As data centers sprout across the nation, a new movement is emerging to challenge the tech companies building them. The rapid spread of these facilities raises critical environmental, health, economic, and political questions, positioning health, climate, and social justice activists to play a central role in elevating these questions for the 2028 elections.

To date, the movement against data centers has made impressive gains. In the first four months of 2026, local opposition disrupted at least 75 data center projects worth approximately $130 billion. In June 2026, more than 200 advocacy organizations urged Congress to reject legislation fast-tracking the financing and permitting for large AI data centers. By July, New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers—a model other states and cities are considering. National groups such as Food and Water Watch, the NAACP, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Democratic Socialists of America have distributed resources to support local campaigns.

Public opposition has shifted dramatically alongside this activism. In August 2025, a poll of 4,000 Americans showed 43% supported having a data center built near their home. Just eight months later, in Spring 2026, support plummeted to 21%—a drop described by the pollster as “a scale of change in public opinion that I didn’t know was still possible in the US.”

However, the movement also faces significant headwinds. Big tech companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Open AI are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to support new data centers to meet AI’s growing computing demands. As Karen Hao explains in Empire of AI, tech owners believe being first and largest will ensure dominance, driving relentless expansion.

Data center and AI activists are raising core questions: Who should decide whether communities allow data centers? Who pays the long-term costs and reaps the benefits?

Earlier environmental movements received some support from presidents seeking environmental legacies, but President Donald Trump provided public subsidies enabling the AI industry to bypass opponents.

Despite widespread local opposition to data centers and bipartisan support for regulation, the movement lacks a comprehensive national narrative to counteract the industry claim that AI will solve all problems. To tell such a story, previous and current movements must articulate a clear diagnosis of the problem, adapt to changing political landscapes, translate early wins into lasting policy, and forge broad alliances. My analysis of past successes of health and environmental movements suggests five strategic pathways emerge for the data center movement.

Connect Concerns About Data Centers to Other Issues People Care About

Successful movements link distinct problems to create multiple paths into activism. The women’s movement brought together advocates for sexual and reproductive healthcare, women of color, working women, lesbians, and people with disabilities. This inclusive alliance built the power needed to expand access to abortion, ban pregnancy discrimination, and protect women from insurance industry bias. Even when differences among its supporters emerged, the movement’s unifying goals provided a framework for common action.

Data center activists have raised health, environmental, and social justice concerns: increasing air pollution, water depletion, and excess noise. One study estimates that by 2028, the annual public health costs of data center air pollution will reach $20 billion. Activists also recognize that data center expansion enables AI and tech companies to deepen surveillance, target harmful social media campaigns, and facilitate harms to mental health.

Organizers can build a unified constituency by addressing both immediate harms (unregulated construction) and systemic issues (AI expansion enriching billionaires at public expense).

Build Crosscutting Coalitions

Effective movements united diverse groups around shared economic and social interests. The Fight for $15 movement successfully raised the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, in at least 68 cities, counties, and states, winning more than $150 billion in higher pay for more than 26 million workers. It united low-wage workers, unions with the resources to pay organizers, and activists from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

Data centers activists can replicate this coalition approach. They can link residents concerned about the impact of local data centers and workers and labor unions whose jobs will be displaced by the growth of AI. They can enlist advocates for democracy, social justice, and tax reform who object to the political influence and low taxes of tech billionaires.

Pursue Transitional and Transformative Goals

Movements frequently debate whether to emphasize immediate or long-term goals. In the movement for universal healthcare, organizers argued whether to support the Affordable Care Act as a step forward or to demand Medicare for All to reduce healthcare industry power.

Mark Hannay, from Metro New York Health Care for All, suggested a “both-and framework.” Metro fought for Medicare for All, but also for funding for New York City’s public hospitals and Medicaid and stronger regulation of the healthcare industry.

Data center and AI activists adopt this approach by pairing immediate demands—such as construction moratoria and stronger air and water protections—with long-term systemic reforms, including antitrust enforcement, elimination of corporate subsidies, and higher taxes on tech billionaires.

Use Multiple Strategies to Achieve Policy Goals

ACT UP, a leading force in the fight to get the government to respond more effectively and rapidly to the AIDS epidemic, used inside-outside, disruptive and conventional, and litigation and community organizing to achieve its goals. ACT UP found that multiple approaches increased pressure on the government to respond and mobilized more constituencies.

The data center movement has already used community organizing, demonstrations, litigation, legislation, and media campaigns to advance its goals. Maintaining this diversity, aligning its deployment to maximize impact, and developing a strategic plan for 2028 and beyond will help sustain momentum and drive policy wins.

Articulate a Vision

Enduring movements unite people around a vision grounded in shared values. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a world where character triumphed over skin color provide a moral vision for the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, environmental justice activists have proposed that all people have the right to environmental protections and a voice in shaping their communities’ environments. This expansive vision has enabled this movement to win local, state, and national policy changes and bring together environmental, climate, people of color, and women’s activists across the country.

Data center and AI activists are raising core questions: Who should decide whether communities allow data centers? Who pays the long-term costs and reaps the benefits? What role should voters—rather than tech industry executives—have in directing the future of AI?

By offering clear, practical answers and using the experiences of past activist campaigns, the growing data center-AI movement can put these questions on the nation’s electoral and political agenda. In doing so, they can become a powerful force for healthier, safer, and more just communities and a world where AI is used to benefit humanity.

Gloria Steinem, who died September 2 at ninety-two, was the leading voice and public face of second-wave feminism that began in the 1960s. Thanks to the tireless work of Steinem and others, America is today a more inclusive society for women in both attitude and practice. It is a credit to her generation of activists that later generations now embrace feminism’s goals that were once considered radical, impractical, or even a violation of human nature. Steinem “awakened a vast and often skeptical public to problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, and unfair hiring practices,” President Barack Obama said in 2013 when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”

Today, 75 percent of Americans (including 64 percent of Republicans) think Congress should guarantee twelve weeks of annual paid family and medical leave to all employees. Almost three-quarters support government-funded universal childcare. Also, 57 percent want Congress to pass legislation to codify nationwide rights to abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization and 62 percent think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage – a long-time part of feminism’s agenda.

Americans also support equal pay for women and strong protections against and punishment for sexual harassment and rape. They believe that couples should share housework and childcare. They don’t think that gender should limit a person’s ability to enter professions once dominated by men, such as law, engineering, medicine, construction, journalism, and military service.

There are more Americans who embrace these goals than there are self-identified feminists. This might be a good thing. It means that many feminist ideas have become so mainstream that Americans take them for granted. But it could also mean that our society may not appreciate—or even know about—the struggles that previous generations of women endured to change attitudes and practices and win rights.

Born in 1934, Steinem had a peripatetic childhood. Her family dealt with challenging financial circumstances, which may explain why she viewed women’s issues through the lens of class as well as gender. Her father, Leo, was a Jewish itinerant antiques dealer routinely on the precipice of financial ruin. Her mother, Ruth, was a former journalist born to a Presbyterian family. After her parents divorced when she was eleven, she and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse. Her mother suffered from depression, and Steinem became her caretaker, cook, and housekeeper.

Part of what gave her the resilience to persevere was the example of her paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinem, who was president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. In a testimonial to her grandmother, Steinem noted that in her campaign for the school board, “she was elected on a coalition ticket with the socialists and the anarchists.” In the 1930s, Pauline helped rescue many members of her family who lived in Germany from the Nazis. Although Pauline died when Gloria was five, she left her what Gloria later called vivid “sense memories” of her strength, courage, and intelligence.

Gloria was raised without much religious involvement; ironically, it was her Christian mother who taught her to be proud of her Jewish heritage, educating her daughter about the horrors of the Holocaust. “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian,” Steinem once said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”

In 1956, Steinem graduated from Smith College, where she majored in government and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After a few years living on a fellowship in India, where she was inspired by the nonviolent movement led by Mahatma Ghandi that overthrew British colonialism, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist.

No sooner had she died when some social media warriors started attacking her as a one-time CIA agent. The reality is more complicated. Around 1958, she worked for the Independent Research Service (IRS), which was set up to recruit American college students to attend World Youth Festivals sponsored by the Soviet Union and countries in its orbit. It was the height of the Cold War and the goal was to have liberal non-Communist voices at those events. The IRS was covertly funded by the CIA through foundations, as were many liberal nonprofit organizations and publications at the time, including the National Student Association - a connection that Ramparts magazine exposed in 1967. Steinem never denied her work for the IRC and was not ashamed of it, although it is likely that she did not know where the money came from. She was not involved in the CIA’s nefarious activities of overthrowing democratic governments, which came to light long after she spent three years with the IRS in her twenties. These attacks on Steinem’s work for the IRS are a cheap shot, meant to discredit her feminist and progressive credentials.

Steinem came of age in the 1950s, when women were treated like second-class citizens in almost every aspect of society. When she returned to the U.S., she had to overcome many gender barriers to make her way in the world of journalism. (The National Press Club didn’t allow women members until 1971). She worked for a new magazine of political satire, Help!, and contributed short articles to women’s magazines such as Glamour and Ladies’ Home Journal. After writing several pieces for Esquire without being credited, she finally published her first bylined article in the men’s magazine in 1962. The article, published a year before Betty Friedan’s pathbreaking manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, was about the then-new contraceptive pill. She examined the fact that women often had to choose between a career and marriage. “The only trouble with sexually liberating women,” Steinem ended the article, “is that there aren’t enough sexually liberated men to go around.” The following year, Steinem made a big splash with “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine. Steinem got a job working at a Playboy Club for the article, which exposed the decidedly unglamorous working conditions faced by the club’s waitresses, who were required to wear a corset, rabbit ears, cotton tails, and high heels.

Steinem made a living as a freelance writer, profiling celebrities and writing about popular culture for major publications. But she could not persuade editors to assign her serious political subjects. Eventually she began writing a column for New York, which she helped launch in 1968. There she covered a variety of topics: Ho Chi Minh’s years living in New York, wounded veterans returning from Vietnam, neighborhood battles over childcare centers, antiwar demonstrations, migrant workers, the New York City mayoral race, and the 1968 presidential campaign.

Two articles in the magazine established her as a feminist spokesperson. In 1969, she was outraged by what she heard at a “speak out” of women discussing how their illegal abortions made them feel like criminals. Later that year, Steinem, who had an abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first explicitly feminist essay, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which profiled the burgeoning women’s movement. The second was a 1970 essay in Time called “What It Would Be Like if Women Win.” There Steinem predicted that feminism would liberate men as well as women. If women could have equal power, she argued, if homosexuals had the right to marry and women could refuse to have sex, then men would no longer be “the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility.”

Although Steinem wrote hundreds of articles and eleven books and gave thousands of speeches, her most significant accomplishments involve the creation of two influential institutions -- the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and Ms. magazine.

In 1971 Steinem joined a bipartisan group of women—including Friedan, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Dorothy Height (president of the National Council of Negro Women)—to launch the NWPC. They believed that by increasing women’s participation in politics, it would be easier to pass legislation to eliminate sex discrimination and to bring about greater legal, economic, and social equality.

“This is no simple reform,” Steinem said at the group’s founding convention. “It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”

Ms. was the first modern feminist periodical with a national readership. From its start in 1972, it challenged conventional wisdom in articles like “How to Write Your Marriage Contract,” “Can Women Love Women?” “The Black Family and Feminism,” “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” and “Down with Sexist Upbringing.” In its first year, Ms. made history when it published the names of fifty-three prominent women, including Steinem and tennis star Billie Jean King, who acknowledged having had abortions when it was still illegal in most of the country, before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Its 1976 cover story on battered women—which featured a photo of a woman with a bruised face—was the first major exposé of the problem of domestic violence.

The magazine pioneered investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the wage gap, the glass ceiling, women’s health (and the medical establishment’s sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape. It explained and advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, rated presidential candidates on women’s issues, reported on feminist protests against pornography, exposed the influence of sexist advertising on women’s self-images, and acknowledged race and class differences within the feminist movement. Ms. injected these issues into the political debate at a time when they were considered too radical for the mainstream media to cover—or at least to cover fairly.

During her first several decades as a public figure, Steinem had to endure media portrayals that called her as the “pin-up girl of the intelligentsia” or a “willowy beauty, 34-24-34.” She also had to deal with some feminist leaders, particularly Friedan, who resented her visibility in the media. But more than any other figure, Steinem was the public face of modern feminism, a constant presence on college campuses at union halls and protest rallies, on TV talk shows and in media profiles.

Steinem often used outrageous ideas to shake up her readers and audiences. In 1971 she stunned parents and alums at the Smith College graduation by quoting her friend Flo Kennedy’s observation that “there are only a few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina.” She once told an audience of CEOs that a fair society would eliminate all inheritance. She compared marriage to prostitution and said that unpaid housework “is the definition of women’s work, which is shit work.” In speeches, she frequently drew on the theme of her 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate.”

She continued to use her voice for social justice into her eighties. At the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., she rebuked President Donald Trump for his divisive rhetoric. “The Constitution doesn’t begin with, ‘I, the president’,” she said. “It begins with, ‘We, the people.’ So don’t try to divide us!” Later she blasted Trump’s proposal to force Muslims to register in a government database. “If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims,” Steinem declared. In 2018, she raised money for Planned Parenthood and joined a successful effort to save the last abortion clinic in her hometown of Toledo.

Steinem’s work was not limited to the United States. She was an outspoken advocate for peace and human rights around the world. In 1984 she and two other activists were arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. for protesting the country’s apartheid regime. In 2010, Steinem and Pramila Jayapal (then an immigrant rights activist and since 2017 a congressperson from Seattle) coauthored an article linking women’s and immigrant rights issues. In 2015 Steinem joined a delegation of thirty female peace activists from fifteen countries who made a rare crossing of the dangerous demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

Despite her many successes, Steinem made some missteps. In 2016, for example, while campaigning for Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries, she made a rare political blunder. When asked why so many young women were supporting Bernie Sanders rather than Clinton, she said “When you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys?” The backlash to this quip was merciless and she quickly apologized.

Not all of the goals of Steinem’s generation have been achieved, and patriarchy has not disappeared, yet there’s been significant progress. More men take responsibility for housework and childcare, although it is still not shared equally. The U.S. gender pay gap has narrowed: According to the Pew Research Center, women’s pay has increased from roughly 65 percent in 1982 to 85 percent by 2024. Among married female-male couples, women’s financial contributions have grown steadily over the last half century. The share of women who earn as much or more than their husband has roughly tripled from 16 percent to 45 percent since the early 1970s.

Another area of progress is women’s participation in sports. Students in my college courses, including most women, are shocked to see charts showing that in 1971, the year before Congress passed Title IX, only 300,000 girls (less than 4 percent) participated in high school sports. Today, 3.6 million (43 percent) do. The number of women playing college sports has also mushroomed. These trends have laid the groundwork for the growing popularity of women’s professional sports, including soccer, tennis, and basketball. This summer witnessed the inaugural season of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, the first since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (the inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own), which lasted from 1943 to 1954.

