It is 1955 and the hot Mississippi sun is blazing overhead. Miles away in Chicago a Black mother is having a conversation with her 14-year-old son. She tries to impress upon him the often subtle but dangerous realities of what it means to be Black in America, and how one misinterpretation, one lie, could result in his death. That boy is Emmett Till, and in her memoir, Death of Innocence, Mamie Till-Mobley reflects on “The Talk” she delivered to her son before his historically tragic trip to Mississippi.

This version of The Talk dates back to American chattel slavery and has been passed down for generations in Black families, shaped by ongoing racial violence and unequal treatment. But recent violent and fatal encounters involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have forced families across lines of race, ethnicity, and immigration status to confront the reality of their precarious existence in America—and start talking to their children about how to stay safe. Black families’ experience on how to have these conversations is now, tragically, something many families can learn from.

The Talk has always carried more than one meaning. For many families, it refers to the conversation about the birds and the bees, the discussion parents have with their children about dating, puberty, and sex in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. That version of The Talk is often framed as universal.

But for Black families, The Talk has long meant something entirely different. In addition to conversations about puberty, Black parents have used The Talk to prepare their children for the realities of race and how to stay safe in a society shaped by racism.

In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation.

Both conversations typically happen around the onset of puberty, but only some families have had the privilege of needing just one version of The Talk. In a 2024 study conducted by Dr. Conial Caldwell, Black fathers reflected on whether other communities also have The Talk. The consensus was clear: Some groups have long had the luxury of avoiding it, while others have their own versions shaped by identity, history, and perceived vulnerability. However, that distinction is beginning to blur.

Because of recent ICE actions, many immigrant and mixed-status families are foregoing everyday liberties out of fear, like grocery shopping and going to work. In Connecticut, Minneapolis, and other locations school attendance stymied by ICE-related anxiety is widespread. Recent deaths linked to encounters with federal immigration enforcement, including those of Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Preti in Minnesota, have sparked national outrage and renewed scrutiny of ICE’s training practices, accountability, and use of force, including against white Americans. These incidents follow the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by ICE agents, showing that not even young children are safe.

Families who once felt insulated from normalized and state sanctioned violence against Black Americans, are now asking the same questions Black parents have asked for generations: How do we keep our children safe? How do we prepare them for interactions with law enforcement? What do we say and when?

The fathers in Caldwell’s study offered simple but powerful guidance.

Parents should have The Talk early and revisit it often, adjusting the conversation as children grow. As children grow and become part of new environments outside of the home, so too do the risks of danger increase. Parents’ protective conversations should reflect their children’s developmental stage and level of maturity. At the same time, they should be mindful of social media and television, recognizing that children are exposed to images and narratives that shape their understanding of safety and belonging. Social media has become of one the major spaces of youth interactions; thus, the risk of exposure is not only heighted but as consistent as their internet access. Beyond one’s immediate family, communities must work together to protect all children, not just their own. And children must be consistently reminded that their lives have value, regardless of how they look or where they come from.

From chattel slavery to emancipation, from reconstruction and the civil rights period to post civil rights, The Talk has had to respond to harsh prevailing societal realities for Black Americans. In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation. So, just as Mamie Till-Mobley may have agonized over her words as she gave her son some of her final attempts at guidance and protection, parents across the USA are weighing their words and conversations in their attempts to safeguard their children.

In 2004, I wrote about a peaceful protest I had just attended with my young children that turned into a sudden melee, with riot police shooting pepper bullets into the crowd.

Desperate to find a place to share what felt like important information I discovered after the experience, I decided to take a chance and submit my piece to Common Dreams, a progressive news and opinion website. I was shocked to log on the morning after my late-night submission and see that they’d published it: "To Be Silenced, Or Not to Be: That is the Question."

At the time, Common Dreams didn’t have, as they do now, a section for comments or discussion following a piece they published. I did receive, however, over 600 emails. Those emails helped me know that something I—an everyday American without a collegiate degree—had written about not being silent had resonated, informed, and inspired.

I no longer have access to those emails, a few of which were from well-known people, but I often think of one in particular, in which a couple wrote to say that they were installing new stairs in their home and they wanted me to know that they’d printed my piece and put it under the stairs in a small time capsule they had created.

