s most effective laundering machines. It takes a dirty hierarchy built through unequal access to wealth and education, scrubs away its history, and returns the result stamped with a single word: merit.

The Testocracy

Every high-stakes testing system tells young people some version of the same story: Work hard, follow the rules, outstudy everyone else, and a high score will make the future yours.

For the millions of students taking NEET in India, that promise carries enormous weight. The examination is presented as the great objective referee, capable of determining who deserves entry into medical school. It supposedly does not care about a student’s family income, caste, gender, language, region, or access to private coaching. Everyone receives the same questions, the same time limit, and a score that appears to settle who is prepared to advance.

But a society does not become equal merely because it administers the same test to people who have been given profoundly unequal lives.

These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.

Some NEET applicants attend well-funded schools and spend years in expensive private coaching programs. Others learn in overcrowded classrooms, study in regional languages, work after school, care for siblings, or worry about whether their families can afford another year of preparation. “Everywhere you look, you can see the desperation of young people in this country,” Shree Kumar Verma, a 19-year-old NEET student studying in Kota—the center of India’s exam-coaching industry—told The Guardian. “Being at Kota is either going to bring you success or totally break you down; it’s all or nothing here.” Some students enter the testing center trained specifically to defeat NEET. Others arrive carrying every burden that caste, poverty, geography, and educational inequality have already placed on their backs.

Standardized tests convert these unequal conditions into a clean numerical hierarchy and then present the result as a neutral measure of individual merit. This is the central function of what I call the testocracy: a social class of elites that uses standardized testing to make inequality appear earned.

The NEET leak laid bare the crudest form of class privilege: Students with enough money or the right connections could allegedly purchase the questions outright. It was corruption in a form no one could mistake.

The scandal has a close parallel in the United States. In 2019, federal prosecutors exposed Operation Varsity Blues, a sprawling college admissions scheme in which wealthy parents paid consultant William “Rick” Singer to fraudulently secure places for their children at selective universities. Some arranged for stand-ins to take the SAT or ACT or paid corrupt proctors to change answers after the exams. Others bribed college coaches to designate their children as recruited athletes, sometimes fabricating athletic résumés and staging photographs of students participating in sports they did not actually play.

The scandal provoked outrage because wealthy families had purchased test scores and admissions outcomes outright. But affluent families routinely buy educational advantages that remain perfectly legal: elite schools, private tutoring, test preparation, admissions consultants, and access to universities that favor donors and children of alumni.

The comparison with NEET is striking. In both scandals, public outrage erupts when wealth abandons even the pretense of fairness and simply buys access to education and opportunity.

These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.

Testing as a Tool of Colonialism and White Supremacy

The camouflage of inherited advantage as individual merit is not an accidental flaw. It is rooted in the white supremacist, colonial, and eugenic history of standardized testing—a system designed to translate racial and imperial hierarchies into the seemingly neutral language of scores.

British colonial rule imposed a standardized examination system on India, reorganizing education around centralized curricula, externally controlled tests, and official credentials. Historian Jana Tschurenev describes the resulting culture as centered on “memorisation, examination, and technocratic management.” British authorities expanded schooling not to achieve equality, but to prepare most colonized people for subordinate positions while opening a narrow path to government employment and elite credentials.

A decisive turn came with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education. Macaulay admitted that he knew neither Sanskrit nor Arabic, yet declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” His contempt expressed the racist logic of British policy, which treated European knowledge as universal and Indian intellectual traditions as inferior. Whatever opportunities English education later offered some people excluded by India’s caste hierarchies, the colonial policy itself was designed to elevate the language and culture of the rulers. Mastery of that culture became increasingly essential to credentials, employment, and social advancement.

Wood’s Despatch of 1854 further centralized the system. The universities established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857 were modeled after the University of London and operated largely as examining and affiliating institutions, prescribing curricula, administering tests, and conferring degrees. Teaching became organized around examinations controlled by colonial authorities.

The Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination made the colonial function of testing especially clear. Indians could formally compete to enter the elite administrative corps that governed their country, but the examination was held only in London and structured around subjects associated with elite British schooling. British officials argued that the examination should secure candidates trained in the “highest and best form of English education”—a principle they said would be sacrificed if the test were also offered in India.