Feminism has also helped break the professional glass ceiling. Watching the documentary RBG, my students are stunned to learn that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956, she was one of only nine women in a class of 500. As recently as 1971, women constituted only 3 percent of American lawyers. Today, women represent about 56 percent of all law students. The proportion of women among college students has also increased from 42 percent in 1970 to 57 percent in 2025.

Women have made significant advancements in politics. In 1969, only half of all Americans said they would vote for a woman for president. By 1999, according to a Gallup poll, 92 percent of Americans supported the idea. At the start of the women’s liberation movement, no woman had ever been the presidential nominee of one of the two major political parties. That is no longer the case. The idea of a woman president is no longer a distant dream. In 1969. there were only ten women in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate. In the current Congress, 125 women (29 percent) serve in the House and twenty-six (26 percent) in the Senate, the highest total figure in history. Nor is this only a phenomenon at the federal level: 28 percent of the nation’s governors are women, up from only two in 1980. Roughly 34 percent of state representatives are women. and forty-one of the one hundred largest cities have women mayors.

College students today take for granted that they can take courses in women’s history, literature, and other subjects, but the first women's studies courses didn’t appear until 1969, when Cornell University offered a class in response to student demands. By 1975, that number exploded to over 1,000 courses at hundreds of colleges and universities. Now they are a staple on almost every campus, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine them as part of its assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Women’s and gender studies departments employ over 2,000 full- and part-time faculty members.

To Steinem’s generation of feminists, these statistics are a sign of progress. Subsequent generations, however, are more likely to see in them a sign of how far we have to go before women achieve equity in many areas of American life. A YouGov poll conducted in July and August found that nearly half of Americans (46 percent)—including 54 percent of women and 36 percent of men—say the country has not gone far enough in promoting gender equality, compared with 17 percent who think it has gone too far. While there is still far to go, Steinem’s life and legacy provide valuable lessons about overcoming obstacles and challenging the status quo.

Steinem’s feminism was rooted in a critique of capitalism and big business, which pitted women against men for jobs, pay, promotion, rights, and respect. She frequently spoke at gatherings of 9 to 5, the working women’s group, and certainly agreed with Dolly Parton’s song, “9 to 5,” that “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it. And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.”

She was also an early advocate of what today’s activists call intersectionality—consistently injecting issues of race and class into the women’s movement. “The truth was (and still is) that in the United States, as in almost every country, categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require—or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market—than by the sex, race and class of most of their workers,” she wrote in a 1994 essay “Revaluing Economics.” She pushed other white middle-class feminists to embrace the concerns of working-class women and women of color. In a 2017 interview with The Grio, she praised Black Lives Matter activists for creating “a more inclusive movement.”

Steinem always viewed working- and middle-class men as potential allies in the struggle for equality. She built bridges between feminism’s radical and liberal wings and between the women’s and labor movements. She believed that unions were a vehicle for promoting gender parity and often join their picket lines. She was not only a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, but also an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s and 1990s, long before it mushroomed into today’s influential force in American politics.

Steinem believed that the struggle for equality was ongoing and that activists could never give up the fight. There has been backsliding on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal constitutional right to an abortion. Some evangelical ministers in the MAGA orbit want to repeal women’s suffrage. We’ve also seen the rise of a “manosphere” culture epitomized by Joe Rogan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others in Trump world. It may be having an influence: A 2018 survey of boys in the eighth and tenth grades found that 84 percent believed that women and men should have the same job opportunities. By 2023, that figure had slipped to 72 percent.

But these gender reactionaries are fighting a rearguard battle. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of reformers, radicals, and idealists, like Steinem, who challenged the status quo of their day and transformed radical ideas into common sense. Those who don’t know this history have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make America more livable, humane, democratic, and inclusive. Steinem’s 1970 prediction “If Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do” is not yet a reality. But many Americans, including a majority of those under fifty, now embrace the once-radical tenets of modern feminism. And that, like Steinem’s life, is a victory worth celebrating.

The Trump 2.0 era has intensified a deeply entrenched pathology in the American media system: concentrated corporate ownership. During less perilous times, legitimate concerns about a few corporations capturing so much of our news and information have often been dismissed as conspiracy theories and paranoia. But Donald Trump and his coterie of plutocrats have made our media oligarchy problem acutely evident and impossible to ignore.

Constant controversies—from government and corporate censorship of television comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert to the algorithmic and editorial abuses of Elon Musk’s X and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post—remind us why media ownership holds such high stakes for any semblance of democracy. Meanwhile, rightwing nepotistic dynasties like the Murdochs and the Ellisons hold inordinate influence over what millions of people can see, hear, and read in their daily media.

Our current media system is simply incompatible with democracy, making structural media reform an urgent priority. This includes unwinding previously approved and pending mergers—exhibit A being Paramount Skydance’s potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (which owns CNN and HBO, among other key holdings)—as well as trust-busting corporate media behemoths by forcing them to divest major components of their sprawling conglomerates.

Undoing the wreckage will take time, but we must lay the groundwork now to launch necessary structural reforms the moment we dethrone Trump and his ilk. This project requires a clear analytical framework for understanding exactly why such run-amok media concentration is bad for democracy, and why breaking up media conglomerates is both necessary and insufficient for reconstructing the media we need from the ground up.

Big corporate media mergers are bad for everyone other than those few who stand to profit. They’re harmful for media workers, consumers, local communities, First Amendment freedoms, and democracy writ large. Over the years, the dangers for democracy posed by media concentration have been borne out by empirical evidence. Research shows that media conglomeration can lead to less local news, more advertising, and shifts toward conservative political commentary, especially under the ownership of rightwing companies such as Sinclair.

According to basic democratic theory, ensuring diverse voices, viewpoints, and stories in our media requires a pluralistic range of media owners. However, the hypercommercialized, corporate-dominated US media system wasn’t devised to privilege democracy. In fact, given its weak public media system, oligopolistic media markets, and light public interest regulations—many of which eroded over time or simply were ignored (or weaponized under Trump)—the US media system is almost perfectly designed to not serve democracy.

Within this hypercommercialized media structure, despite many individual journalists’ courageous work to the contrary, profit imperatives too often trump democracy (bad pun intended). Capitalist logics undercut and skew democratic discourse by encouraging clickbait, excluding low-income communities, and degrading the quality of journalism. Capitalist incentive structures also lead to pronounced deficits through sheer cost cutting, and by treating news and information as commodities, not public services, and audiences as passive consumers, not engaged citizens.

Even during the best of times, media corporations often maximize profits by ruthlessly cutting corners and forcing their media workers to do more for less. Too often, costly services like high-quality journalism are dismantled while content that’s cheaply produced and easily replicated—like shouting heads across ubiquitous screens, endlessly capturing our attention for advertisers—gets amplified.

Media conglomeration only intensifies these commercial logics. For example, cost cutting typically accelerates immediately following big mergers when companies take on tremendous debt. New corporate ownership has subjected CBS to such restructuring and would likely do the same to CNN if the pending merger goes through, for which Paramount Skydance is reportedly incurring $79 billion in debt. To compensate, media corporations often combine newsrooms and lay off reporters—or eliminate journalism altogether in favor of opinion and commentary.

In addition to decimating jobs, managing such debt tends to result in outsourcing costs to audiences by raising prices, offering lower-quality programming, and providing less creative cultural fare. This outcome is especially detrimental given a media landscape already riddled with news deserts, in which scarce original journalism and local media content are being produced.

The debasement of our news and entertainment media is bad enough. But media conglomeration also creates private tyrannies wherein oligarchs command broad swaths of our media. Driven by perverse incentives, these media barons wield dangerous control over public discourse, warping how important issues get framed and what stories get told.

Conferring such political economic power onto a small elite is itself a severe democratic threat. Whether through lobbying, campaign contributions, or preferential press coverage of politicians in exchange for regulatory favors, these media oligarchs almost always develop corrupt relationships with those in government, undercutting the press’s much-vaunted “watchdog function” of holding the powerful to account.

Moreover, media consolidation is a structural precondition for authoritarianism. We saw such patterns play out under Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who demonstrated how authoritarians needn’t control newsrooms by gunpoint. Rather, they can rely on chummy oligarchs to discipline the media for them, resulting in news feeds and media channels saturated with government-approved talking points and propagandistic narratives that brook little dissent toward those in power.

It shouldn’t surprise us that billionaires are likely to deploy their media assets to advance their class interests. This is especially prevalent in the United States, given devalued media properties and extreme concentrations of wealth. To provide one stark example: Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for less than half of what he would later pay for his super yacht.

In the final analysis, such concentrated corporate ownership—whereby a tiny elite commands so much power over our media—is antithetical to democratic society. Even if today’s villainous oligarchs had the hearts of angels, it’s far too much power for any individual to wield over our news media. Just as every billionaire is a policy failure, every billionaire-owned media outlet is a profound threat to our democracy.

How did the United States fall under this media oligarchy? Many of our contemporary media failures trace back to specific policies and political decisions. One such inflection point occurred during the 1930s and 1940s, when policymakers established a privatized and highly commercialized broadcast media system tempered by relatively weak public interest protections. The latter included what became known as the Fairness Doctrine, which President Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) jettisoned in 1987.

The United States belatedly established a chronically underfunded public broadcasting system in the late 1960s. But after a period of modest progressive policymaking, we began rolling back media ownership restrictions and “deregulating” our media in the 1980s, leading up to the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996, when media consolidation began to escalate. In many ways, our oligopolistic media landscape has only worsened since the merger mania of the Clinton-Bush neoliberal heyday.

Particularly alarming is the utter collapse of local journalism, in which more than 40 percent of our newspapers and three-quarters of our local journalists have vanished since the early 2000s. Meanwhile, FCC Chair Brendan Carr is a loyal apparatchik for bullying what’s left of our independent media into capitulation to Trump.

Combined with the federal defunding of our public media, few structural alternatives and countervailing forces can withstand a blasted media landscape dominated by profit imperatives and a handful of media moguls. What’s to be done?

Today we face a dangerous new terrain upon which an authoritarian government weaponizes a hypercommercialized corporate media system against democracy. Yet, the market libertarianism and policy failures over the decades that enabled media oligarchy weren’t inevitable or natural, nor must they be permanent. These were political choices, and politics are subject to human agency and change. But first we must denaturalize this hypercapitalistic system that turns our media against democracy.

To begin, we must recognize that our media pathologies run even deeper than bad billionaire media owners doing bad things. Ownership structures are only part of the problem—a key part, to be sure—downstream from the core root of our media polycrisis: capitalism. Confronting media monopolies requires us to reckon with the underlying conditions that made such concentration possible, specifically the hypercapitalist logics capturing our information and communication infrastructures from root to branch.

Indeed, our media’s systemic problems predate the recent spate of mergers under Trump. While today we must stop mega media mergers, tomorrow we must create an entirely new public media ecosystem in service to local communities. To combat the capitalist capture of the entire American media apparatus that produces various kinds of “market censorship” that would-be autocrats like Trump can exploit, we must create a non-capitalistic system—a truly public and independent media system—that’s owned and controlled by us all.

Fortunately, recent positive signs have already emerged at the state and local levels, ranging from contesting media mergers by state attorneys general to making public investments toward local journalism. Yet we must broaden our political imagination and plan for bold national policy interventions for the post-Trump moment. There’s a strong practical need to be utopian right now—to give us hope but to also provide clarity as to what we should be fighting for. We need a long-term vision firmly planted on our political horizons—we can dare to imagine a media system that privileges democracy over power and profit.

The US government continues to double down, even as its stubbornness costs it dearly—not only in material terms, but also in geopolitical influence. Washington is rapidly losing power and status in the Middle East, a decline that could produce a wider domino effect, reverberating around the world.

The latest expression of this hubris came from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Speaking at a G20 gathering of finance ministers in Asheville, North Carolina on September 1, Bessent declared that within two years, the Strait of Hormuz would become “a worthless piece of water,” as oil would instead be transported through overland pipelines.

Bessent is now promoting a new narrative that shifts the emphasis from the military war to an economic one. In an August 23 article for the Financial Times, he announced that “an economic D-Day is coming for Iran,” threatening countries that continue to trade with Tehran with severe economic consequences.

This sounds less like a serious foreign-policy strategy than an admission of Washington’s inability to alter the course of the ongoing war.

The deeper failure lies in Washington’s attempt to impose an outdated model of regional domination on a Middle East—and a world—that has fundamentally changed.

Two dominant schools of thought have emerged to explain how Washington found itself in this position.

The first, promoted largely by sections of the US media, former officials, and retired military commanders, argues that the war on Iran was a mistake from the outset and that Washington lacked the military and logistical preparedness necessary to wage it.

The second explanation places Iran at the center. It argues that Washington fundamentally underestimated Iran’s military capabilities, political resilience, and regional reach, treating the country as though it were another Venezuela that could be subdued through sanctions, threats, and limited military pressure.

Both explanations contain elements of truth. Neither, however, provides the deeper, less defensive, and more historically grounded understanding required to explain the scale of the present American failure.

John J. Mearsheimer, the prominent American political scientist and international relations scholar, has been among the boldest critics of the US war.

“Trump is trapped and has no way out,” Mearsheimer said on July 15, reiterating an argument he had advanced repeatedly since the beginning of the war. “All of this is to say that the decision to attack Iran on 28 February 2026 is one of the greatest blunders in the history of US foreign policy,” he added.

Mearsheimer, like Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Ritter, and other critical American voices, often—and understandably—analyzes these “great blunders” from a US-centered perspective. For millions of people in the Middle East, however, this collective analysis is not an intellectual or strategic exercise. It describes their everyday reality. They have lived through these catastrophic miscalculations and paid the human cost of US intransigence, militarism, and political failure.

The history of US foreign policy in the Middle East offers countless examples of this destructive pattern. Washington’s support for Israel—the region’s greatest destabilizing force—remains the most enduring example.

Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and other peoples of the region require no new strategic framework to reach a conclusion similar to Mearsheimer’s. They have experienced the consequences of US power directly: wars, invasions, occupations, sanctions, political interference, and unconditional support for Israel.

The United States also established a disastrous record through its invasion and occupation of Iraq. It succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, but failed catastrophically to govern the country, stabilize it, or restructure the Middle East according to the "vision" it had proclaimed.

The outcome was not a new American order, but the devastation of Iraq, prolonged instability, and the rise of political forces Washington had neither anticipated nor controlled.

Washington’s Western allies were also drawn into what became known as the Iraq quagmire, paying considerable political, military and financial costs for a war whose premises proved false and whose consequences remain unresolved.

Naturally, those former partners have little appetite for participating in a much larger and potentially more destructive war against Iran for an indefinite period—particularly when the crisis is being managed by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two deeply unpopular, impulsive, and widely distrusted leaders.

But the Middle East has changed. Regional states now possess greater political agency, more diversified alliances, and far more at stake than they did in 2003. They are no longer operating within a regional order in which Washington represents the only meaningful center of global power.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Egypt provides one of numerous examples. “We must uphold the principle that the people of the Middle East are the masters of their own affairs,” Xi said during his September 2 meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He also urged countries to oppose “external interference” and strengthen regional dialogue on peace and security.

Like Egypt, other regional powers are similarly diversifying their partnerships rather than relying exclusively on Washington.

Key Middle Eastern leaders understand that a prolonged war against Iran would not remain confined to Iran. It could destabilize the entire region, devastate economies and infrastructure, threaten vital energy routes and generate interconnected wars whose consequences could endure for decades.