I’ll Admit It, Though, I’ve Been Pretty Silent the Last Few Years

While I attended the two local No Kings protests last year, and a local ORD2 Indivisible protest this year after the murder of Renée Good, I did think twice before going, and mostly hung quietly around the edges (in order to try and make a hasty exit if anything went awry).

I’ve barely written about any of the administration’s growing atrocities, other than notes in my journal.

And, until the horrific murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents, and the administration’s immediate lies, including saying he was a domestic terrorist (just as they’d lied about Renée Good and others), I hadn’t posted anything “political” on Facebook for over five years. (Mostly due to a friend on the platform telling me a mutual friend didn’t like my political posts, even though they’ve been minimal, respectful, and mostly with a reach-across-the aisle sentiment. This “friend” said the platform is only for “fun” stuff.)

Yes, the masses of everyday people have power in any society. Power to do nothing, or power to rise in resistance.

Yes, fear has kept me silenced. Fear of what may happen to myself or my loved ones if I choose to stand up and not be silenced, be it at a protest, or by sharing things on social media, or if I write something critical of President Donald Trump and his administration.

Following are just two new examples leading to what I’d suggest are rational fears, and are specifically intended to chill and silence dissent and criticism of Trump and his regime:

• There are new reports about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) using secretive administrative subpoenas (which don’t need a judge’s approval) in order to try and gain personal information of individuals online who have been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Trump administration. In one case, a retiree simply sent an email to a DHS agent, imploring him to reconsider trying to deport an asylum-seeker. Within five hours, Google emailed to let him know that DHS wanted to subpoena his information, which he later learned included any credit card numbers on file as well as his Social Security and driver’s license numbers. They also wanted a list of services he used, along with dates, times, and the length of online sessions.
• There are also alarming new details about an enormous domestic spying infrastructure, paid for by our tax dollars, with frightening implications regarding privacy and our constitutional rights.

In a recent opinion piece published at the Boston Globe, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote:

This pervasive surveillance doesn’t just undermine our privacy. It also changes how we behave. If you know that DHS can identify you at a protest, track your movements, or pull up years of personal information with a single inquiry, you may—consciously or unconsciously—begin to self-censor. You may think twice before criticizing the government online or showing up at a rally. This chilling effect is real. It’s dangerous. And it’s a direct threat to our freedom of speech.“Each Act, Each Occasion, Is Worse Than the Last, But Only a Little Worse”

At the end of the piece I wrote in 2004, I’d shared a chilling quote, an excerpt really, from something I’d recently read. It has stuck with me ever since, and started reverberating more loudly once Trump’s second term in office began.

The excerpt comes from chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late,” from Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1933-45 (1955, University of Chicago Press). In it, the person doing most of the talking in this eight-page chapter—who Mayer only names as a colleague of his, a philologist who lives in Germany—speaks of trying to understand the silence and inaction of masses of everyday people, including “learned men” like himself, that allowed the horrendous evil of Nazi Germany:

What no one seemed to notice... was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people... And it became always wider... The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway...

Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us... Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

Clearly feeling regret and wondering how it might’ve been different had they resisted, Mayer’s colleague finally admits a painful realization:

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you... The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays... Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves...

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing)... If one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood...You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Ever since learning about Nazi Germany as a youth, and the monstrosity of horrors committed therein, I’ve been curious why many everyday Germans responded (or not) the way they did. At the same time, I’ve wondered how I would have responded if living in Nazi Germany. Shortly after the end of World War II, Mayer, an American journalist and author, traveled to Marburg, Germany and took up residence for a year to try and learn the answers to these questions as well.

Via extensive interviews, “a year’s conversations, in their own language, under informal conditions involving meals, ‘a glass of wine,’ or, more preciously, a cup of coffee, exchange of family visits (including the children), and long, easy evenings, Saturday afternoons, or Sunday walks,” Mayer sought to understand the thinking of 10 men, “little men” he called them, who were members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka, Nazis. He also interviewed women related to these “little men,” but alas, did not include those interviews.

Mayer, a German descendant (and also Jewish, though he didn’t admit that to the interviewees he came to call friends), wrote:

Every one of my ten Nazi friends... spoke again and again during our discussions of “wir kleine Leute, we little people.”

These 10 men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers...Their importance lay in the fact that God... had made so many of them. In a nation of 70 million, they were the 69 million plus.

Those 69 million plus everyday people in Nazi Germany had power, but the majority didn’t recognize or use it. As Mayer wrote, “The German community—the rest of the 70 million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere.”