The effective exclusion of most Indian candidates became an early nationalist cause. At its founding meeting in 1885, the Indian National Congress demanded that the exam also be offered in India. The dispute exposed the contradiction of colonial meritocracy: Britain proclaimed an open competition while designing it to reward those with the wealth to travel to Britain and the greatest access to the colonizer’s language, schools, and culture.

A related system of race and class sorting developed in the United States, and the use of standardized tests gave that hierarchy the appearance of objective measurement. As Rethinking Schools has written:

Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the "natural superiority" of wealthy, white, US-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since.

Beginning during World War I, psychologists administered the Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests to more than 1.7 million military recruits. The tests sorted soldiers and were then used to make sweeping claims about the intelligence of entire racial and national groups.

Eugenicist psychologist Carl Brigham drew on the Army test results in his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, to promote the supposed superiority of “Nordic” people and the inferiority of Black people and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Warning that “the decline of American intelligence” would accelerate “owing to the presence here of the negro,” he called for public action to prevent what he described as racial deterioration. Three years later, Brigham helped develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), turning a system shaped by military classification and eugenics into a gatekeeper for higher education.

By the 1920s, standardized tests were also sorting millions of children into academic, remedial, and vocational tracks. They disproportionately directed white and affluent students toward universities and professional careers while steering Black, immigrant, working-class, and disabled children toward lower-paid positions in a racially stratified economy. Testing was essential for reproducing hierarchy and making it appear deserved.

Black intellectuals organized an early counterattack against this racist testing regime. Reflecting on the rapid spread of psychological testing after World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:

It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.

Du Bois was part of a larger movement of Black scholars challenging the tests’ methods, assumptions, and political uses. In 1924, educator Horace Mann Bond systematically dismantled Brigham’s claims, exposing the supposed science behind intelligence testing as an instrument of “propaganda and encouragement for prejudice.” Bond urged Black intellectuals to understand how the tests were constructed and used so they could resist efforts to portray Black people as incapable of exercising the full rights of citizenship.

Du Bois and Bond understood that the tests converted the consequences of segregation, poverty, and unequal schooling into supposed evidence of Black inferiority. The state denied Black children equal resources, measured the predictable results, and then used their scores to restrict access to advanced education and professional work.

The colonial testing system in India and the eugenic testing system in the United States were not identical. But both converted the language, culture, and advantages of dominant groups into supposedly universal measures of merit.

The openly colonial and eugenic language eventually became less acceptable, but the sorting machinery survived. “Racial fitness” became “aptitude.” Assertions of British and white superiority became supposedly universal “standards.” Claims about racial differences in intelligence became claims about an “achievement gap.” This year marks the SAT’s 100th anniversary—a century after its creation by eugenicists, it is still used to rank and sort young people for unequal opportunities.

When Exams Cause Eruptions

High-stakes tests become politically explosive because they ask young people to place their faith in a promise our economic and political system cannot keep.

Capitalism produces enough wealth to house, feed, clothe, and educate everyone, but concentrates that wealth at the top. Education is celebrated as the “great equalizer,” yet schools operate within—and help reproduce—this unequal order. Education may help some individuals move within the hierarchy, but it cannot abolish a hierarchy the economy depends on. Standardized tests manage this contradiction by ranking young people, rationing scarce opportunities and presenting the results as merit rather than economic design.

When a test carrying the weight of a young person’s future is exposed as corrupt, arbitrary, or rigged, the promise of meritocracy can collapse into rebellion. In India, a leaked medical entrance examination sent masses of young people into the streets. In the United States, resistance to high-stakes testing grew into what organizers called the Education Spring. Though these movements confronted different systems, both revealed how supposedly neutral exams ration opportunity, discipline educators, and disguise inequality.

The protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades.

I learned something about resisting the testocracy at Garfield High School in Seattle. In January 2013, teachers voted to refuse to administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress test, known as the MAP. We were not opposed to assessing students. We opposed a test disconnected from much of our curriculum, costly in time and resources, and increasingly used to rank teachers rather than improve learning.

When the district threatened us with a 10-day suspension without pay, students and parents joined the struggle. Families opted out, students urged classmates to refuse the exam, and educators at other schools joined the boycott. By the end of the school year, the boycott forced the district to end the required use of the MAP in Seattle high schools.