This brings us to Israel. Historically the cornerstone of US strategy in the region, Israel is itself considerably weaker. It is militarily overstretched, politically fragmented, socially divided, and unable to decisively conclude any of the wars it has opened, despite Netanyahu’s repeated declarations of victory.

Washington’s present predicament, therefore, cannot be explained solely through depleted arsenals, poor military planning, Trump’s impulsiveness, or Netanyahu’s manipulation. Nor can it be understood simply as the result of underestimating Iran.

The deeper failure lies in Washington’s attempt to impose an outdated model of regional domination on a Middle East—and a world—that has fundamentally changed.

"The well-prepared heart has hope during adversity and fear during prosperity.”—Erica McAlpine

Twenty-five years, and the day keeps getting bigger instead of smaller. Three thousand dead in a single morning, then some multiple of that across the wars launched in its wake, then a shifting count out of Gaza that outpaces anyone’s will to keep totaling it. I did not expect grief to go on collecting interest this long. I did not expect to still be bitter, on a date this rehearsed, in a country this practiced at looking away.

I have written some version of this before. On some earlier September, I posted this: “#NeverForget is bad spiritual advice. Especially, when one has exacted revenge that far exceeds initial loss. To spell it out, honor your dead but remember, too, the 100,000+ Iraqi civilian noncombatants murdered in a vengeful, unjust ‘war.’ It is unseemly to keep one’s wounds open, while downplaying those of others that we’ve inflicted. There is wisdom, humility, and self preservation in honoring one’s pain & setting it aside, to Live.” Under it, I’d put a line from Friedrich Nietzsche, “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all"; another, unattributed, “If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury, but if you injure him you will always remember"; and closed with Kahlil Gibran: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?”

This is not the only year I have said some version of it. Social media keeps a ledger I never asked for: one friend calling it the voice of reason, another admitting he’d learned the hard way that making this case got him nowhere with people he knew, a third telling me the 9/11 Memorial & Museum has a final section on the wars that followed, built into the same ground as the names of the dead. “We can always do better,” I wrote back to that last one, which was as much comfort as I had that day.

Then there is the exchange that still says more than anything I could add to it. A commenter, spoiling for a fight, wrote that we were lucky the whole Middle East hadn’t been leveled. “You’re a funny guy,” I wrote back, “and I’m too fond of you to take seriously your outrageous comment,” and sent him “a great big, virtual hug, until I can give you one in person.” Another commenter played along just long enough to ask what exactly had been won. Afghans and Iraqis, he answered himself: more Americans dead in the war on terror than in the towers, “them” and “us” collapsing into the same casualty list. “Yes,” I wrote back, “it’s always civilian casualties,” which is the whole essay in four words, if I am honest, and everything since has only been me finding 400 more ways to say it.

I could republish that old post today, and only the arithmetic would need updating. Ammiel Alcalay, writing this same week, names the habit outright: Keep what happens abroad in one room and what happens at home in another, so neither has to answer to the other. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the toll of these 25 years, direct and indirect combined, at 4.5 to 4.7 million and still counting. Alcalay draws the line forward, to what he calls, correctly, “the genocide in Gaza and seizure of land in Palestine.” The number I gave my friends, a decade or more ago, was 100,000. It never got revised. It got buried under the next one, and the next. There is no exchange rate for human suffering. The afterlife of September 11 was not measured abroad alone. At home, Muslims remained available for suspicion: The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,683 complaints in 2025, its highest annual total. This week, Rudy Giuliani went on television to say the city’s current mayor, its first Muslim one, shouldn’t attend Friday’s ceremony, then said Muslims are taught from childhood that they want to “dominate us.” Twenty-five years on, and grief still comes with a loyalty test.

What has changed since is the camouflage. Richard Nixon needed Henry Kissinger to bomb Cambodia in the dark. Barack Obama needed kill lists and a “disposition matrix,” a targeting database mapping how terrorism suspects would be captured or killed, dressed up in the calm language of due process. Donald Trump needs none of it. He says the part that used to need a translator, calls it winning, and the bombs land anyway, in the same places they always did. He is the pattern finally caught without its coat on, a confession the country has been rehearsing since before I wrote that old post, only now said out loud.

It was a friend, in that same 2018 thread, who was already flagging the collusion with Saudi Arabia over Yemen: American weapons, sold for profit, into a war just as unjust as the ones carrying our own name. I hadn’t known. I said so. Eight years on, Britain has announced plans, not yet law, to ban imports from illegal settlements and create powers to sanction companies that support, facilitate, or profit from them. It is a small thing. It is also an acknowledgment, however belated, that complicity can carry a price.

I wrote, once, that there is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live, that what is spiritually true for us as individuals is also true for us as nations. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it, or if honoring the dead, now, requires that we stop setting anything aside at all.

"The book isn't just a celebration of the past, but an encouragement to see what we can learn to help us today" (Scipes, p. ix, 2026).

Dr. Kim Scipes’ Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building A Progressive Labor Movement is a commemoration of one union’s distinctive approach to social justice unionism that should change the way that we think about organizing not only in the workplace, but in any response to important issues around the world.

Though centered in labor activism from a sociological lens, the findings and framing of Scipes’ work produce an analysis critical for Northwest Indiana and Chicago historians, labor unions, activists, and all individuals pondering the steps to achieving a better world. These findings reach far beyond one workplace, one academic discipline, or one social cause.

To reinforce the diverse application of this work, I approach this review from a communication studies background.

What happens if we all looked outside of ourselves to care, regardless of political party, race, age, gender, or occupation, about intentionally seeking positive change that benefits the well-being of all?

In the book, Scipes reveals two opposing conceptualizations of trade unionism by comparing the organization of two Chicago unions in the steel and meatpacking industries during critical decades of the 20th century.

From the beginning of the book, it is clear that this study was built on a solid foundation. The selection of 1933-55 for this study was important, as this period frames a time of "insurgent trade unionism that emerged from below," with 1933 marking the "beginning of modern American trade unionism" (Scipes, p. 4, 2026).

Further, considering the 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day, the establishment of International Workers Day, the headquarters of the Eugene Debs' led American Railway Union, the site of the Industrial Workers of the World, and more, Chicago was an extremely relevant site for this study (Scipes, p.5, 2026).

From this foundation, three significant claims emerge.

The first is a claim that marks the heart of this book. Upon expansive archival research; the design of a measurement scale; and the synthesis of labor organization records, theory, union case studies, and more, Scipes uncovers that despite being two worker’s unions in the same period of time, comprised of individuals with comparable educational and cultural backgrounds in the same city, faced with comparable issues, both the steelworkers’ (Steel Workers Organizing Committee: SWOC and United Steelworkers of American: USWA) and packinghouse workers’ (Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee: PWOC and United Packinghouse Workers of America: UPWA) unions had two different approaches to addressing racism, white supremacy, and in turn, unionization. Understanding the unions’ navigation of racism is crucial when it is considered how much worker control prevented union organization, as workplace leadership often divided workers by racial group and sparked competition that kept them from realizing efforts that could benefit their collective well-being (Scipes, p. 14-15, 2026).

The steelworkers enacted a form of “business unionism,” while the packinghouse workers took a “social justice unionism” approach.

In the context of this study, the steelworkers' business unionism characteristically refused to address divisions of race among workforces and “took a limited approach to trade unionism, keeping the union divided and weak” (Scipes, p. 190, 2026).

This form of unionism separated members' working lives from their lives outside the plant, leading “to terrible consequence when the regional steel industry collapsed in the 70s and 80s and thousands lost jobs and pensions” (Scipes, p.190, 2026).

Conversely, the meatpackers’ use of social justice unionism brought forth a form of economic trade unionism that “understands the necessity of addressing the needs and concerns of all of its members, in the union, workplace, and the community with mutual efforts to improve the well-being of all” (Scipes, p.197, 2026).

Scipes’ second key claim builds on the first in important ways. Scipes demonstrates the increased power of social justice unionism over business unionism for the well-being of the workers and world positive social change.

To illustrate this, he shared powerful accounts of the way that both unions responded to racial housing discrimination in the community.

The USWA approached racism and discrimination in completely different ways compared with the packinghouse workers. Local steelworker organizations "were not generally interested in becoming involved in community affairs to any great extent" (Scipes, p.179, 2026).

They did not involve themselves in efforts to address racial oppression in the community or housing discrimination. In fact, there is even evidence to suggest the steelworkers ignored the housing riots that took place from 1953-54 at the Trumbull Park Homes in Chicago.

But, the packinghouse workers' fight to "abolish racial terror and discrimination" in the wake of a housing crisis for Black workers was monumental.

Related to their efforts, Scipes cited a powerful quote from United Packinghouse Workers of America President Ralph Helstein: "it is not enough to eliminate discriminatory practices in the plant, but we also have to do it in the community, because you can't work with a man all day long... and then pick up where you left off the next day... it's essential to carry on this kind of activity in the communities in which you lived" (Scipes, p.177, 2026).

The PWOC made it possible for Black workers to walk freely and safely in the community: “Any public space which refused them service would be quickly put out of business by a boycott of the white union members” (Scipes p. 178, 2026). The UPWA efforts continued to accelerate through this period, even leading to the sponsorship of a 1949 conference on housing to address the public housing crisis. Though not a perfect union free of the marginalization of women (p.158), power emanated from the bottom up in the packinghouse workers’ union, enabling popular democracy (p. 192). At every turn, they directly confronted issues of racism and discrimination as conscious union and policy projects.

And importantly, these external efforts did not harm the internal professional well-being of these workers. When measured, Scipes found that “wages for meatpacking workers grew either at the same rate or at a faster rate than it did for steelworkers during the 1939-1958 period… the packinghouse workers did not suffer financially from the social justice unionism of the UPWA…" (Scipes, p. 200, 2026).

Expanding on the relevance of these findings for today’s society, Scipes’ third major claim of this work asserts that we have not had a labor movement since 1949 (p. x). Despite recent efforts to revive the trade union movement through the Chicago Teacher's Union, Starbucks, Amazon, and more (p. ix), Scipes argues that we have only had a trade union movement since 1949, as a trade union movement only looks out for the well-being of union members and a labor movement champions the well-being of all working people (p.x).

Scipes believes that we can revive the labor movement and unify workers. I believe that this book provides us with a road map to unifying all people.

Beyond from the systematic approach by which this study was conducted, my hope is inspired by two additional factors. The first is Scipes’ foundational credibility that informed the body of this work.

Scipes has been active for over 40 years in the labor movement and published more than 300 writings while traveling around the world throughout his life, working in fields in blue-, white-, and pink-collar jobs, working in the print trades, earning his PhD at 51, and teaching for more than 18 years with Purdue University Northwest.

He is still active in Northwest Indiana, Chicago, and the Calumet region today, reinforcing the relevance of the perspective of his research.

“He has seen a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and living conditions across the globe while studying labor practices and movements, from the streets of The Hague to villages in the Philippines,” (Purdue University Northwest, 2021), and cares about finding true understanding through his research process. Of this process, he has been quoted: [When I’m researching,] “I’m out with workers, at union offices, traveling by bus, boat, van. I’m out there integrating with the ordinary people” (Purdue University Northwest, 2021).

He furthered this sentiment with a nod to Alice Walker: “Activism is my rent for living on the planet” (Vasilko, 2022).

So, when Scipes affirms in his book that "with strong, resolute leadership... [workers] can be won to opposing white supremacy and racism... this is not theory, this is not ideology. It is shown to the practices of these labor organizations" (p. 181) I believe that the strength of his credibility is such that we can apply these findings beyond labor organizations.

Which leads me to the second factor of my hope: the currently unrealized positive persuasive power of these findings when applied to society as a whole. It is this part of my review where I can most strongly apply my own scholarly background.

From a communication lens, when I read this book, I was especially interested in the application of Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation (1968), social movement theory (Melucci 1989 and 1995), and the concept of the enthymeme (Brock, 2014).

To preface my application, the enthymeme is a persuasive rhetorical process employed to lead an audience to a desired meaning with intentional word choice by convincing an audience they are co-creators in the process. The phenomenon is imperative for successful collaboration for social change.

And the enthymeme is critical for the creation of meaning, as a proposed meaning has no power without mass consent (Brock, 2014). The enthymeme guides an audience toward the desired mass consent for new meaning, or change. It is important to note that guiding an audience toward mass consent is not inherently evil, it just depends on the speaker's intention. The enthymeme can be used for positive social change by guiding an audience to accept that climate change needs to be addressed, civil rights matter, violence is bad, etc. Most crucial to this study, the enthymeme is most powerful when the audience has common understandings of identity and meaning.

In 1974, French feminist theory argued that the stakes of feminist struggle against patriarchal-driven oppression and discrimination required an overthrow not to the patriarchal system, but to the system of power and the division itself (Vasilko, p. 16, 2023). Meaning that activists must look beyond individual differences and division and fight for the common good of all, leading to a positive, life-enhancing society to benefit all, much as the meatpackers realized in this study.

Lastly, Bitzer (1968) and Melucci (1989 and 1995) have shown us that a shared identity is imperative to keep the momentum of social change protected from co-optation if any exigence is to truly be addressed, which means that social change, overall, requires a shared identity (Vasilko, 2023).

When all of this is synthesized, this leads us back to Scipes for one of the most important theories of his career: polyconflictualism.

Scipes’ polyconflictualism explains the basis for why groups of people who share many comparable characteristics, exist in the same period, and face similar conditions respond to a situation in entirely different ways, just as the steelworkers and packinghouse workers responded completely different to white supremacy and racism. With this theory, he argues that belonging to comparable groups does not automatically guarantee that group members will respond the same way. Instead, group members must be aware of their individual agency and intentionally seek common ground to form collective identities strong enough to address social issues to enhance the well-being of all (Scipes 2025; Scipes 2026).

Recognizing a collective exigence and collective identity is key to positive social change.

Laying out his hopes for the future after his book, Scipes challenged: "What I'm talking about here is building a union pathway to support all who are willing to work to advance the standard of living and improve the social well-being of all... building grassroots power from the ground up in social justice unions controlled by their members... for the purpose of working together and improve conditions for all involved" (Scipes, p. 210-211, 2026).

To readers of this review, I ask an important question as AI impact, environmental destruction, and war accelerate: What happens if we all apply these findings more broadly, beyond labor organization? What happens if we all looked outside of ourselves to care, regardless of political party, race, age, gender, or occupation, about intentionally seeking positive change that benefits the well-being of all?

With strong organization and shared experiences, common threads could be recognized, allowing collective identity and impact to be maximized and a better world to be possible, even as our differences co-exist.

We all have more in common than we realize. It is time to celebrate this book and find ways to apply it to labor unions, organization for positive change, and our world today.

A new study by Pew Research finds that more than 4 in 10—more than 40%!—of Americans believe that Muslims are having a “negative impact on the US” and are “less patriotic” than other Americans. These numbers show more negative feelings toward Muslims than immediately after 9/11. Islamophobia is also higher than immediately after 9/11.

And yet, no massive terrorist attack like 9/11 or other similar negative impact by Muslims has occurred in the last 25 years. 9/11 is an unremembered event in the lives of over 100 million young Americans. So what is happening to increase negative views of Muslims in America?