I’m just an everyday person, too, in a nation of mostly 349 million other everyday people—minus those few at the top seeking to control us, and those few among us who seem to only know hate (maybe because they’ve never known love). An everyday American who is increasingly concerned about the frightening and escalating actions of the current “administration” of my country, and what they portend for us (and also the rest of the world and planet).

Thankfully, Many Everyday Americans Are Standing Up and Speaking Out!

As recently reported by The Guardian, based on data from the Crowd Counting Consortium: “There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term... An overwhelming majority of US counties—including 42% that voted for Trump—have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.”

According to other informative data compiled by Britannica regarding No Kings demonstrations in June and October of last year: “Both demonstrations were some of the largest single-day protests to occur in US history, with more than 5 million protesters attending in June and almost 7 million protesters attending in October.”

And then there’s the recent massive and predominantly nonviolent demonstrations in Minneapolis and the surrounding region.

But, until now, aside from cautiously attending a few local protests, I’ve still been too silent.

Other Things That Have Kept Me Silent: the “Forms,” and Then Also the Paralysis

Interestingly, it was the colleague of Mayer’s mention of the forms that has stuck with me the most from that particular excerpt: “The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.”

None of the above forms, nor the addition of so many others since, such as TV, computers, cell phones, social media, streaming programs, and more—most forms that I, too, partake of—are bad forms in and of themselves. But is it possible that at least some are used to manipulate us masses? Or, at the very least, used to take advantage of our attention being, as the excerpt from Mayer’s book says, diverted?

Think of all the time, work, and money that we exhaust just to (hopefully) make ends meet. There’s the skyrocketing rent or mortgages, utilities, transportation, groceries, childcare, household insurance, etc. There’s the medical bills, health insurance (which I and millions of others can no longer afford), taxes, college tuition (which is now leaving graduates with difficulty finding work), Social Security and Medicare—which we’ve paid into, and more, along with all of the attendant literal forms that keep us busy. There’s all we spend trying to pay for the myriad of things they tell us to need or want, and then all of the time we spend organizing and taking care of those things (and often later getting rid). And then, exhausted from it all, if we even have time or energy left over, we (yes, me, too) often check-out with our never-ending sports and streaming programs.

All of these things, and more—including any debt we go into, not only keeps our attention diverted and out of their way, effectively silencing us, it also makes those seeking to control us wealthier than the majority of all Americans combined (if you figure those seeking to control us are likely in the top 10% of the population owning 63.77% of all wealth in the country, per the following data).

Regarding Wealth Inequality in America

We can look at new Federal Reserve reporting, assets by wealth percentile group in 2025:Q3. Using their data, I have created the following to make it easier to follow:

• 1% of the population owns 28.98% of all wealth (with 0.1% owning 13.04% of that).
• 9% of the population owns 34.79% of all wealth.
• 50-90% of the population own 30.91% of all wealth.
• The bottom 50% of the population owns 5.32% of all wealth.

I certainly can attest to this effective silencing in my own life (aside from having an amazing landlord who charges fair rent). But I definitely see at least some room where I could choose differently.

In addition to allowing myself to be silenced through both covert and overt means, there has also been the very distinct paralysis I’ve felt after trying to follow the absolute barrage of appalling things coming from Trump and his administration. It’s a constant blitz, which comes from “blitzkrieg” of course, which Britannica deftly explains as a military tactic “calculated to create psychological shock and resultant disorganization in enemy forces.”

The speed and seeming chaos of these shocking and growing anti-democratic and authoritarian actions by the current administration are surely no accident, and are instead more intentional attempts at diverting our attention with the common authoritarian modus operandi of Ruling by Distraction and Chaos. Oh, and a Barrage of Outright Lies.

One Great Shocking Occasion

I’d been shocked and stunned by the murder of Renée Good, of course, but, for me apparently, Pretti’s murder was the “one great shocking occasion” that spurred me back into speaking up more publicly. Regretfully, I admit there were many, so many, shocking occasions before Pretti’s murder which should have done so.

The Monday after Pretti was murdered, doing chores while listening to and watching the reporting out of Minneapolis, I stopped myself short, asking: “If I received an emergency alert on my phone that a wildfire was on its way, would I continue trying to ‘finally get my house and life organized’ before I evacuated?” It was an incredibly clarifying question, as that’s exactly what I’ve been doing regarding the fire raging in our country.