The boycott became one of the brightest sparks of the Education Spring, the largest revolt against standardized testing in US history. The uprising carried the critique of Occupy Wall Street into public schools. Occupy had exposed how the wealthiest 1% manipulated political and economic institutions; the Education Spring challenged the use of testing, austerity, and privatization to reorganize education around corporate interests.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of families opted out of state exams; students organized walkouts; and educators challenged testing mandates through resolutions, rallies, and boycotts. In New York alone, more than 200,000 students refused the state’s Common Core exams in 2015. The Garfield teachers did not create this movement alone, but our refusal helped spread a dangerous question: What if we simply stop cooperating?

The Education Spring and the NEET revolt both erupted because high-stakes tests compress vast social conflicts into a single score. An exam can determine whether a student graduates, enters medical school, receives a scholarship, or is shut out of a profession. It can also rank schools, punish educators, and justify closures. Resistance has since helped push a growing number of states to abandon standardized exams as high school graduation requirements.

Standardized tests become detonators because they promise fairness while making life-altering decisions among people never given equal opportunities. When that promise collapses—through leaked questions, racial disparities, corporate profiteering, or educationally useless exams—the test reveals itself as more than an assessment. It becomes a symbol of the system deciding who advances and who is left behind.

The testocracy tells young people they must defeat one another for access to a scarce future. Resistance begins when they recognize that the real obstacle is not the person sitting beside them, but the system forcing them to compete for what should be a right.

The Test We Must Pass

The Cockroach Movement did more than expose a corrupted examination. It exposed a society that tells young people their futures depend on defeating one another while the wealthy purchase every imaginable advantage—and sometimes the answers themselves.

A fairer NEET would matter. But no perfectly guarded test can make an unequal society just. India remains scarred by poverty, caste oppression, concentrated wealth, and repression. The United States is likewise defined by mass poverty amid extraordinary wealth, racial inequality, and attacks on dissent.

A fairer competition for scarcity does not end scarcity. A cleaner testocracy remains a testocracy.

The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.

But struggle is the greatest teacher. Young people who entered the streets demanding a fair exam learned that the corruption ran deeper than a leaked test. They learned how wealth and power shape the institutions governing their lives—and that institutions presented as immovable can be forced to retreat.

The Cockroach Movement did not end that repression. But it showed that even a government accustomed to surviving mass dissent can be forced to concede.

Most important, the protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades. Their power did not come from defeating the student beside them, but from uniting in solidarity.

The government called them cockroaches because it believed they were small, disposable, and easy to crush. But cockroaches are legendary survivors, said to be capable of outliving even a nuclear apocalypse. These young people came through the monsoon rain, danced beneath the water cannons, and transformed an insult into a warning: The powerful may build the machinery of destruction, but those they despise may yet survive them.

Power wants the isolated student hunched over a standardized test, stomach knotted and nerves frayed, believing every failure belongs to them alone. It fears the moment that student looks up, sees millions carrying the same burden, and realizes that the failure belongs to the system.

The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.

That is the test our movements must pass.

It has taken the Trump administration just eighteen months to turn a seasonal stomach bug into a national epidemic.

Cyclospora, the food borne parasite that causes severe diarrhea, has infected an estimated 18,000 Americans so far this summer—more than six times the number of cases the U.S. typically experiences over a full year.

This surge in case counts represents the largest recorded outbreak of Cyclosporiasis in U.S. history. As of writing, it has led to more than 400 hospitalizations across 45 states. Worse still, Michigan recorded its first two Cyclospora-related deaths earlier this week.

With all this in mind, it makes sense that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently spent nearly three hours grilling a health official over their response to a disease outbreak…

…until you realize that the topic of discussion was COVID-19 rather than Cyclosporiasis.

On July 29, Congressional Republicans called an oversight hearing to do something they’ve done many times before: ask Dr. Anthony Fauci to explain, once again, where COVID-19 came from.

These COVID-origins hearings have now run for years, generated multiple staff reports from both parties, and reliably produce the same result:

• Republicans accuse Fauci of a cover-up,
• Fauci denies,
• Democrats call the exercise theater,
• Everyone goes home having learned nothing they didn’t already believe going in.

This most recent hearing was no different. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) subpoenaed Fauci and the 85-year-old retired scientist, more than three years removed from federal service, declined to answer questions. The only notable part about this go-round was that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than a hundred times to avoid responding.