First, those with negative views about Muslims are less likely to have ever met a Muslim. Their views, then, stem from social media, the news, and the many Islamophobic statements by governmental officials.

Second, American attitudes about Islam are being intentionally manipulated by a loose network of individuals and organizations, called “The Islamophobia Industry,” which seeks to disseminate disinformation about Muslims and Islam. The anti-“Ground Zero Mosque” appellation and campaign was engineered by this network. The introduction of the word “shariah” (which essentially just means “Islam”) as a scare word and specter was deliberately introduced by David Yerushalmi, who made a lot of money peddling his xenophobic views to state legislatures, telling them to implement “anti-shariah laws,” which promote the falsehood that Muslim Americans are incapable of complying with American laws.

These attitudes affect Americans. Islam is an American religion. And yet, Muslims experience the most discrimination of any religious group in the United States.

Third, this characterization of shariah, as well as other canards about Muslims, are parroted by governmental officials aiming to scare Americans into voting for them, Vice President JD Vance going so far as to say—on no evidence whatsoever—that Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is “very, very evil,” implying that Muslims are out to destroy other religious groups in America. Yet, the vast majority of Muslim Americans (the largest majority of any American group except for Jewish Americans) want to live in a country where no one is targeted for their religious beliefs.

These negative stereotypes and bogeyman threats belie reality. Polls have shown that Muslim Americans are more likely than other faith groups to reject attacks on civilians. Muslim American women are the second-most educated faith group in the US, ranking just below Jewish American women; Muslim American women have the most parity of income with Muslim American men, as well. Most Muslim Americans believe that homosexuality should be accepted by society (52% accepting to 33% opposed), more than Evangelical Christians (who number between 25% and 40% of all Americans) and Jehovah’s witnesses.

Professor Steven Fish at University of California Berkeley wondered whether the endlessly circulating stereotype that Muslims are more violent than others were true. If so, he thought, homicide rates in Muslim-majority countries should be higher. Right? So he conducted a massive empirical study and found that not only are homicide rates in Muslim-majority countries lower than in other countries, but the larger a Muslim community, the less homicide.

These attitudes affect Americans. Islam is an American religion. And yet, Muslims experience the most discrimination of any religious group in the United States.

Ironically, given all these scare tactics about Muslims taking over the United States, shariah itself requires Muslims to obey the law of the land in which they reside. This has been established in Islam for over 1,000 years. Muslims would violate shariah if they tried to impose shariah on Americans or in American governments. In fact, the Qur’an repeatedly prohibits conversion by force. How ridiculous, then, are our lawmakers for indulging in bigotry to say the opposite.

I grew up in California, answering questions on Islam and Muslims as far back as I can remember (the question of why I didn’t eat pepperoni pizza being the prevalent one when I was a child). I see absolutely no conflict between living as a practicing Muslim and being a patriotic American. After all, the basic tenets of Islam are belief in God, donation to charity, prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. Broadly speaking, pretty much the same as other American religions. Muslim Americans are pretty much the same as other Americans, as well.

I can still remember the smell. But I’m at a loss to accurately describe it to you. It wasn’t the unmistakable odor of death, although that must have been some tiny part of it. It wasn’t like burning tires or plastic or even metal. It was all that, but it was more.

In the quarter century since, I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never experienced anything like the smell near the rubble pile at Ground Zero in September 2001. The air was acrid and thick, a swirl of toxins and carcinogens made possible by turning two large, jet-fuel laden planes into cruise missiles and aiming them at gigantic office towers. As it burned, we all inhaled a haze of pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), and whatever else. It remains a part of us still.

The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.

Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump.

The so-called Pearl Harbor of the 21st century was no surprise. Long before President George W. Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a classified intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,” the Al Qaeda leader had been honest about his plans. “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,” he announced in a 1998 TV interview, castigating the U.S. for stationing troops in the Middle East and its support of Israel. “The Western regimes and the government of the United States of America bear the blame for what might happen. If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests.”

When bin Laden made good on his threats, slaughtering thousands on 9/11, he knew it was bound to trigger a response. One possibility was a measured law-enforcement action that would end with arrests and legitimate legal proceedings. The other was a president standing on a rubble pile, vowing revenge, a never-ending fruitless war against a tactic (terror), a secret torture gulag, a forever prison, and a kangaroo court. One would be ruinous for bin Laden. The other, an answer to his prayers.

Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to attack the U.S. after it had elected a lightweight nepo-baby president and a power-mad vice president who had cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s criminal-packed White House. While he came to be an enemy of Donald Trump, it was Dick Cheney who paved the way for America’s current would-be tyrant, with the vice president’s relentless campaign to concentrate power in the White House, creating an imperial presidency predicated on the “unitary executive theory,” a misbegotten notion that the Constitution grants the president unrestrained authority over domestic and foreign policy, such as unilaterally removing government officials and waging wars.

In both style and substance, Cheney prefigured Trump. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Cheney went on TV to announce the government would now operate on the “dark side,” as he put it, claiming “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”

America has never emerged from those sinister shadows. Cheney was arguably the leading cheerleader for the ruinous war on terror, which began in Afghanistan, spread across the globe, and grinds on a year after his death; a prime architect of the disastrous Iraq War and the faulty, unverified, and cherry-picked intelligence that underpinned it; an enthusiastic supporter of torture, calling the waterboarding of detainees “a no-brainer”; a vocal supporter of domestic surveillance; a promoter of undemocratic, unprecedented, and unparalleled secrecy; and a belligerent bully.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a 2022 ad for his daughter, Liz, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term. He might have been right — and he was certainly responsible. Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.

After weakening American democracy during his first term, Trump launched a full-scale assault — literally — on it. Despite knowing he lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, worked to subvert vote counts and undermine the certification process, pressured state officials to “find” votes, and orchestrated what special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on it called an “unprecedented criminal effort” to remain in power.

Bin Laden was never able to raise an army in America, lead an insurrection, and launch an attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The plane meant to carry out that attack on 9/11 crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) But on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s encouragement, his supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the “domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and issues relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power” concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It found that Trump, for hours, deliberately failed to act to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Smith said that the evidence gathered by his team “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” had the American people not reelected Trump.

Bin Laden would have no doubt cheered the attack on the Capitol and endorsed Trump’s reelection run, had he been alive. And he would not have been disappointed by the results. Upon returning to office, Trump unleashed a coordinated assault on American democracy, undermining the rule of law and fundamental freedoms by pardoning and rewarding insurrectionists; weaponizing the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, and the military against American citizens; firing government watchdogs; attacking the free press; engaging in naked and unrestrained corruption, such as violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause; engaging in due process violations, immigration lawlessness, and unconstitutional executive power-grabs; and launching a disastrous war with Iran and a murder-spree on the high seas amid a host of other foreign and domestic policy fiascos.

Since January 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 separate authoritarian acts by the Trump administration including around 1,050 undermining democracy, more than 940 suppressing dissent, over 650 aggressive or destabilizing foreign policy efforts, about 600 acts weakening civil rights, around 500 centered around controlling information or spreading misinformation, and more than 320 acts of corruption, according to the Trump Action Tracker, which documents acts and statements of Trump and his administration that echo those of other authoritarian regimes.

A startling global analysis also discovered “autocratization” in America rose at a speed “unprecedented in modern history” last year. Under Trump, the researchers found, the U.S. has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy after the largest one-year drop in democratic principles in American history. This took the country back to 1965 levels, when Jim Crow racial discrimination in voting — including violence and intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests — were still commonplace. These results are bolstered by research by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which finds that the corrupting of elections, quashing of dissent, spreading of disinformation, and aggrandizing of executive power are all “escalating” in Trump’s second term, while both authoritarian actions and the politicizing of independent institutions in the U.S. are “rapidly escalating.”

In 2001, the U.S. government recorded a budget surplus of about $128 billion and was projected to pay off the national debt by 2009. But after miring the U.S. in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, bin Laden looked upon the fruits of 9/11 and took a victory lap in 2004, bragging that his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” had helped to push the U.S. deficit to “more than a trillion dollars.”

“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note,” bin Laden announced.

He could not have imagined just how closely and how long America’s leaders would hue to his plan, conducting commando raids, drone strikes, armed interventions, and outright wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor could Al Qaeda’s leader have foreseen how deep into financial ruin the U.S. would sink as a result.

Bin Laden’s 2004 trillion-dollar boast wasn’t actually accurate. The U.S. federal deficit was just $413 billion in 2004. But it wouldn’t remain that low for long. America’s post-9/11 wars have now cost or caused long-term obligations to taxpayers of an astonishing $8 trillion, according to a 2021 analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

And Trump has continued to expand America’s ruinous foreign interventions from Ecuador to Iran. An Intercept analysis found that Trump has presided over more than 20 armed conflicts and wars during his two terms in office. And the costs continue adding up. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told The Intercept that the excessive expenses of the Iran war, alone, would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. And Trump is also currently pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year.

In case you hadn’t guessed, the pre-9/11 projection that the national debt would be paid off in 2009 never came to pass. Instead, the Bush and Trump presidencies were marked by massive tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, depriving the Treasury of almost $10 trillion in expected revenue.

So after bin Laden’s attack; the forever wars of Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden; and Trump’s contributions in disastrous conflicts and gross fiscal mismanagement, the $5.8 trillion national debt of 2001 has now ballooned by 590 percent to a staggering $40 trillion. That’s $1 million, 40 million times over.

About 50 percent of the debt has been accrued since Donald Trump was first elected. This week, Trump pledged to pay every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in November, which would cost more than $1 trillion. And that $128 billion budget surplus from 2001? It’s been replaced by a projected federal budget deficit for this fiscal year of $2.1 trillion. This debt and deficit spiral is also occurring during a time of near-full employment when the government’s finances should actually be improving.

If bin Laden made it to paradise, as was his hope, he is no doubt smiling as the Trump administration dismisses the ballooning debt and the president peddles nonsensical claims that “growth will take care of that very easily.” The U.S. will actually spend more than $1 trillion this year just paying interest on the debt. The Peterson Foundation projects that total interest payments will more than double over the next decade — and that may be an undercount. And even if the debt remained steady at $40 trillion and the United States were to pay down $1 million per day, it would take almost 110,000 years to pay it off.

All this debt is also likely to keep interest rates high, raising the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and small business credit, hurting ordinary Americans. High deficits and debt — particularly if coupled with high inflation or interest rates — make it harder for the government to respond to crises like a recession, depression, pandemic, or other emergency.

Then there is the weakened safety net that comes from deficits and debt. Bin Laden doesn’t need to worry about his golden years, and Trump is living them right now at taxpayer expense. But in 2032 — just six years from now — the Social Security trust fund is on track to go bust, to take one example of shortfalls on the horizon. By law, when the trust fund hits zero, all retirees’ benefits are mandated to drop by more than 20 percent.

Looking back, I’ve come to think of the acrid odor of the collapsed Twin Towers as more than a mélange of burning paper, glass, concrete, and around 70 carcinogens. It was, instead, a harbinger of something even darker than the nearly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 — a long road of death and destruction stretching out into the future, beyond the vanishing point.

Even Bin Laden couldn’t have imagined long-term lethality of his attacks. Close to 9,700 first responders, survivors, and those who helped to clear nearly 1.8 million tons of debris at the World Trade Center have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. And more than 57,000 first responders and others have been diagnosed with 9/11-linked cancers. Around 155,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides care and health monitoring to people who were exposed to toxic air after 9/11. And an estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, the risk of physical injury, and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The vengeful war on the world that bin Laden managed to provoke has proved even more devastating than the effects of the toxic stew we inhaled near Ground Zero. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere between 2001 and 2023, alone. Another 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the toll to at least 4.5 million dead and counting. This quarter century of carnage and all that it unleashed has left the U.S. hollowed out and rotting from within; a deterioration in every conceivable measure from economics to democratic ideals to the spiritual health of the nation.

Bin Laden’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was designed to sink America’s economy — and it continues to work to great effect. And by ushering in the presidencies of Donald Trump, bin Laden left the United States morally bankrupt, too. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the country is a pale shadow of the superpower that emerged from World War II having been laid low not by the Soviet Union — the nuclear-armed power it long considered an existential threat — but by two trust-fund terrorists: the scions of a Saudi construction empire, and an outer borough New York City real estate developer, respectively.

“The wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House,” bin Laden said in 2004, referring to Bush. He likely couldn’t have imagined America choosing an even more inveterate liar, an even greater intellectual lightweight, and an even more ruinous president. A quarter century after 9/11, it’s clear that bin Laden won. But the victory was not his alone. And, in the end, his role in it turned out to be vanishingly small. Bush, Cheney, Obama, and Biden, as well as a raft of politicians, government functionaries, and all who went along with the madness unleashed by the attacks, played key roles in helping hobble the U.S. in the 25 years since the September 11. But it’s been Trump, more than anyone else, who has made bin Laden’s lofty 9/11 dreams America’s never-ending nightmare.

In the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, I joined Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, the Institute for Policy Studies, YES! Magazine, and hundreds of other signatories in calling for “Justice, Not Vengeance.” We argued that the United States should find and prosecute those responsible for 9-11 rather than launch wars against countries that had not attacked us.

We were right to worry: The wars that followed cost trillions of dollars and countless lives, and left the country less secure, not more.

Twenty-five years later, Congress faces a similar test—and a similar warning sign. The United States and Israel are at war with Iran, a war of choice that could prove even more disastrous than the decision to go to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.

While responsibility for the war lies with the Trump administration, Congress has a say in what happens next—if it chooses to act.

When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.

Likewise, Congress can rein in historic levels of military spending and reject proposals to spend billions of dollars on a new generation of nuclear weapons, funded by taxpayers and historic levels of debt. And it can say no to the rapid development and deployment of AI weapons, an especially important step at a time when AI agents are already going rogue.

All it would take is 41 US senators. That is the number needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities, with a proposed price tag of $1.5 trillion.

The NDAA passed the US House of Representatives on July 22, but it has stalled in the US Senate.

Under Senate rules, 41 senators can filibuster to stop a bill from moving to the Senate floor for a vote, and the Democratic caucus has 47 senators. So, even in the minority, the Democratic senators—along with any Republicans who oppose “forever wars”—could prevent the NDAA from advancing without modifications.

When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.

What specifically could 41 Senators do?