Almost immediately, I ceased everything else and sat down and started writing. And have been writing for weeks since.

We have a five-alarm fire going on in our country that is getting terrifyingly close to, among other things, incinerating the rule of law, our civil liberties and constitutional rights, and democracy.

It can be difficult to track, especially when most media are only able to report on the immediate fire(s) of the day, but the following are just some of the Trump Regime’s current blitzkrieg. It is not necessarily in order of importance, nor is it exhaustive by any means.

• According to newly released data, the “worst of the worst” make up less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 ICE arrests last year. According to the FBI, violent crime consists of four crimes: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Most agree that they want violent undocumented immigrants deported, via due process; however, the majority of those who’ve been arrested and detained, approximately 86%, have not committed violent crimes. Nearly 40% have no criminal record at all!
• US citizens—in addition to Renée Good and Alex Pretti—are being shot, injured, and detained for standing up for their neighbors or just being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Afterward, the administration has immediately lied before there’s even been time for an investigation, and those injured or murdered have been routinely called, by the administration, “Domestic Terrorists,” and “Agitators.” Just two examples are Marimar Martinez, and Aliyah Rahman. Martinez was shot five times by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent. Aliyah Rahman, was violently pulled from her car when she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment and happened upon an ICE operation. There are other US citizens, and also noncitizens, who have been injured, shot, and also killed by federal agents. How many times did agents and this administration lie the same lies about those cases? And how many more instances do we not even know about?
• The regime’s intentional and routine labeling of protesters, activists, groups, organizations, anyone critical of Trump and his administration, (or those like Rahman who was just on her way to a doctor’s appointment) as “Domestic Terrorists” is not only an attempt at restricting or silencing our First Amendment right to free speech. It also comes with actions they can take, via National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-7, against those they decide to deem “Domestic Terrorists.” (Sure, we expect our government to keep a watch out for true domestic terrorists. How many are they actually missing, though, with all of their focus on the “radical left democrats,” “paid agitators,” and others simply standing up to exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize Trump Regime behaviors and policies?)
• Among many of the falsehoods he uttered during his recent State of the Union address, Trump described the horrible killing of Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, as being the fault of “open borders.” However, the man charged with her murder is a US citizen. There have been horrible murders committed by undocumented immigrants; however, according to many studies, native-born individuals are much more likely to commit violent crime. (Also, out of curiosity, since Trump introduced Zarutska’s mother at the SOTU, what does he think about the tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who are losing work visas and Temporary Protected Status, and fear increasing risk of deportation?)
• An ICE attorney, who also trained cadets at the ICE training facility in Glynco, Georgia, resigned on February 13 and then testified as a whistleblower on February 23. In Ryan Schwank’s testimony, he described the training he witnessed as, “deficient, defective, and broken.” He went on to testify that ICE was training new agents to violate the constitution by entering homes illegally, and that they had “ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force.”
• There is the unnecessary and heartbreaking toll—which is already a massive source of trauma, and will likely remain so for years to come—that CBP agents, and masked, heavily armed, and usually unidentified ICE agents, are inflicting on millions of young children in communities around the country as they seek to fulfill the “quotas” of mass deportations set by the demonstrably white nationalist White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
• ICE, with $38.3 billion of our tax dollars, is seeking to purchase (and already has in some cases) giant warehouses across the country to convert into detention facilities (concentration camps) in which to house tens of thousands of immigrants who they plan to arrest and slate for mass deportations.
• There are already widespread inhumane and dire conditions at existing ICE detention facilities (concentration camps).
• There will likely be many negative long-term effects on children who are already living in the abysmal conditions at ICE detention facilities (concentration camps).
• In addition to many concerns regarding how Trump could try to disrupt the 2026 midterms, he recently said, in yet another attempted abandonment of established law, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
• The SAVE America Act, in its current writing, could make voting much more difficult for millions and millions (and millions) of eligible voters. (It passed the House recently and is currently stalled in the Senate as of February 26.) BTW: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote, and voter fraud is exceedingly rare. Even the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation researched voter fraud going back decades and found it was less than 1%. And that number, when it comes to noncitizen registrants and voters, according to CEIR (The Center for Election Innovation and Research) falls even more upon further investigation.
• The Trump administration is attempting unlawful seizure of states’ voter data, which includes private information. Many states have already complied.
• There’s the alarming reporting from NPR back in August of last year regarding our Social Security data: “A whistleblower says that a former senior DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names, and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” It’s an ongoing story that could have tremendously alarming and troubling ramifications for the majority of the US population with Social Security numbers.
• There’s Trump’s brazen graft and personal profiteering. (Not to mention similar graft by so many others in his administration.)
• There’s the ongoing genocide in Gaza despite a supposed ceasefire; concerns regarding what Trump’s “Board of Peace” is really about; and fear that the US government master plans for “New Gaza” are nothing more than money grabs for investors while facilitating the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
• And what about the Epstein Files? Which are full of known pedophilia, sex trafficking, abuse, suspected bribery and money laundering, and more. An enormous ring of abuse and deceit, at high levels, that may likely be even worse than is already known. Prior to millions of Epstein files being released (still only a little over half, though the Department of Justice says it’s final), Trump claimed they were a “Democrat hoax.” However, in recent days and weeks, the files have triggered multiple reactions from or regarding many implicated in the files, which definitely does not support Trump’s “Democrat hoax” claim. Around the world, there have been multiple high-level government officials, attorneys, industry moguls, influencers, a Nobel laureate, former royalty... who have—just since the release of the files—either resigned, retired, gone on leave, been replaced, stepped down, announced they were selling, canceled their charities, or have been arrested. There is a there, there. (And, in new investigative reporting from NPR in the last few days, we learned about missing files regarding Trump and a woman who claimed he sexually abused her when she was 13. According to NPR’s reporting, “The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times.” Why weren’t those files released?)