On Thursday, the committee voted—along strict party lines—to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his recent testimony.

COVID-19 origin hearings have established themselves a predictable, low-yield use of oversight capacity. That makes it worth asking: why are Republicans calling attention to the issue now?

Oversight hearings involve real and finite resources including a Senate committee’s subpoena power, its staff’s investigative time, and a chair’s agenda-setting authority. To have that congressional attention wasted on an issue both sides have already litigated to exhaustion is revealing—especially when juxtaposed with the fact that not a single Republican has subpoenaed anyone over a historic outbreak that continues to spread with no real end in sight.

The Food and Drug Administration’s current acting commissioner Kyle Diamantas could have easily replaced Fauci in the hot seat. Not just for the agency’s failure to adequately communicate with the public about their cyclospora investigations, but also for his professional history as “corporate lawyer that defended Abbott Laboratories in 2022 for its key role in creating an infant formula crisis.” That’s the same Abbott responsible for the contaminated baby formula that spawned a multiyear criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, which has since been dropped despite having yielded, per the DOJ’s own prosecutors, enough evidence to support criminal charges. According to the Wall Street Journal, that call was made by the DOJ’s “top decision makers,” which in all likelihood included the man the GOP plans to confirm as the country’s top lawyer: Todd Blanche.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—and his former Department of Government Efficiency co-lead Elon Musk—could have similarly been forced to answer questions about how their brand of “efficiency” has hollowed out federal, state, and local health departments charged with monitoring viral threats and inspecting food facilities. Do the American people not deserve to know that thanks to these cuts, there’s a thousand fewer people overseeing our food supply to ensure instances of cyclosporiasis don’t become widespread outbreaks? Or that the principal national office with cyclospora expertise was dismantled during Musk and Vought’s campaign?

There are ample administration officials to place in the hot seat, but the list of culpable targets extends even further. Taylor Farms’ surreptitious handling of this ongoing tragedy is obviously deserving of microscopic inquiry. People all over the country will not look too fondly on the summer they were forced to eschew their bright salads out of fear of becoming too well acquainted with their bathrooms. But Rand Paul & co. evidently have no desire to satisfy the public’s itch for accountability since Taylor Farms’ CEO Bruce Taylor continues to sit easy even as Americans die. A grim reminder of the privileges that political donations have secured under Trump.

The precedent for achieving this sort of accountability was already set by House Democrats. Two days prior to the Fauci hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)—the Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—demanded Bruce Taylor answer questions about his (company’s) role in this outbreak.

Neither the ongoing cyclospora outbreak, nor the next manufactured health emergency under Trump, will be solved by another round of questions for a Biden-era retiree. But Republicans aren’t looking for solutions, they’re looking to shift blame for—and from—a shit-show of their own making.

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am local time, our world changed forever when the US dropped the first atomic bomb used in war over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The immediate death toll was approximately 70,000 with ~140,000 to have died by year's end. Three days later, the US would drop a plutonium bomb over the city of Nagasaki. The immediate death toll there was ~40,000 with ~70,000 to have died by year's end with a combined total of ~210,000. Three weeks earlier, following the atomic bombing of New Mexico with the Trinity test, the nuclear age was thrust upon mankind. The nuclear legacies from victims and survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, and their history lingers to this day. The legacy extends from the mining for the nuclear materials and its impact on local communities to the processing, testing, use, storage, and waste management, as well as the impacts and risks of nuclear power to this day.

Amnesic of past history and events, the United States initiated a new arms race beginning in 2010 with then-President Barack Obama‘s “grand bargain“ to garner favor with the Republican Congress to ratify the New START Treaty. Following our lead, all of the remaining nine nuclear nations are working to modernize their stockpiles as well.

With the advent of artificial intelligence programs already utilized by President Donald Trump’s Department of War and the race to bring this technology to war, we move ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, either by intent, miscalculation, mistake, or cyber attack using disruptive technologies. This fact was recognized by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, moving their Doomsday Clock forward this past January to 85 seconds to midnight.