• Rein in the spending: Proposed defense spending is at the highest level in real dollars since World War II—a 38% increase over last year’s spending, funded by taxpayers and a national debt that has reached 124% the size of the entire US economy. This spending is unsustainable and unaccountable; the Pentagon just failed its eighth consecutive audit. Congress should restore the inspector general positions the Trump administration eliminated.
• End the war in Iran: Require a War Powers Act resolution, with appropriate guardrails to set the terms for an end to the war. Set limits on the use of taxpayer funds for the conflict.
• Reset our relationship with Israel. Cut military aid to Israel until it withdraws from Gaza, ends the spreading of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and stops threatening its neighbors with unilateral military action. Strip Section 1217 from the Senate version of the NDAA, which would create a US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative merging research, development, and deployment of military technologies with the Israeli military.
• Work for nuclear safeguards, not new weapons systems: End authorization for a new generation of nuclear weapons that includes the development of intermediate-range systems designed for use in regional conflicts. This risks turning nuclear weapons from a deterrent into a first-strike weapon of aggression. Require robust new arms-control talks aimed at reducing nuclear arsenals; none currently exist since the New START treaty expired on February 5, 2026, leaving the US and Russia with no binding limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals for the first time in decades.
• Stop illegal and ill-advised uses of the US military: Enforce the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on using US troops on American soil. End the extrajudicial killings of unidentified people on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, now numbering 227. Prohibit using the military to threaten Canada, Greenland, and other allies as part of efforts to seize their territory.
• Put guardrails on AI-controlled weapons: This field is moving faster than Congress can track, and the NDAA is already the battleground. The House and Senate versions each include provisions on autonomous weapons and human oversight. But the same bill also directs the Pentagon to build a department-wide system for deploying agentic AI at speed and scale, pushing adoption forward even as the human-oversight rules meant to contain it remain unsettled. Congress should preserve and strengthen the human-oversight provisions, not let them get traded away in conference, and should require that no lethal-force decision—including nuclear launch decisions—is ever delegated to an algorithm. Three in four Americans agree: Decisions to kill should be made by people, not machines.

In January of this year, President Donald Trump called for raising the US spending on defense to $1.5 trillion, but has been uncharacteristically quiet about this eye-watering level of defense spending ever since.

Perhaps his silence is because he can see how deeply unpopular the US-Israel war against Iran has turned out to be. Sixty eight percent of Americans say it is not worth the costs, according to a July survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a level of unpopularity that parallels Americans’ views of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And there is no end in sight. In spite of President Trump’s bragging about an imminent US victory in Iran, The Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has extended Middle East deployments into 2027.

The US already spends more on the military than any other country—more than twice as much as China and five times as much as Russia. The enormous sums devoted to military spending, and the taxes and debt used to finance them, make the priorities of the American people more difficult to achieve.

Instead of ramping up dangerous conflicts and new weapons systems, we should fund an economy that meets the needs of our families, deploys solutions to the climate crisis, and makes healthcare and housing accessible to everyone. Instead of mounting debt, we should invest in prosperity for future generations.

Since the start of its second term, the Trump administration has repeatedly defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings and killings, smeared their victims as “domestic terrorists,” racially profiled people with the Supreme Court’s consent, expanded their biometric and social media surveillance capabilities while also maintaining over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists. It is effectively dismantling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, tried—and is trying again—to repeal birthright citizenship, paused all immigrant visa applications, and is aggressively pursuing politically motivated visa revocations and denaturalizations, among other extreme measures.

All of this is reflective of the rampant and unfettered xenophobia, Islamophobia, and white nationalism that define the Trump administration. Yet, at same time, we must also acknowledge that Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) violence and Trump’s assault on the immigration system is an extension of the national security framework built following the 9/11 attacks.

ICE was established in March 2003 as part of “the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense.” A key rationale for including ICE within the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US legally via temporary visas. To keep “the homeland” safe, a more aggressive approach to immigration was thus deemed necessary. As Attorney General John Ashcroft remarked in 2002:

In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values, and kill innocent people.

Going forward, immigration enforcement and control agencies would police and surveil every immigrant as if they were potential terrorists. As the Department of Justice (DOJ) emphasized in 2004, “The primary mission of ICE is to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorists and criminal activities.”

In the name of counterterrorism, the DOJ launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) in 2002. Under this program, male foreign nationals aged 16 or older from 25 countries—24 of which were majority-Arab and Muslim (the other was North Korea)—were fingerprinted, interviewed, photographed, and required to check in with immigration officials at regular intervals. These regulations applied to both new arrivals and individuals who were already in the US on temporary visas. NSEERS was suspended in 2011 and finally terminated in 2016 by President Barack Obama—it led to no terrorism prosecutions.

Despite its failure, NSEERS, alongside other measures and decades of Republican fearmongering, functioned to normalize the link between immigration enforcement, border control, and counterterrorism. In doing so, it amplified the alleged danger posed by “radical Islamic terrorism,” thus setting the stage for the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on Muslims. This, in turn, served to distract from the far greater and actual domestic terrorism threat posed by white supremacist groups. As a report by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs noted, “In 2019, DHS publicly acknowledged white supremacist violence as a major threat to national security for the first time, despite being aware internally of the severity of the threat for 10 years.”

In our desperation to prevent another 9/11, we have spent billions building our own homegrown domestic terrorism threat.

The goal of combating terrorism also promoted a demand for more biometric technologies. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) noted in 2001, the reason why “a large group of coordinated terrorists [could] operate for more than a year in the United States without being detected” is because “we could not identify them. We did not know they were here. Only if we can identify terrorists planning attacks on the United States do we have a chance of stopping them. And the biometrics technology, the state-of-the-art technology of today, really offers us a very new way to identify potential terrorists.”

To that end, DHS established the US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program in 2003 to collect biometric identifiers from foreign nationals and build an electronic check in-check out system. As Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security at DHS Asa Hutchinson remarked in 2003, “initially, fingerprints and photographs” will be used; however, “as the technology is perfected, additional forms such as facial recognition or iris scans may be used as well.”

Fast forward two decades and now, ICE agents are currently deploying facial recognition software such as Mobile Fortify. In May 2026, ICE awarded a $25.1 million contract to BI2 Technologies to acquire over 1,500 wireless, handheld iris-scanning devices. In its fiscal year 2027 budget request, DHS allocated $7.5 million to develop face-scanning “smart glasses” that would grant agents real-time access to biometric databases.

Now, importantly, none of this should be taken to mean that the pre-9/11 landscape was entirely welcoming to immigrants. The “browning of America” discourse depicted—and continues to depict—immigrants as an existential threat to the nation. Meanwhile immigration policies like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 expanded the number of deportable offenses while also introducing expedited removal processes that allowed immigration officers to deport people without a formal hearing.

And yet, there were a few rays of hope. There was broad support for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, with a Senate hearing scheduled for September 12, 2001. On September 6, 2001, the US and Mexico announced they had reached an agreement on a framework for border and immigration reform that included “respecting the human dignity of all migrants, regardless of their status; recognizing the contribution migrants make to enriching both societies.” At the time, both President George W. Bush and President Vincente Fox “agreed that US-Mexican relations have entered their most promising moment in history.” Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed.

For 25 years, America has treated immigration enforcement as a form of counterterrorism. Yet, instead of making us safer, it has given rise to an increasingly militarized agency that, in the name of protecting “the homeland,” uses its vast surveillance network and policing powers to target and kill innocent people. In our desperation to prevent another 9/11, we have spent billions building our own homegrown domestic terrorism threat.

After 25 years, we must finally recognize that DHS and ICE were never the solution. If we truly wish to make America safer and greater, we must choose to forge a new path—to work toward a world without war, resentment, and violence.

Few who pay their respects today in the hallowed plaza where the Twin Towers once stood will be aware that the September 11 memorial echoes a 1987 Holocaust “counter-memorial” in Kassel, Germany. Like our memorial, the German monument consists of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows.

But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly different.

We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted on an innocent nation, Iraq.

What We Can Learn From Kassel’s Holocaust Counter-Memorial

In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a 40-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.

The Aschrott Fountain (1908–1939) is shown.

Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”

The Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Eistreter, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The September 11 memorial, which is called Reflecting Absence, evokes the missing Twin Towers by revealing their empty foundations. Hoheisel’s earlier Kassel counter-monument is, similarly, an emptiness in the shape of the missing original. “The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose darkness water runs down,” Hoheisel says.

“The sunken fountain is an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”

The underground portion of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)

Kassel’s Holocaust memorial is one of many throughout Germany, part of the way the Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This small, local memorial compels us to think of those who were murdered, but also of those who murdered and those who stood by.

The installation of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)

We reflect on the small viciousness of destroying “the Jew’s fountain,” and the monstrous barbarity to which this was prelude. The small monument conjures the sadness of loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.

Can America Accept Responsibility for the Mass Deaths Inflicted in the Name of Our “War on Terrorism”

The murder of thousands of Americans, the crime of September 11, 2001, spawned a larger tragedy for another people. Using the false suggestion of Iraq complicity as one of its pretexts, and treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism” as license for war on Baghdad as well as on Kabul, our government invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and occupied the country.

In reality, as Bush White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke confirmed, Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and our government knew it. “In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Clarke explained, “the president… instruct[ed] the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of Iraq... Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”

Knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with the al Qaeda attack did not matter because President George W. Bush’s government had begun targeting Iraq for invasion long before September 11. The very first meeting of Bush’s national security team on January 20, 2001 included a discussion of “military options” for Iraq and overthrowing its government.

It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.

As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to their government before the invasion, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush] policy” of going to war. “The case [for war] was thin.”

The American invasion, and the resistance and chaotic civil war triggered by the US occupation, likely took between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqi lives. It made refugees of millions more, and inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on a generation of Iraqi children.

It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.

To America’s 9/11 memorial we should add a wall on which we engrave, in a necessarily small font, the names of however many can be identified of the million Iraqi men, women, and children slain in the wars and sectarian strife our invasion precipitated. And since President Donald Trump has ensnared our nation in another pointless war, another war of aggression based on the excuse of “terrorism,” a Middle East war he has no plan to end, we should inscribe as well the names of the Iranian civilians killed in Trump’s war. The 100 children slain at the beginning of the bombing campaign. The wedding guests bombed in a small Iran town last week. They deserve remembrance, too.

Of course, this is unthinkable and will never happen.

It would be “too political” to acknowledge any connection between the horrors we suffered and the horrors we inflicted. In fact, even the suggestion will be said to “disrespect” our honored dead—as though their memories could be further sullied than they already have been by the evil perpetrated in their names.

Nonetheless, the proposal may be useful. As Hoheisel says: “That’s how a counter-monument works. People get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the history begins to come out.” In America, such a provocation may be the only kind of counter-monument that is permitted.

I am such a caricature of a native New Yorker that my first date, at age of 12, was at the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I thought there was nothing more romantic than showing someone a full view of the place that was simultaneously my shtetl and the greatest city in the world. I said a shechechiyanu when we walked up to the glass, because the beauty of the moment called for a blessing.

Years later I was a freshman in college in September of 2001, and when I came home for a long weekend that October, the air across Manhattan still smelled unholy, like burning wires, melted concrete, and mass organic decay. There were an unspeakable number of lives, whole universes unto themselves, lost that day, and their memories being a blessing remains a cold comfort. For many of us in the aftermath of that terrible day, we watched the national conversation shift to be entirely about who we should be afraid of—and too often, the answer was some of our fellow Americans.

This year, Rosh Hashanah begins on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The convergence is an opportunity and a gift. Together, Jews in New York and around the country will experience several hours of extraordinary potency: one part of our hearts focused on the opening of the book of life, and the other on the day the towers fell, and everything that came after.

This is an opportunity to understand what Jewish tradition offers us, as well as what it demands.

The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.

Judaism teaches us that there is no pathway to atonement with God until you have first atoned with the people you harmed; the gateway to divine repair is closed until interpersonal repair is complete. Crucially, Jewish theology holds it as an impossibility rather than a preference: You cannot approach God while your neighbor still bears the wound you gave them.

There is no such thing as atonement without honest accounting. There is no repair without looking the harm in the eye.

This is the fundamental spiritual nature of the High Holidays. The convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look back at what we did in the aftermath. But we must also simultaneously account for the acute political crisis unfolding around us. The multiracial democracy that has kept Jews safer in this country than anywhere else in the history of the world is under attack.

A legal fact that must be part of our accounting: It was in the increased pressure to target American Muslim and American Arab communities that Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) was formed post-9/11. There is a direct line from that targeting in the early 2000s to ICE’s attacks these past years in places like Portland, Washington, DC and Minneapolis. Immigrants have been terrorized—surveilled and made to fear their own government when leaving their homes. Immigrants and innocent bystanders alike have been shot and killed, and families have yet again lost loved ones to both violence and detention. The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.

Twenty-five years ago we decided it was an acceptable trade-off for our safety to treat Muslim- and Arab-American men as suspects first and neighbors second. Indefinite detention, the erosion of due process, and the normalization of disappearing people were tested on them. Now, twenty-five years later, we are watching those same frameworks on steroids

If Jews, of all people, cannot recognize the peril here, then we are truly lost.

To be clear, some Jews spoke up in the fall of 2001. They joined the Jewish prophetic tradition of decrying injustice and protested the attack on civil liberties for Muslim- and Arab Americans. But most of us did not.

As Jews, we understand what it means to feel afraid. Antisemitism is a real threat to our safety, bigotry that manifests as real violence—in our places of worship, our neighborhoods, and in halls of power. Our immigrant neighbors, our American Muslim and American Arab neighbors, are not our enemy and we must not be silent when they are targeted in the name of our safety as Jews or Americans.

Those in power right now who are using their power to target so-called outsiders need our support to enact their agenda—to create a country only of people who look and think exactly like them. An agenda where white Christian nationalism is the norm, and where it’s become acceptable to use violence and force to keep the rest of us in line.

This is where our tradition meets us with exquisite moral clarity. Where we must account for what we did—or in this case did not—do. The Talmud teaches that someone who can protest the wrongs of their household, their city, their country, their world and does not is held responsible for those wrongs. English unhelpfully softens the words that matter here. What we translate as "protest"—limchot—really means rebuke or forceful confrontation; the Talmud is not asking for polite dissent. And what we translate as "held responsible"—nitpas—comes from a root meaning to physically grab, to catch, to seize. The sin snags you. It wraps itself around you until the injustice is indisputably as much yours as anyone else's.

This is the warning, and this is the theology of the season. We cannot atone for what we refuse to name. You cannot get right with God while you are still refusing to get right with your neighbor. And you cannot get right with your neighbor while you are still pretending you did not participate in the harm.

We must not treat the 25th anniversary of September 11 and the beginning of Rosh Hashanah as separate events. Instead, we should welcome this invitation to stand in our fear, and our pain, and our integrity, and face what we did. Only then can we truly move into a different world. Our spiritual health and the health of our democracy are both depending on it.

On September 11, 2001, the world watched as the World Trade Center, the twin towers that represented US global dominance, were struck by hijacked US commercial jetliners and came crashing to the ground. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, from high-powered executive to clerical workers and immigrant kitchen workers. The hijackers were Middle Eastern men, primarily from Saudi Arabia.

Twenty-five years later, many questions remain about how the US military and security establishment could have allowed this to happen. Hardly anybody believes the official 9/11 story, which raises more questions than it answers, and there are many competing theories about who was behind this tragedy. Was this an incredible US security lapse or a highly coordinated false flag? Whatever the case, the neocons in George W. Bush’s administration immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” and put into motion their longstanding designs to conquer seven Muslim countries in the Middle East (as revealed by General Wesley Clark)—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Over the last 25 years, the US has initiated wars against all of these countries, as well as Afghanistan.

US administrations under Presidents George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (again) are responsible for creating a hell on Earth throughout the Middle East, resulting in millions of deaths and millions more homeless refugees. Thousands of US soldiers also died in Iraq and Afghanistan, any thousands more carry the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds to this day.