Again, that’s just a partial list. Just a small bit of the scope of what we everyday people should be deeply concerned about. Each have been important factors in helping me recommit myself to doing what little I can to add my voice to the millions of other everyday people who are currently refusing to be silenced—often at risk to their own safety—and are choosing to stand and speak up for their neighbors, our communities, the rule of law, the Constitution, and democracy.

Some of the Ways to Speak Up and Get More Involved

For those who are ready to act but haven’t yet—or, like me, haven’t done much more than attend a protest or two in recent years—here are just a few ways we can start speaking up more:

• Write or call our leaders in Congress;
• Attend local rallies;
• Consider joining groups like Indivisible, MoveOn, or the 50501 Movement—all groups that have helped organize No Kings events. (Indivisible and MoveOn also make the top two items in this list easy.);
• Join the next No Kings event, scheduled for March 28, with events planned (and growing) all over the country (and world);
• Attend (or host) local Know Your Rights training sessions, which can be scheduled through a variety of organizations and also hosted by community groups. These sessions also likely have information on how best to monitor ICE and CBP locally, and other ways we can get involved and help;
• Minneapolis, who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, suggests that getting organized before ICE comes to town is important, and one of the things they most recommend doing? Getting to know our neighbors;
• Consider subscribing to Project Salt Box in order to stay up-to-date and learn what can be done regarding the DHS-ICE attempt to purchase massive warehouses across the country and turn them into immigrant detention centers (concentration camps);
• Respectfully share honest concerns, opinions, news, and details on current and important events on social media accounts and elsewhere (as more and more are doing now);
• Engage directly again—being willing to listen and dialogue compassionately and respectfully—with family, friends, neighbors, people we work with, and people we care about even though we know they may currently disagree with our views and concerns; and
• Reevaluate where we spend our resources and attention.

Whatever we are motivated to do, nonviolently, helps. It all matters. It all adds up. And in doing so, together we millions of everyday people will intensify and help sustain the needed resistance to an attempted authoritarian (or fascist) takeover of our country. An attempted takeover by this administration and its allies that is clearly devoid of heart, truth, justice, rule of law, conscience, empathy, or any concern whatsoever for anything other than their own selfish and unquenchable thirst for control, money, and power.

A Few Hopeful Notes

Many have probably already heard of the “3.5% rule.” It was coined by political scientist Erica Chenoweth following research she and a colleague undertook over a decade ago at the Harvard Kennedy School. In an updated paper in 2020, she explains the rule again: “The ‘3.5% rule’ refers to the claim that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”

Chenoweth also shared new data showing there has been at least one time where the 3.5% rule didn’t work, as well as other times where it took less than 3.5% of the population to resist. Chenoweth also has cautioned that the 3.5% rule is more a “rule-of-thumb,” and that it’s a “descriptive finding but not necessarily a prescriptive one.”