In order to survive, we must awaken from the myth of deterrence, realizing it for what it is, the greatest driver of the arms race. The unexamined assumptions that these weapons must exist is blatantly false. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to disassemble them. From a height of roughly 64,000 weapons in 1986 we have reduced global stockpiles to approximately 12,187 currently. We also know that even a “limited nuclear war“ in a remote region of the world, for example, between India and Pakistan, using less than one half of 1% of global stockpiles, will result in a global nuclear famine. This could potentially result in up to 2 billion deaths on the planet due to the catastrophic climate change that would follow.

The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons.

When we awaken from this trance and understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable manner.

What is required in this race to save ourselves is the political courage and will to do so. Thankfully, there is hope both internationally and nationally. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 75 nations and signed by 25 additional nations representing a majority of the global population. Here at home the Back From the Brink grassroots movement currently has endorsing congressional resolutions. There are 70 members of Congress, who have endorsed House Resolution 317 and Senate Resolution 323.

The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons. We must demand our elected officials endorse this campaign or move out of the way for those who will.

Democratic Connecticut Rep. John Larson has a long record of fighting for working families. He has a 98% voting record with AFL-CIO. He’s endorsed by over three dozen unions and the Working Families Party. And he is Social Security’s No. 1 champion in the US House.

Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act would protect and expand Social Security by making billionaires pay in on all of their income, just like the rest of us. That’s why billionaires are so desperate to defeat him—and they’ve found just the empty suit to do it.

Luke Bronin, the former mayor of Hartford, is challenging Larson in the August 11 Democratic primary. As mayor, Bronin laid off hundreds of workers, slashed worker benefits, and tried to undermine collective bargaining rights. Bronin’s frosty relationship with labor was a major reason that he abandoned a bid for governor. But now, billionaires are trying to use Luke Bronin to take out John Larson.

Bronin is backed by The Bench and Majority Democrats, two billionaire-funded PACs created to prop up corporate-friendly Democrats. Notably, Bronin is the only candidate challenging an incumbent Democrat that The Bench has endorsed. That’s how badly the billionaires want to take out John Larson.

“We're not gonna let the billionaires buy a seat in Congress to stop the progress that John Larson has led for his entire career.”

Labor leaders and Social Security experts have lauded Larson for his consistency and stalwart determination to protect, in his words, “the best economic development plan that this nation has ever had.”

View this post on InstagramA post shared by Social Security Works ❌

“The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.”—A-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, Nobel peace prize ceremony for ICAN, December 2017

This August 6-9 marks the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, having committed the unspeakable sin and crime in 1945, thus ushering in the nuclear age.

Rather than repenting for the evil of building and using nuclear weapons, making reparations to the victims, and promising to eradicate its nuclear program, the US government has instead made nuclear weapons the cornerstone of its military policy. This policy holds that the United States must be prepared to use any military means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to protect and ensure its “vital” national security and geopolitical interests.

The US nuclear weapons program was conceived under a shroud of secrecy that continues to this day, and without the consent of the US people. Beginning with the Manhattan Project in 1940, the US has spent over $9 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.

The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable.

To date, the US government refuses to adopt a “no first-use” nuclear policy, declaring it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the case of conflict. Therefore, a US president could unilaterally order a nuclear attack at any time. According to peace advocate and author Joseph Gerson, the US has prepared or threatened to use nuclear weapons against adversaries an estimated 30 times to bolster its aims.

Moreover, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review includes planning for limited nuclear war by developing low-yield nuclear weapons to counter an adversary’s limited use of nuclear weapons in any conflict. The US government is now continuing a several decades long process to modernize its nuclear arsenal at a cost of nearly $1 trillion. Instead of funding vital human needs programs, this exorbitant expenditure (along with the $1.5 trillion 2027 military budget) constitutes a direct theft from the poor! The US, along with the eight other nuclear nations, refuse to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which now deems nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To date, 75 nations have ratified the TPNW.

On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. This is due to the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate crisis, AI, and worsening world tensions and other perils. The Ukraine war has further aggravated the nuclear threat between Russia and NATO.

The nuclear threat is further exacerbated by recent threats against Iran by President Donald Trump, including to “blast Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages,” and his warning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

As a leading nuclear superpower, the US practices a double standard by calling on other nations to disarm while, at the same time, it refuses to disarm and instead is rapidly expanding its own arsenal.