These nations may never fully recover, but Iran still stands. It may be the only Middle Eastern country still strong enough to resist domination by Israel, the US, and the former European colonial powers. That is why it is being frantically targeted by militarists in Israel and the US And that is why the US peace movement must do all we can to end the escalating US on Iran.

Who Are the Real Terrorists?

Under the slogan of “the war on terror,” the US government has carried out an increasing campaign of terror worldwide and against its own people. Torture has been normalized as represented by the extralegal Guantánamo torture prison on occupied Cuban land. The US and NATO provoked Russia into a catastrophic war in Ukraine which they continue to fuel with billions of dollars, arms, and military advisers. Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have enabled an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In January of this year, the US made a brazen attack on Venezuela, kidnapped its president and first lady, and are holding the Venezuelan government hostage while they steal Venezuelan oil. The US has blocked all oil shipments to Cuba, greatly exacerbating the damage done by the 64-year-old US blockade of Cuba, even as they threaten to invade. President Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth post “snuff videos” of their blatantly illegal bombing of boats in South American waters, where they have murdered hundreds of fisherman and alleged “narco-terrorists” without any evidence or judicial proceeding.

Trump’s War of Terror Comes Home

The stepped-up US aggression abroad is now being mirrored by state-sponsored terror in these United States. Armed gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely carry out racist attacks on immigrant communities and people of color, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. The mass incarceration of Black men is now matched by mass incarceration of brown men, women, and children in for-profit prisons, where abusive conditions have led to many deaths. White supremacism is out in the open as cruel fascist practices are being normalized. US peace activists and immigrant rights activists are being labeled as terrorists and prosecuted as terrorists for nonviolent resistance to the terror of the state.

Even as the US war on Iran continues and escalates, the Trump administration and Republican Party are openly seeking to undermine the midterm US elections by blatant last-minute gerrymandering of congressional districts, by trying to prevent mail-in voting, by reducing the number of polling places, by threatening to deploy intimidating ICE agents at polling places and even “joking” about canceling the elections altogether. Veterans For Peace has joined with other veterans’ groups and military families in the Veteran Against Fascism coalition to do all we can to defend the elections, for example by providing safe accompaniment to the polls.

The Terror of Nuclear War

Adding to the atmosphere of global terror is the ever-growing threat of nuclear war. Multiple sources have confirmed that the Trump administration has been discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war on Iran. Pentagon war-gaming of the US use of tactical nuclear weapons has consistently resulted in global nuclear war that leads to a nuclear winter in which billions of people would starve to death—those that survived the initial nuclear blasts and radiation illnesses. Seventy-five countries have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws possessing sharing, transporting, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has ditched the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia, while it carries out a series of wars that—if not checked—will inevitably lead to nuclear war. In fact, the US is actively planning to wage a war against China that would start with a US nuclear first strike on China. These policies only lead more countries to seek nuclear weapons, directly the opposite of the stated US policy and treaty obligations to seek nuclear non-proliferation and good-faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we must rededicate ourselves to resisting US wars at home and abroad.

Sometimes defeat can be clarifying.

Last week, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against the City of Jackson, Mississippi, in which the plaintiffs alleged that city officials knowingly allowed residents to drink water that was unsafe, tainted with lead and dangerous microbes.

The facts are not in dispute. “The City’s public-water system is fraught with vexing shortcomings,” the court found. “In recent years, it produced water containing lead, E. Coli, and other bacteria, allegedly violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA regulations, shut down and left residents without water for weeks, and necessitated the issuance of dozens of boil-water notices.”

Despite this, the court ruled that the lawsuit could not move forward. The problem for the plaintiffs, as the court found, was that these harms do not rise to the level of constitutional harm. “These deprivations, while grievous,” the court wrote, “do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.” And so the court rejected their arguments.

Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press.

What are we to make of a situation where a city can neglect its responsibilities, knowingly expose its residents to dangerous and life-altering contamination, and get away with it because, in the eyes of our legal system, “mismanagement of the public-water system resulting in Plaintiffs’ lead exposure is wholly different” from “sexual assault by a police officer,” “forced surgical examination,” “forced stomach pumping for evidence,” “and medicating prisoners against their will”?

Is it truly all that different? Just because the law excuses it, should we truly accept injustices that contaminate our bodies, make us sick, and cause lifelong learning disabilities in children?

We don’t have to–there is another option. We regroup. We reorganize. And we fight back. And in this case, we have a solution.

“It is undisputed that the [US] Constitution does not guarantee clean water,” the court wrote. That’s true. But it's not the whole story.

In Mississippi and in most states across our nation there is no constitutional right to clean water. But in three states, with dozens more on the same path, there is.

In Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth’s Constitution guarantees the “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment.” It adds: “Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come,” and requires all government officials–both state and local–to conserve and maintain the state's natural resources for the benefit of the people.

The State Constitution of Montana recognizes the inalienable right “to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities.”

And New York’s constitution declares, “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

It’s called a Green Amendment, and it is explicitly designed to protect people from harm like that suffered by the residents of Jackson, Mississippi.

Green Amendments are self-executing provisions added to a state constitution’s Bill of Rights or Declaration of Rights that recognize, protect, and guarantee the inalienable rights of all people to an environment of quality, including pure water, clean air, a safe climate, and healthy environments.

Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press. Green Amendments are clear in their protections, deriving their strength from plain and clear language, proven legal theories, and robust constitutional court precedent.

In short, Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.

When our rights to free speech or religion, to a free press or freedom of assembly are infringed upon by government action, we do not sit idly by and accept it. We rise up and demand our rights be protected, secure in the knowledge that we are backed by the clear and powerful language of our constitutions. Why should our right to pure water, clean air, or a healthy environment be any different? With Green Amendments they do not have to be.

Today pollution and environmental desecration are seen as entitlements of powerful industrial and political interests. Recall that in Sterling v. City of Jackson the court agreed that the city was poisoning its residents–but wouldn’t let the plaintiffs sue to rectify it with a remedy that protected all city residents from harm. Instead the court suggested that pursuit of tort claims, likely resulting in money damages for those who could document harm from the contaminated water, was good enough. That’s just the way it is, the court shrugged.

With Green Amendments, we transform this expectation. Our entitlement to a clean, safe, and healthy environment becomes the baseline government must responsibly protect.

Environmental issues are all around us these days: rising carbon emissions driving ever-hotter summers; PFAS, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals leaching into our drinking water; the hyperscaling of data centers slurping up ever growing amounts of land, water, and power.

With Green Amendments we may not always win when we experience environmental injustice, but they give us the constitutional ability to say, “No,” to push back, and to fight for our rights.

A Mississippi Green Amendment could have meant a very different outcome for communities living in the City of Jackson.

Editor’s Note: The following is the third excerpt from Nancy J. Altman’s latest book, The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge, 2026), now available for purchase wherever quality books are sold. Read the first and second excerpts published by Common Dreams here and here. As the United States continues to spend substantially more on health care than other wealthy nations but with poorer health outcomes, Altman’s book analyzes the dysfunction of the current system and sets forth the solution. “Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight,” she argues, “but it is a fight we can win.”

As policy-wise and popular as Improved Medicare for All is, the nation may appear to be as far away from enacting Improved Medicare for All as possible. During his first term, Trump did what he could to accelerate the privatization of Medicare. Unfortunately, his thumb on the scale in favor of privatized Medicare is not only back, but is on steroids.

Adding to the sense that the nation may be as far away from Improved Medicare for All as possible, the Republicans enacted legislation that is projected to cause 15 million people to lose their health insurance. Adding to the sense that we are nowhere near enacting Improved Medicare for All, the two prior presidential elections, in 2016 and 2020, saw Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), two leading champions of Medicare for All, lose in the primary to the more centrist candidate Hillary Clinton, in 2016, and Joe Biden, in 2020. Trump defeated Clinton and won a second term in 2024 against Vice President Kamala Harris. Though Harris did not mention the fact in her presidential campaign, she was an original cosponsor of the Sanders-authored Medicare for All Act.

Trump’s election to a second term, the Republican control of Congress (as these words are written), and a Supreme Court with two-thirds of the justices who are acting as Trump advocates rather than independent jurists appear to suggest that the nation is moving away from national health insurance. But it is crucial to recognize that today is only a snapshot in time. The pessimistic view that we are moving in the wrong direction sees only the waves at the surface. It misses the subterranean tremors underneath. The Republican cuts to health insurance are already putting a strain on rural and inner-city hospitals, as well as nursing homes. The nation is seeing hospitals close as a result of the enactment. Their closure, in turn, strains even those hospitals and nursing homes not directly affected by the cuts.

Improved Medicare for All won’t magically become a reality. It will take all of us who support it to fight for it, in small and large ways.

With the cost of health care rising and, with it, increased insecurity, a majority of the electorate are concluding that the nation is moving in the wrong direction. Perhaps even more significantly, it will become clearer and clearer that the current path is unsustainable.

Importantly, two action-forcing events requiring Congressional legislation are on the horizon. Social Security and Medicare Part A, by law, can only pay benefits if they have sufficient dedicated revenue to cover their costs. To avoid an automatic across-the-board reduction of around 20 percent of the monthly Social Security benefits received by more than 70 million beneficiaries, and to avoid hospitals no longer being reimbursed, Congress must act. However the precise dates shift over the next few years, Congress unquestionably will have to act in the next half decade or so, before the revenue is insufficient to continue to pay full benefits.

Those action-forcing events provide an opportunity. Because those action-forcing events will result in must-pass legislation, provisions that expand Medicare, as well as Social Security, could be included. To make that a reality, though, it is essential that those who support Improved Medicare for All are fully prepared.

Improved Medicare for All won’t magically become a reality. It will take all of us who support it to fight for it, in small and large ways. The wonderful news is that determined activists are currently working hard to make Improved Medicare for All the law of the land. Building a winning coalition and other steps are already underway.

It is imperative that a winning coalition is built strong enough to defeat those who will fight against Improved Medicare for All. Physicians have been extremely active politically since the United States first started to seriously debate universal health insurance at the start of the twentieth century. Initially, the American Medical Association, whose members in 1910 comprised more than half the doctors in the nation, endorsed the legislation under consideration. Individual doctors, however, strenuously objected and made those objections known through their state medical societies. As a result, in 1920, the AMA’s House of Delegates formally voted to reverse its support, and instead opposed the initiatives.

While the AMA has been a staunch opponent ever since, that may be changing. Though the AMA has opposed national health insurance for over a century, doctors have much to gain from it. The image of the self-employed family doctor who makes house calls is virtually an anachronistic image. Today, around four out of five physicians – 77.6 percent – work for corporations. Historically, doctors have expressed concern over government oversight and interference. More and more, though, physicians’ reality is that they now live under commercial insurance oversight and interference. Unlike elected officials for whom Americans vote and whose salaries are set and paid transparently from public funds, doctors have no say over who runs private insurance companies and how they are operated.

A survey of doctors conducted by the Chicago Medical Society found that 66.8 percent had favorable views of a single-payer system.

The doctors most active in support of Improved Medicare for All are the leaders and 25,000 members of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). They have provided a clear and steady voice on the issue since their founding in 1987. In part because of PNHP’s sustained effort, doctors seem to be moving toward support for Improved Medicare for All. A survey of doctors conducted by the Chicago Medical Society found that 66.8 percent had favorable views of a single-payer system. In fact, when asked to choose between Medicare for All and an improved Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare), the doctors chose Medicare for All by two to one!

The increasing support among doctors for Improved Medicare for All is likely in large part a response to how vexing and inadequate the current system is for all participants, including doctors. The increasing support for Improved Medicare for All may also reflect a more diversified pool of physicians. When Medicare was enacted in 1965, doctors were overwhelmingly white men, who tended to identify as Republicans. Accordingly, the AMA gave the majority of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates. Ninety-four percent of the medical students at that time were men. Only 2.5 percent of practicing physicians were African-American, generally having been trained in segregated settings. An even tinier 0.2 percent of medical students were Hispanic or indigenous at that time.

In contrast, women comprised 55.1 percent of the entering classes in accredited medical schools across the country for academic year 2024-25. That was the sixth year in a row that women made up the majority of medical school students. They comprised 54.9 percent of total enrollment. African-Americans comprised 10.3 percent of total enrollment, and Hispanics, 12.3 percent. In 2021, more than one out of four surgeons and other physicians – 26.5 percent – were foreign-born.

Led by PNHP, advocates of Improved Medicare for All must have a focused strategy geared toward physicians to solidify the support of doctors, with the goal of converting the AMA from a force in opposition to a force in support. With a focus on improving the quality of medical practice while compensating its providers adequately, along with improving Medicare and extending it to everyone, the goal for supporters of Improved Medicare for All should be to convince doctors to become a force for its enactment.

Physicians have been perhaps the hardest opponent to overcome in the past, because of the extremely close relationship they have had historically with their patients, who rely on their doctors when their lives are literally on the line. When doctors give patients advice, those words carry enormous weight, even if the advice is about whether universal health insurance would lead to better or worse health care. If physicians tell their patients the proposed legislation will harm their practice and therefore their patients’ health care, that is influential.

While attaining the support of the AMA can likely be achieved with concerted effort particularly and primarily by physicians themselves and would be extremely valuable, that support is not essential. After all, Medicare was enacted despite the AMA’s strong opposition. Moreover, while doctors historically have been extremely influential with their patients about health policy, and they remain so, the need to change doctors because they are no longer in-network and the increasing reliance on teams of healthcare providers, including nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants, have increased the influence of nonphysician providers.

Nurses are another key group, and fortunately they have been leading the fight for Improved Medicare for All. Unlike the AMA, National Nurses United (NNU), the largest professional association of registered nurses, with 225,000 members nationwide, has been advocating for Improved Medicare for All for decades, with determination and effectiveness.

Following the lead of the AMA, the American Hospital Association (AHA), which represents nearly 5,000 hospitals, has opposed the last century of efforts to enact national health insurance. Improved Medicare for All, with its guaranteed payments to providers, its ability to incentivize healthcare providers to practice where the need is highest, and its ability to use tax dollars to subsidize the most at-risk hospitals, is a solution. Though the AHA does not yet support Improved Medicare for All, advocates may be able to persuade individual hospital administrators and, over time, the AHA itself to recognize the advantages of Improved Medicare for All and join the effort.

Another powerful group that started as supportive in the early years but then quickly switched were employers, who worried about the cost to them and the potential government interference in what they considered their independent authority. Though they still oppose it today, they might be persuaded of its value to them because healthcare costs have grown so substantially, and the lack of universal national health insurance puts them at a competitive disadvantage to their foreign counterparts.

Most companies are primarily focused on the cost of health care and, therefore, should be open to Improved Medicare for All, if they are convinced it would reduce their costs. There are some industries, though, that have an overwhelmingly strong stake in the current inefficient, costly system. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmacists, and their associations have been aggressive parts of the opposition from the beginning. Another opponent has been the insurance industry. Neither pharmaceutical companies nor health insurance companies are likely to be convinced to end their opposition to Improved Medicare for All. Pharmaceutical companies take advantage of the bloated system to make extraordinary profits. Under Improved Medicare for All, the pharmaceutical industry will still make profits. Price gouging, however, will stop. Similarly, health insurance companies, for which Improved Medicare for All is an existential threat, will fight as hard as possible.