To be up front, Chenoweth is also, as noted on her website, currently working to understand why the “rule” has appeared to be less effective over the last decade. From an interview with Harvard Magazine last year, we learn, “Chenoweth sees a number of factors at work, such as regimes managing to control the information environment, or provoking violence within a movement to discredit it, or criminalizing protests.” She believes autocrats are catching on, and it is likely going to take more than just mass nonviolent protests going forward.

There are clearly many factors that may affect the success of a particular resistance. Nevertheless, the data on the 3.5% rule remains impressive concerning the potential power of even just a small percentage of a population participating in a sustained and organized campaign of nonviolent resistance.

Let’s look at just Minneapolis for a moment. Population estimates vary, but according to Minnesota Monthly, in March of last year the combined population for the Twin Cities was 724,630, with Minneapolis being 423,250 and St. Paul being 301,380.

Applying the 3.5% “rule of thumb” here: Minneapolis proper would need 14,814 people to actively protest, and St. Paul would need 10,548.

According to estimates, the amount of people who marched in the massive “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” event on January 23 in Minneapolis was widely estimated to be at 50,000, with some reports even suggesting it was closer to 100,000. Not even one month after that historic and peaceful march of at least 50,000 everyday people—in sub-zero temperatures—border czar Tom Homan declared in a news conference: “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude.”

The population of the United States sits at around 349 million people; 3.5% of that is a little over 12 million. Seven million of us already showed up around the country at the October 18, 2025 No Kings peaceful protests. Imagine what might happen at the next one coming up on March 28? Will we everyday people become Democracy’s 12th man?!

The regime’s mass deportation plan clearly has little to do with deporting the “worst of the worst.” We can have a dream, however, with so many of us everyday people standing up and speaking out across the country, in greater and greater and greater numbers—that Trump, Miller, and the rest of the regime will be quickly forced to agree as they did in Minnesota: “We concur that all mass deportation operations conclude.” (And may they concur thusly before spending billions of our dollars creating more unnecessary and inhumane concentration camps.)

From a spiritual perspective, I tend to believe that what we focus on expands. I also believe we are all intrinsically connected. So, even while fighting (nonviolently) against the abhorrent is necessary, I believe it’s important to remember (and I have to remind myself often) that it’s also important, perhaps even more so, to also focus on what we are fighting for.

While standing up and speaking out about the Trump regime and its clearly authoritarian push and inherent ills, we are also standing and nonviolently fighting for: kindness; compassion; empathy; joy; respect; dignity; forgiveness; equality; diversity; understanding; love; a healthy life for ourselves and our loved ones; and a just, equitable, safe, supportive, peaceful, inhabitable world for all.

Wouldn’t we masses of everyday people—which far, far outnumber both those who seek to control us, as well as the small percentage among us who only know hate—agree on most of those ideals?

As former President Barack Obama said in a recent interview:

Right now, we’re being tested, and the good news is, what we saw in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and what we’re seeing in places across the country... has been the American people saying... at least a good number of the American people saying, "We’re going to live up to those values that we say we believe in." As long as we have folks doing that, I feel like we’re going to get through this.

I’m going to conclude here the same way I concluded another piece back in 2020. It was a piece about questioning so-called truth, especially as disseminated by organizations, corporations, governments, etc. It was also, more importantly, about the power of everyday people:

In George Orwell’s all-too-prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the proles are the proletariat who make up 85% of the population of Oceania… In Orwell’s novel, the proles came to represent hope, if for no other reason than the power their sheer numbers represented. Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith observed: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles… If only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.”

Yes, the masses of everyday people have power in any society. Power to do nothing, or power to rise in resistance. We could choose to ignore what is going on before our very eyes, like the mostly 69 million that Mayer mentioned doing so in Nazi Germany before realizing it was too late. Or we can choose to become more and more conscious of our own strength, which is already being evidenced across the country as more and more of us everyday people are standing up and saying, nonviolently and in unison: We Will Not Be Silenced.

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms… some in this room are going to prison—myself included.

Now, it looks like President Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting yesterday in the Washington Post:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

Donald Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

If you’ve studied history—and you know I have—that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

In red states they’re purging voters in blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: Just imitate what Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Adolf Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: Declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, The Washington Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history—and you know I have—that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: It’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: They’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 right-wing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare—real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated—become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: They’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out—and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting—whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended—just temporarily—to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump—and their toadies like Corsi, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard—decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon-rapist-insurrectionist president in the past.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives—Democratic and Republican—and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.