AI technology also increases the risk of nuclear war. A study by King’s College London published earlier this year revealed that AI models used in 21 simulated nuclear crises escalated the conflict by threatening nuclear war in 95% of 329 turns of play.

As we confront the nuclear peril today, it is imperative that we hear and heed the testimony of those who were directly impacted by nuclear weapons. Since 1945, the Hibakusha has urgently called on all the nuclear nations to abolish nuclear weapons stating that “humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Additionally, people of faith and conscience have actively opposed and resisted nuclear war preparations, including those of blessed memory such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who immediately condemned the 1945 bombing; Bishop Tom Gumbleton (first bishop president of Pax Christi USA); Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ; Philip Berrigan—all Pax Christi USA teachers of peace—Thomas Merton, OCSO; Sr. Anne Montgomery, RSCJ; Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI; Sr. Ardeth Platte, OP—as well as peacemakers today like Pax Christi USA teachers of peace Elizabeth McAlister and James and Shelley Douglass, plus Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, and so many more!

Throughout the Nuclear Age, different church denominations, faith leaders, and organizations and groups, including International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Back from the Brink, and Warheads to Windmills have also called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. And there have been countless non-violent actions for nuclear disarmament and ending war. Since 1980, plowshares peacemakers have enacted the biblical prophecy of beating swords into plowshares by hammering and using others symbols to literally begin the process of disarmament. I have been blessed to be part of two plowshares actions.

Catholic leaders have made significant statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons and present nuclear peril.

• In 1972 St. Pope Paul VI stated, “It is unthinkable that no other work can be found for hundreds of thousands of workers than the production of instruments of death.” In 1976, he described the atomic bombings of Japan as a “butchery of untold magnitude.”
• In 1976, Fr. Richard McSorley, SJ said, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.”
• In 1981, Seattle’s Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, the 1987 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, stated: “Trident is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound… I say with deep sorrow that our nuclear war preparations are the global crucifixion of Jesus… the final crucifixion of Jesus, in the extermination of the human family with whom he is one.”
• In 1982, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, the 2009 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, told Catholics in his diocese who worked at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas, “In the name of the God of peace, quit your jobs.” In making this appeal, he said he would try to offer financial assistance to any defense worker who would quit.
• In 2017, for the first time ever, a pope condemned the very possession of nuclear weapons as immoral. Pope Francis declared: “Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race…”
• In 2020 Pope Francis reiterated, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago.”
• Pope Leo has since continued his predecessor’s stance of calling for nuclear disarmament.
• On January 11, 2022, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and recipient of the 2026 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace award, released a landmark pastoral letter: “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace-A Conversation Towards Nuclear Disarmament.“
• There has also been the development of a new partnership of US, Japanese, and South Korean bishops. Last year they declared: “On the solemn occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, Catholic bishops from the United States, Japan, and South Korea have come together in Hiroshima to call for a world free of nuclear weapons. Representing the Partnership for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, the bishops joined with atomic bomb survivor organizations to honor the memory of those who perished, to stand in solidarity with survivors, and to urge the global community to reject the possession, use, and threat of nuclear arms.“

Last year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, more than 500 people and 60 organizations in the US signed an Apology Petition to the Japanese people calling on the US government to apologize to Japan for the atomic bombings and pledge to ratify the TPNW. The mayor’s office of Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo (the main Hibakusha organization and 2024 Nobel Peace Prize recipient), and Catholic clergy and religious in Japan acknowledged receiving this petition and expressed their great appreciation.

Most recently, the groundbreaking “Rome Declaration for an Unarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development,” was signed by over 200 Nobel laureates, leading AI innovators, and global academics.

Nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal, and no follower of Jesus should be involved in their production, financing, or use of them! The Catholic Church and all churches have a crucial role to play in helping to bring about a disarmed world. What if the church leadership in all denominations were to call on all Christians in the military nuclear chain of command to refuse orders to kill and use nuclear weapons, and publicly support those who do so? What if the churches could take the lead in calling for the conversion of arms industries to non-military production, while advocating for full and just protection of workers’ rights during the transition process? What if the church would provide material resources for those who quit their jobs for reasons of conscience? And what if the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and all Catholics—clergy, religious, and laity—and Christians in the US demanded that the US government ratify the TPNW? These efforts would go a long way to help create the climate necessary to bring about real disarmament.