Health care is a matter of life and death for virtually all of us at some point in our lives.

Those monied interests must be defeated – no easy task given their vast resources. As powerful as they are, history shows that they can be beaten. They can be defeated, if the electorate is engaged and determined. The way to defeat those stakeholders that cannot be convinced of the benefits of Improved Medicare for All is with ongoing motivated action at both the grassroots and grasstops levels. The strong antipathy to commercial health insurance, exposed by the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, reveals that the public may be ready to fight persistently, relentlessly, and effectively for accessible, affordable, high-quality health care for all.

History reveals that Americans’ support for national health insurance is generally widespread and strong at the start of the public push, likely because the need is so great, but that support can easily be shaken. Polling shows that support for Improved Medicare for All is susceptible to opposition messaging that invokes fear of loss and danger. That is not surprising, because health care is a matter of life and death for virtually all of us at some point in our lives. The challenge will be to keep people motivated and not swayed by half-truths and lies, which history demonstrates opponents are willing to deploy. The uber-wealthy want to defeat anything that will increase their costs and reduce their wealth, even by a little. They will seek to scare the American people to retain the status quo. Obviously, fear of failing to obtain adequate health care when needed is an extremely powerful fear that can be exploited.

A key player in maintaining the active support of the American people is organized labor. Studies show that union members are more likely to vote, to volunteer for candidates, and to be influenced by their union leadership in political matters generally. Importantly, they remain a counterweight to the corrosive power of self-interested billionaires and multinational corporations. While organized labor can be counted on, it does have concerns that should be addressed. These include the fact that in negotiating for the generous healthcare plans their members enjoy, they had to trade away current compensation. Moreover, some workers involved in the administration of the current wasteful system will lose employment as a result of the greater efficiency of Improved Medicare for All. Both of those concerns should be addressed as part of the fight for Improved Medicare for All. Both issues are discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, which focuses on the counterattack.

A crucial part to winning the fight for Improved Medicare for All is extremely careful messaging to strengthen the commitment and effort of supporters and to win over those who may be skeptical.

As part of the effort to enact Improved Medicare for All, advocates must be an active part of the fight for workers’ rights to unionize and build union strength. In addition, advocates must employ a careful strategy, in addition to relying on unions, to convince the American people to fight for Improved Medicare for All.

Using the right messaging is key. While the majority of Americans favor Improved Medicare for All, polling indicates that the support can be shaken simply by the way the issue is framed. For example, while 63 percent have a positive reaction to the phrases “Medicare for all,” and “Universal health coverage,” that reaction drops to 49 percent when the phrase is “Single-payer health insurance system,” and 43 percent when the proposal is called “Socialized medicine.” People’s opinions can change dramatically depending on what is emphasized. When those polled are told that Medicare for All will increase their taxes, support drops to just 37 percent. When, though, they are told there will be no premiums and out-of-pocket costs will be reduced, support increases to 67 percent. Indeed, when those polled are told that the proposal guarantees health care as a right for all, support jumps to 71 percent.

This means that a crucial part to winning the fight for Improved Medicare for All is extremely careful messaging to strengthen the commitment and effort of supporters and to win over those who may be skeptical. While the facts are important and strongly on the side of advocates of Improved Medicare for All, history teaches that winning must include effective messaging that is repeated frequently.

Careful strategizing and messaging are especially crucial with respect to older Americans who are Medicare beneficiaries or are about to become so. Seniors have, on average, the greatest need for health care and are the most reliable voters. History shows that they generally pay keen attention to conversations about retirement security and health care. Older Americans were key to the enactment of Social Security in 1935 and its improvements ever since. They were also key to the enactment of Medicare in 1965. History also reveals, though, that the deployment of fear tactics targeted toward seniors can be effective, unfortunately. Consequently, it is vital that proponents of national health insurance have a systematic strategy with respect to seniors, including careful messaging.

In particular, the name Medicare for All may be a two-edged sword. The name presumably tests so well because Medicare, having completed its 61st year, is widely known and understood. Virtually all Americans know people who currently are covered by Medicare and appropriately expect to be covered themselves one day, if they aren’t currently. Consequently, it is harder to demonize as something scary, foreign, and potentially dangerous.

As important as the enactment of Medicare was, both in its own right and as a first big step toward Improved Medicare for All, its creation established a part of the population that might believe that they have something to lose by its expansion to others. Opponents can and have played on the fear that expanding Medicare to the entire population will dilute it and endanger it. For this reason, it may be prudent to always call the proposal, as this book does, Improved Medicare for All.

Starting with the word, “improved” subtly emphasizes that it will benefit those currently on Medicare. The improvements make the proposal a winner for current beneficiaries. It will eliminate all of their out-of-pocket costs. Its long-term care coverage will be a lifesaver for one out of every three seniors and their families. That coverage of long-term care will end the need for seniors to spend all of their assets to qualify for Medicaid and the care they need. Instead, it will allow seniors to pass on whatever savings they have accumulated to their children and grandchildren. Moreover, simply the knowledge of that coverage will provide everyone with greater peace of mind.

For those who today have traditional Medicare, Improved Medicare for All will provide them with hearing, vision, and dental services. And it will free everyone from the complicated sign-up process that current Medicare enrollees must wade through for prescription drug coverage, Medigap coverage, and, for increasing numbers, the erroneously-named Medicare Advantage. In that regard, though, supporters must have a strategy for those who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage. The ending of Medicare Advantage is particularly challenging to message, because it is extremely popular at least until people get seriously ill, when its extra benefits are of less concern and its narrow network of providers and deny/delay tactics are life-threatening. How to message Medicare Advantage, as well as messaging more generally to seniors, is dealt with in greater detail in the next chapter. The basic point, though, is that messaging specifically aimed at reassuring and enlisting seniors must be a key part of a winning strategy.

Fundamentally, advocates must be astute about employing the most effective messaging. The issue should be constantly polled and the messaging refined, as part of an overarching strategy and game plan. The bottom line, though, is that a winning strategy must include careful messaging that is snappy and compelling, but brief. The messaging must be used repeatedly, consistently, and widely.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.” That’s not quite our approach at the Brennan Center. We worry. (Dr. Franklin also advised, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”)

What are we particularly concerned about as we look toward November?

Voter confusion is perhaps the biggest risk. People ask, understandably, can they still vote by mail? Will I need to show a passport or birth certificate to register? It has been many years since the freedom to vote has faced so many proposed challenges, and never before from the federal government. With all the news and noise, citizens cannot be expected to follow the executive edicts and ping-ponging court rulings in minute detail.

In fact, for voters, very little has actually changed. Congress and courts blocked all those bad ideas. The SAVE Act never passed. As a general matter, citizens can cast ballots as before.

After all the push and pull, voters can make their voices heard. Make a plan to vote. Vote early if possible. In person, with a drop box, or if necessary, using the mail.

With less than two months to go, President Donald Trump’s drive to undermine the election is failing. Judges, states and counties, and voting rights groups have blocked his moves. If we keep at it, we can have free and fair elections in 2026.

What else keeps us on edge? The Supreme Court, of course. It is now considering whether to undo a trial court’s decision blocking a rule that would allow the US Postal Service to withhold mail ballots. The trial court determined that rule is illegal and unconstitutional.

If the court allows the USPS to implement its rule, it would introduce chaos and disenfranchise many voters just before the election, as a USPS whistleblower explained in a friend-of-the-court brief detailing the agency’s rushed and flawed process to implement the rule. The court will likely rule in a matter of days on the administration’s request to allow the USPS rule. Fingers crossed.

Here’s a third concern: a growing risk of foreign interference. America is at war. (An illegal, unauthorized war, worth noting.) In 1980, the “October surprise” was the notion that Iran would release Americans it held hostage to influence that year’s election. Let’s hope that Iranian hackers do not produce a digital “October surprise” this year.

Iran has shown its ability to break into municipal water systems in Minnesota. In previous elections, Russia and China have tried to sway voters or attack registration lists. Trump’s purge of election security offices means that American elections have less federal protection against malevolent foreign hackers than before.

States have worked hard to get ready. And it’s important to remember that there is no way for even the most sophisticated schemer to change the results. Voting machines are not connected to the internet. And citizens cast ballots with a paper record, which can be audited and recounted.

Some of our worries are decreasing.

First, “ICE at the polls.” That could still happen. But deployment of federal forces is illegal under numerous federal and state laws. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pledged recently not to use federal troops, correctly asserting, “Election administration and security remain the fundamental responsibility of state and local officials.” We have growing confidence that courts would step in fast. At the Brennan Center, we are prepared to sue if necessary. The briefs are written, and the toner is in the printer.

Then there are the Justice Department observers deployed to some states. They are annoying and often seem like a bit of a mess. But they too are subject to the laws that prohibit voter intimidation, and state officials are prepared to speak up if observers are disruptive.

And as for the worry that electoral winners won’t be certified, we are increasingly confident that courts will step in here, too. Judges have been heroes and upheld the rule of law.

But courts are not enough. We need a citizen mobilization to watch polls, help voters, and blow the whistle on abuse. That, too, gives hope.

It’s going to be a busy two months. No doubt Trump and his partisans will fling new charges every few days. All that clatter can confuse voters further. Perhaps that’s part of the goal.

So for all of us who want voters to have their say in 2026, a chief job is to stay calm and make clear that—as of right now, at least—little has changed. That’s a task for the news media. Public officials should be clear and calm. We who fight for voting rights must measure our own tone, so as not to rattle confidence.

After all the push and pull, voters can make their voices heard. Make a plan to vote. Vote early if possible. In person, with a drop box, or if necessary, using the mail. As we’ve said before, the effort to undermine the election is failing. It will succeed only if citizens stay home.

Honestly, I don’t think we really get it yet.

Let’s face it. It’s going to be hot, hot, hot. Or do I mean hotter, hotter, hotter, or even hottest, hottest, hottest, or someday, for all we know, beyond any words we might now have to describe it.

Though it seldom seems that way in the daily news, we’re talking about a genuinely apocalyptic possibility. Give us human beings full credit. Somehow, we’ve managed to come up with not one but two distinctly apocalyptic ways to potentially destroy ourselves and this planet—one a relatively speedy way to go and the other already operating in world-destroying slow motion—and that, believe me, is no small thing.

Here are just a few examples of that slow-motion version of our self-destruction on this increasingly extreme planet of... well, can I really say “ours” anymore, or should I say theirs?

The Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around.

Of course, Europe has recently experienced remarkably extreme temperatures and scorching fires across significant parts of the continent (heat estimated to have resulted in at least 16,000 extra deaths—and no, that is not a misprint—at its high point in June and at least 35,000 across the whole summer). Western Europe, in fact, experienced the hottest June on record. And that (or worse) is increasingly likely to be an every-summer event for what’s now the fastest-warming continent on this planet.

And don’t forget that the predicted El Niño in the Pacific beginning this fall, expected to be the strongest in more than a century, or a “Godzilla” event (if you happen to remember your movie dinosaurs), is likely to heat significant parts of the planet even more severely. (Oh, and in case you missed it, it’s not just the land that’s getting ever hotter. This August, the world’s oceans hit their hottest temperature ever—yes, ever!—adding, of course, to sea level rise and the further flooding of coastal communities.)

And sadly enough, we just can’t seem to stop, can we? Worse yet, humanity’s latest brilliant invention-discovery—artificial intelligence—may someday have to be relabeled artificial stupidity (of the first order), given that the production of AI is, it seems, going to involve pouring staggering amounts of—yes, of course!—fossil fuels into our already overheating atmosphere. As environmental expert Bill McKibben put it recently, “The planned data center buildout will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by at least 20%, and perhaps as much as a third.”

In truth, you’ve got to hand it to us humans when it comes to utter self-destructiveness (and I’m not even thinking about our never-ending, devastating wars from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and Somalia that also pour endless fossil fuels into the atmosphere, as does the US military).

A Global Disaster That Needs a New Name

You would think, of course, that, faced with what’s likely to happen in the years to come, humanity might have responded by working ever harder to bring our fossil-fuel usage under control. But not much such luck there, of course. After all, China, the country that has moved in the most significant fashion on climate change by figuring out how to produce ever more green energy and sell globally the mechanisms—solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment—that make it (as well as stunning numbers of electric vehicles), continues to pour the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of any place on Earth.

And though other countries are indeed beginning to try to switch to green power, when you look at this endangered planet of ours, explain to me how, in 2024, the American people by a slight majority (even if not quite 50% of the vote) managed to reelect as president one Donald J. Trump, a climate-change denier of the first order. And in his second term in office, he’s focused as much attention as he’s capable of focusing (which, of course, is a distinctly limited amount) on blocking wind and solar projects while promoting ever more fossil-fuel production of every kind. (And of course, in the process, he’s brilliantly ceding the vast and growing green-energy sales market to that other superpower, China.)

Let me guarantee you one thing: Someday, when it comes to the overheating of this world of ours, he will be seen as an almost unparalleled idiot, assuming that anybody then is seeing much of anything.

Consider climate change, in fact, a potential global disaster that deserves a far more horrifying name. And consider it just the latest form of (in)human warfare to come to our attention, this time against the planet itself as a livable place for us. And consider it as well no small thing that we humans have indeed produced a second way to essentially destroy this planet and ourselves.

A Climate Bomb of a President

As for that first one, it’s still unsettling to think about the way the United States developed the atomic bomb and then used it twice in August 1945 to devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end World War II in the Pacific. And those first two bombs did indeed represent, all too literally (or do I mean figuratively?), something new on this planet that, until that moment, had only been a dystopian fantasy—the possible future ability of humanity to totally devastate this planet of ours? In fact, given human history, consider it little short of a miracle that, 80 years later, with at least nine countries now possessing atomic weapons, often in significant quantities—there are now an estimated 12,000 such weapons on planet Earth—one has never been used again in wartime (although more than 2,000 have been detonated in atomic tests in what still passes for peacetime).

And there can be little question that, were an atomic war to break out between any of the great (or even lesser) powers on this planet, we could indeed find ourselves thoroughly devastated.

Now, give us humans distinct credit since, having developed a first way to functionally do in this planet of ours and ourselves, we then came up with a completely separate, distinctly slow-motion version of planetary destruction via our use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to pour what have come to be known as greenhouse gases that trap heat into the atmosphere, potentially broiling this planet in a process that’s come to be known all too mildly as—yes!—“climate change.” (Think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion version of atomic warfare happening right before our eyes every moment of every day.)

And unfortunately, when it became ever more obvious that this was indeed another way to do this planet in, the response was sadly all too different from atomic weaponry, with the urge to stop it proving far milder than it should be.

And of course, in 2024, Americans did indeed vote to reelect a presidential candidate all too literally committed to broiling this planet of ours (as, by the way, is Vladimir Putin, the ruler of one of the other great powers on this planet). Yes, the Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around. And don’t forget that, this time, among the donors celebrating his victory and inauguration with giant financial contributions was oil company Chevron with $500,000. (In fact, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has reported that, overall, oil companies invested $5 million in that inauguration alone—and even that may be a low estimate.)