Followers of the non-violent Jesus, who commands us to love and never to kill, cannot allow nuclear weapons, death-dealing technologies, and idols of death to ever be normalized, and must reject any ideology or theology that justifies war, genocide, and even omnicide. We need to adopt non-violent practices, as many are doing today, as a primary means to respond to conflict, to resist systemic violence and injustice, and advocating non-violent civilian defense as an alternative to militarized-based national security.

The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable, for with God, and people acting on their faith convictions, all things are possible. History bears out this truth. I join with many peacemakers worldwide who believe that nuclear abolition can happen, and who are acting to make it a reality. During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.

On September 4, 1989, six peacemakers and I participated in the Thames River Plowshares action in New London, Connecticut. We were able to swim and canoe to the docked USS Pennsylvania, the 10th Trident, and hammered and poured blood on the hull. Three of us, including myself, were able to climb on top of the submarine where we prayed for the abolition of nuclear weapons. From aboard this most destructive weapon, I believed then, as I do now, that if people have the faith to believe that disarmament is possible, and act on that faith, it can occur. Now is the time to act!

This article was first published on the Pax Christi USA web site.

Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.

The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025―a 19% increase over the preceding year. The US government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.

As the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, “This overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance, and build tools to exterminate humanity.”

Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86% of the world’s nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.

Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war.

The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from President Vladimir Putin. But America’s President Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Early this year, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, assessing this deteriorating situation, moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.

Of course, there have been a great many warnings that nuclear weapons portend global disaster, including many beginning right after the shocking annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Seldom, if ever,” reported CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, “has war ended leaving the victors... with such a realization that... survival is not assured.” The Chicago Tribune warned that a future atomic war would leave the world “a barren waste, in which the survivors... will hide in caves.” In France, the resistance leader Albert Camus declared that the modern world had “reached the last degree of savagery,” in which nations were faced with the prospect of “collective suicide.”

As nuclear fear swept around the world, large numbers of people sought to avert catastrophe. Some called for dramatically strengthened global governance to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war, while others, with the same goal in mind, championed nuclear disarmament. Speaking on behalf of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein typified this popular uprising by arguing that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive.”

Over subsequent decades, the anti-nuclear movement ebbed and flowed, but, at times of mass mobilization, it had an important effect on nuclear weapons policies. Naturally, the leaders of many nations felt the allure of nuclear weapons, especially after thousands of years of human history in which national security often seemed to rest upon military strength. Nevertheless, as indicated by opinion polls and massive demonstrations, anti-nuclear agitation inspired revulsion against nuclear weapons and nuclear war among large portions of the public. Consequently, most governments decided not to build nuclear weapons or even to deploy them on their territory.

Hard-pressed by anti-nuclear campaigners and public opinion, even the small number of governments that built nuclear weapons found themselves unable to resist agreement on nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were not nuclear “doves” when they entered office, but, in response to popular pressure, they took significant action to curb nuclear dangers. Some government officials, like Mikhail Gorbachev, even became fervent converts to the anti-nuclear cause.

As the 20th century came to an end, however, progress in rolling back the nuclear menace began to unravel. Popular protest declined, and nuclear disarmament organizations dwindled in size. By contrast, conservative and militarist forces grew more assertive, blocking US Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, demanding the building of new nuclear weapons, and derailing Barack Obama’s initiative for creating a nuclear weapons-free world.

Although nuclear disarmament organizations were on the defensive during the early 21st century, they retained enough strength to produce one major victory. Joining together in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, they cooperated closely with officials in small, non-nuclear nations to produce a series of United Nations conferences on nuclear issues. Then, at the 2017 conference, the national delegates voted 122 to 1 to adopt the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which banned nuclear weapons. Entering into force in January 2021, the treaty has been signed, thus far, by 100 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.

Even so, the situation remains dire. Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war. Not surprisingly, none of them is willing to sign or even abide by the TPNW. Although the anti-nuclear movement continues to oppose their priorities, it remains weak and unable to halt the momentum toward nuclear catastrophe.

Thus, unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.

Admittedly, it’s possible that, when a calamitous nuclear war does occur, it will finally convince even the slow learners among government officials that the nuclear age requires new thinking about international relations. Unfortunately, that recognition will arrive too late to matter, for such a war will snuff out most life on Earth.