And yes, his second time in office he did also launch his own version of a global nuclear arms race, but that, sadly, is the least of it, since he’s distinctly determined to release ever more fossil fuels into our world, while doing anything he can to shut down wind power, in particular. Oh, and don’t forget that, amid all the climate chaos and—thanks to his war on Iran—fossil fuel chaos as well, he continues to make a fortune (as much as $15.5 million or a nearly 40% rise since January) from fossil fuel stocks he owns, including shares in ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum. And more are evidently still being purchased for him.

And all of that is a reality of our world even as, thanks to his war with Iran, American drivers continue to pay ever more for their gas. And with that new El Niño climate pattern already on the all-too-literal horizon and guaranteed to wildly overheat the Pacific Ocean, starting this fall, this planet is only going to get hotter yet. That coming “Godzilla” event could, as The Guardian reports, “push about 50 million people worldwide into acute hunger before the end of next year.”

In short, “our” president is making a fortune off end-of-the-world policies. Think of him, in fact, not figuratively, but all too literally, as the president from hell.

And if you want to add to the potentially world-ending nightmares of this planet at this very moment, keep in mind that, over its long history, humanity has proven all too brilliant when it comes to destruction. So don’t for a second imagine that there isn’t, in fact, a third (or even a fourth) way to do us all in still waiting to be discovered just over (or under?) the present horizon.

We are in a situation, as a country, and I think largely as the West generally, that only Trump can solve.

Now, I don’t mean specifically Donald J. Trump. I mean specifically a person who understands power in the same way Donald Trump understands power. He understands that the executive branch is enormous, that it works for the president, and that when all of that power is pointed toward a purpose it can push through a hell of a lot of blockades. Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, federal procurement, federal credit, federal land, regulatory agencies, it’s all power. A president can treat that machinery as something to politely administer, or decide the country needs to go somewhere and put it to work getting there.

Trump has done the second thing. He has pushed presidential authority on tariffs, executive control over the government, elections, executive orders, independent agencies and the courts. When one route gets blocked, he looks for another. His sweeping emergency tariffs were struck down, so the administration moved to other existing tariff authorities. His administration has tried to use federal power to change the rules around mail voting and has pushed a broad version of the unitary executive, the idea that a president elected to carry out a program must be able to control the executive branch charged with carrying it out. You can argue about the legality of any particular move, and the courts obviously have. The thing I am interested in is that he understands where the power is and is willing to use it.

The Democrats largely recoil from this idea. Part of that is their commitment to neoliberalism, and part of it is what I consider a perverted view of liberalism generally. There is this idea that the president should manage the government, send some proposals to Congress, wait for the courts, respect every inherited norm, avoid picking too many fights and explain to everybody that change takes time.

One of the most successful Democratic presidents in American history rejected that notion.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood power. He understood that the country had elected him to do something and that doing something meant fighting people who didn’t want it done. He named financial monopoly, reckless banking and organized money as enemies. He welcomed their hatred. He even went after incumbent Democrats who were standing in the way of the New Deal. His 1938 effort to knock off conservative Democrats mostly failed, but the important thing is that he tried. He wasn’t a “blue no matter who” president.

Roosevelt also understood something about checks and balances that party leaders ignore. Checks and balances are not just something that exists inside the government. There has to be a balance of power between markets, corporations, financial institutions and people. If, as they have now, corporations and the ultra wealthy have enough economic power, they can manage our lives without ever passing a law. Prices can control where we live. Employers control our healthcare options. Banks decide who gets credit. Utilities decide what electricity costs. A handful of companies control supply, wages, access and entire markets.

The only entity capable of balancing power away from the ultra wealthy and back toward ordinary people is us through our government. Roosevelt knew that market intervention was required, that the existing stranglehold of private power would prevent us from building the country we needed.

So he put the government to work producing.

The federal government directly hired people. It directly built things. It financed factories, built dams, generated electricity, expanded electric transmission, built public housing, roads, schools, parks and public buildings, financed rural electrification and created institutions that did not exist before. When millions of people needed work, programs like the WPA and CCC didn’t use tax credits or incentives to encourage private companies to do the work. The government hired them and put them to work building things the country needed.

TVA is probably the cleanest example. The government did not ask private utilities to please make electricity cheaper and more available across the Tennessee Valley. It built dams, generated power and created a public power system capable of transforming an entire region. That same capacity later helped power wartime industry and the Manhattan Project.

Then the war came and this way of thinking went into overdrive. The production requirements were absurd. We needed more planes, ships, tanks, trucks, engines, aluminum, rubber and ammunition than the existing industrial system could possibly produce. If Roosevelt had accepted the normal assumptions about how long factories took to build and how slowly markets adjusted, the answer would have been that it couldn’t be done. Europe would have lost the war.

Luckily for us FDR didn’t accept that answer.

Big Bill Knudsen, the former president of General Motors, became one of the people Roosevelt put to work organizing production. The government financed factories, built factories, owned factories, paid private companies to operate factories, allocated scarce materials, guaranteed demand and forced production priorities toward the things the country needed. The Detroit Arsenal is a perfect example. We needed tanks, so the government financed and built a giant tank plant and had Chrysler operate it. The point was not ideological purity about who owned what. We needed the factory, so we built the factory.

That is the part people leave out when they talk about American capitalism winning the war. The market didn’t wake up one morning, notice a profitable opportunity to defeat Hitler and organically produce the arsenal of democracy. The government decided what had to exist and then organized the public and private capacity needed to make it exist.

We did the same thing over and over again. We produced enough material to equip ourselves and supply the Allies. We built enough industrial capacity that after the war the United States could help rebuild Europe, build huge amounts of housing and infrastructure, expand electricity and create the material abundance people now look back on as if it somehow appeared naturally.

Donald Trump understands the power part. His problem is purpose.

He can point the executive branch toward immigrants, DEI, universities, the radical left, bureaucrats he considers disloyal, mail voting, allies, or whatever enemy is useful that week, and even if he defeated every one of them tomorrow, their houses would still cost too much, their healthcare would still cost too much, their electric bill would still be too high, childcare would still be too expensive, their town would still have too few doctors, their roads and bridges would still need work, their kids would still be wondering how the hell they are going to afford a house, and the country would still not have enough manufacturing capacity to make many of the things we depend on.

Roosevelt pointed power toward production. Electricity, jobs, housing, infrastructure, finance, labor power, factories, industrial capacity. If private capital would not build what was needed, government could build it. If private finance wouldn’t finance it, government would. If people needed jobs, government could hire them. If private utilities wouldn’t electrify poor communities at an affordable price, public power did.

This is the part modern Democrats seem determined to forget. They love storytelling. They love talking about fairness, dignity, community and opportunity. They seem much less interested in the fact that Roosevelt’s politics were believable because something existed underneath the story. People could see the dam. They could see the electric line. They could see the road. They could see the factory being built and their neighbor going to work.

The story worked because it was attached to a vision, a bold vision, and then that vision was attached to doing.

That is also what people misunderstand about vision. A vision does not become believable because it is small. Getting to the moon was ridiculous. Rebuilding the industrial base? Providing healthcare to every American? Building enough housing to make it affordable? Training hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, engineers, machinists and tradespeople? All quite ridiculous.

Until we start doing it.

If you say you are going to the moon and then build the rockets, launch facilities, factories, training programs and engineering teams, and start blowing shit up in Florida, people begin to believe you might actually be going to the moon.

The thing I hear over and over whenever we talk about rebuilding the country is that it takes time. Of course it takes time. A factory takes time to build. A doctor takes time to train. A power plant takes time to construct. The decision to start takes time. Starting doesn’t. The fact that a project takes six years to finish can’t require ten years of debate before the first shovel goes into the ground.

The executive branch is enormous, and when it is wielded toward a purpose it can coordinate agencies, use federal purchasing to create markets, use federal credit to finance capacity, use procurement to change what gets produced, direct departments to use old authorities in new ways, and force Congress and the courts to respond to a government that is already moving instead of spending years asking permission to imagine moving.

Trump understands that. Roosevelt understood it too.

The difference that matters is what the power is for.

If we want people to believe democratic government can solve their problems, democratic government is going to have to solve some fucking problems. It is going to have to build things again, produce things again, hire people, generate electricity, build transmission, build housing, expand medical capacity, build factories and create enough material abundance that ordinary people can see their lives getting better.

Then we can tell the story.

It’s time we find a president ready and willing to use executive power to build a better America, not a bigger ballroom.

Muslim children were not born carrying the weight of 9/11. Society placed it on their shoulders. It is time for us to take it off.

As a child, I was called a "camel queen" by my teachers. Years later, while I was pregnant, a college professor looked at my stomach and joked in front of the whole class that I might have a "bomb" under there.

He was talking about my unborn child.

What has stayed with me all these years is not only the cruelty of the remark. It was where it happened. The comment came from a professor, in a classroom, an environment that should have been a place of learning, respect, and safety.

I hear from young people who become anxious when classroom discussions turn to terrorism or September 11. Not because they do not want to learn history, but because they worry the conversation will somehow become about them.

In that moment, I was not seen as a student, a mother-to-be, or a human being. I was seen through the lens of a vicious stereotype.

That moment taught me something I have never forgotten: Anti-Muslim prejudice is not always loud or obvious. Sometimes it appears as a joke. Sometimes it appears as an assumption. Sometimes it appears in the expectation that Muslims must constantly prove that they are not what others fear they might be.

My experience is not unique. In May, a 12-year-old Muslim student in Connecticut was reportedly subjected to repeated harassment and called anti-Muslim names. In a sign of the times, the Danbury Police Department searched the family’s home for weapons after allegations were made against the student.

In a 2025 survey of Muslims, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), found, “Forty-seven percent of Muslim families with school-aged children report having a child who faced religious-based bullying in the past year, compared with 23% among the general public.”

Like many Muslim children, I learned early what it felt like to be viewed as different, foreign, or less worthy. Those experiences leave scars that are difficult to explain to people who have never lived them.

Today, I see those same burdens carried by Muslim students.

I hear from young people who become anxious when classroom discussions turn to terrorism or September 11. Not because they do not want to learn history, but because they worry the conversation will somehow become about them.

They wonder whether classmates will look at them and make jokes.

They wonder whether they will be expected to condemn atrocities they had nothing to do with.

No child should have to carry that burden.

This week, the organization I work for issued its Back to School Resource Guide for 2026-2027, which I authored. The guide gives teachers tips on how to discuss challenging topics with students, including providing comprehensive lesson plans that address the 9/11 attacks, specifically the victims and families impacted; the aftermath of the attacks, such as the war in Afghanistan; changes in national security; and the rise of hate crimes and discrimination against American Muslim communities.

The purpose of educational resources that address bias and inclusion is not to rewrite history or erase the tragedy of September 11. Muslims, like millions of other Americans, mourned the victims of al Qaeda’s vicious attacks. We condemned the perpetrators then, and we continue to condemn them today.

The purpose is much simpler: to help ensure that students can learn about difficult moments in history without becoming targets themselves.

Every child should be able to learn about 9/11. Every child should learn about the devastating consequences of hatred, extremism, and violence. But no child should be made to feel responsible for those events simply because they share a faith with the people who hijacked it.

I am no longer the little girl being mocked on the playground by teachers. I am no longer the college student sitting in a classroom while a professor jokes about my unborn child. But children today face many of the same assumptions.

Our children deserve better than that. They deserve classrooms where they are seen as students, not suspects. They deserve the freedom to learn about history without being associated with its worst actors. And they deserve a future in which their identity is not treated as a source of suspicion.

Most of all, they deserve to be children, free from the burden of defending themselves against crimes they did not commit.

The Democratic establishment, along with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent between $60 million and $70 million trying to prevent Dr. Abdul El-Sayed from winning Michigan’s Democratic primary—roughly 11 times the money backing El-Sayed.

He won nonetheless and now faces the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, in a race that will help determine control of the Senate after the midterms in November.

I hope Michiganders elect El-Sayed, who will be a great US senator.

After receiving an advanced degree in public health, El-Sayed worked as an epidemiologist. Informed by this experience and expertise, he advocates access to healthcare as a right and not a privilege.

He also advocates economic security for all, financed by a tax system that asks more from the wealthy. He’s a champion of civil rights. He’s a fighter for affordability against predatory landlords, monopolistic corporations, and billionaires who turn their wealth into political power.

Most Jewish Americans have values that align with Dr. El-Sayed’s. He believes in social justice—that government can be a force for good as it helps expand opportunities, protect rights, and advance the common good.

Yet AIPAC is continuing its battle against El-Sayed. It is expected to put tens of millions of dollars behind Rogers, some of it disguised behind other PACs. “Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” said Deryn Sousa, a spokeswoman for AIPAC.

El-Sayed is no more anti-Israel than I am.

Being opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing Israeli government is not the same as being anti-Israel. Nor should it be equated with being antisemitic. Nor, for that matter, should opposition to Netanyahu and his government be seen as condoning the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 were murdered and 251 taken hostage. It was an atrocity and a crime against humanity.

I believe Netanyahu is a war criminal and that his government has committed genocide in Gaza. I’m appalled that he and it continue to allow and excuse horrific violence on the West Bank against Palestinians. For this reason, I don’t believe the United States should arm Netanyahu’s government with destructive military equipment.

This doesn’t make me anti-Israel. For decades I’ve advocated a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and I continue to believe it’s the only sane and reasonable way for these two peoples to peacefully coexist.

This certainly doesn’t make me antisemitic, either. I’m Jewish. Some of my relatives died in Hitler’s gas chambers. My mother and father were told they were unwelcome in the small town they moved to when I was a toddler because, according to the group of old men who met them at the doorstep of our new home, it was a “Christian community.”

Like me, Dr. El-Sayed opposes what the government of Netanyahu has done and continues to do. El-Sayed has affirmed that “Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike have the right to peace, dignity, and self-determination.” He has acknowledged the horror of October 7, condemned all forms of antisemitism, and been highly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza and abuses in the West Bank.

Ten days ago El-Sayed publicly apologized for any misinterpretation people might have placed on remarks he made after a man attacked a synagogue in a Detroit suburb in March. The man, Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, had lost four relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon the week before.

In a video response at the time, El-Sayed condemned the attack. He added that “hurt people hurt people,” a reference to what happened to Ghazali’s family. Critics accused El-Sayed of justifying Ghazali’s actions.

If you read the transcript of what El-Sayed actually said, it’s clear he was merely trying to explain and give context for the violence. “What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context,” El-Sayed said in apology. “And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”

There is enough pain on all sides—pain for Israelis and Palestinians, for Muslims and Jews. Which is why it’s so important that all of us think clearly and carefully. Being anti-Netanyahu isn’t being anti-Israel, nor is it being antisemitic.

It’s also critically important that the good people of Michigan oppose Mike Rogers, who endorsed and voted for legislation last year that cut Affordable Care Act insurance for millions of Americans, weakened Medicaid and food assistance to less affluent citizens, and provided tax breaks to the very rich.

Rogers has warmly and enthusiastically praised Trump. He’s failed to publicly condemn or even criticize Trump’s bigoted statements about ethnic communities in the United States. He hasn’t said a word against Trump’s unconscionable pardon of the more than 1000 insurrectionists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This includes those found guilty of the most heinous acts, causing grievous bodily harm to law enforcement officers.

My view is we need smart, committed progressives such as Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate. And we need right-wing Trump suckups such as Mike Rogers out of the Senate.