When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, critics predicted backlash. He’d be too Spanish. Too political. Not “American” enough. The assumption was that in a country this polarized, cultural borders were fixed—and he stood on the wrong side of them.

Instead, one of the largest audiences in National Football League history tuned in. Streams surged. Album sales climbed. Millions of viewers who didn’t understand every lyric found themselves moving anyway.

Maybe nothing flipped overnight. Maybe hardened partisans didn’t suddenly renounce their politics. What happened was subtler—and more powerful. The borders didn’t collapse. They became more permeable. How did Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio pull that off?

His Music Is a Joyful Invitation, Not a Grievance

Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico has endured over 400 years of exploitation. And yet his music is uplifting; his community feels resilient, not defeated. Political messaging, especially among progressives, often starts with what communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio describes as, “Boy, have I got a problem for you.” Bad Bunny flips the sequence. He invites us to dance first. To celebrate music and food and love and family. It feels like the greatest party on Earth.

Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization.

When I told my husband to check out Debi Tirar Más Photos, Bad Bunny’s Grammy Album of the Year (the first Spanish language winner ever), he was reluctant. The next day, though, the album was blasting through the house. The music is so accessible because there’s something for everyone. Even within a single song, he moves across genres and generations. Having grown up in the Bronx, I was drawn to the salsa rhythms of “Baile Inolvidable.” But then the dembow pulse of “Tití Me Preguntó” had me moving too—despite years of thinking that I didn’t like reggaeton because it all sounded the same. Bad Bunny’s music loosened assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying.

He Uses Curiosity as a Teacher

Viewers who tuned in for the spectacle of the halftime show noticed people dressed as sugar cane plants, workers climbing electrical poles, empty white plastic chairs scattered across the stage. What did it mean? I know I wasn't the only one burning a hole on the internet that evening. People don’t resist information they discover themselves, especially if they’re being entertained.

Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization: the dismantling of Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy; environmental catastrophes; and gentrification driven by tax breaks for wealthy developers. The result: a diaspora in which 2 out of 3 Puerto Ricans now live off the island.

That’s not persuasion through argument. It’s softening through exposure.

His Call to Connect Counters the Us-Versus-Them Narrative Used to Divide Us

Bad Bunny’s music is more than about Puerto Rico. It’s about countering the fear and anger-mongering being used to pit us against each other. The deliberate cultivation of suspicion that someone else is taking what’s yours—when the real plundering is happening from the top.

His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.

Instead, Bad Bunny’s jumbotron message called on people to view each other through a loving lens instead of a hateful one. Former President Barack Obama praised the performance for conveying a simple message: There is room for everyone here. Contrast that to Turning Point’s All-American Halftime Show, the alternative created for those who preferred a narrower definition of who is an American.

Some observers have compared Bad Bunny to John Lennon who also insisted that love could be politically disruptive. Lennon’s “Imagine” wasn’t about changing policy; it was a call to picture the world differently. That imaginative shift is what unsettles power. Fear-based politics relies on narrowing who counts, on who gets to define the nation. Benito is all about expansion.

He Doesn’t Shrink to Widen His Audience

The NFL executives may have worried that Americans wouldn’t understand Bad Bunny if he didn’t sing in English, but he refused to change himself to accommodate a fractured country. He made the audience stretch instead. (Duolingo reported a 35% surge in Spanish learners following his show.) Understanding doesn’t always begin with translation. It can begin with proximity.

The anger directed at Bad Bunny, writes journalist Jim Heath, is about losing control over identity. “Latino culture is framed as divisive,” writes Heath, “only because its permanence challenges an older mythology about who America is.”

Changing Heart and Minds

We often assume persuasion begins with argument—that we must win debates before we can win anyone over. But most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that. His work is an invitation: to learn about his culture, to experience joy together, to recognize how much we share. Not to contort ourselves to fit in, but to widen the circle without losing who we are. And before long, we’re dancing beside people we were warned to fear.

His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.

That’s how movements grow.

Our government should make life better for all people. Local and federal elected leaders should ensure we all have enough to eat, a roof over our heads, the opportunity to learn and grow, and access to care when needed.

Instead, Congress cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and nearly $200 billion from food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while committing a staggering $85 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This administration has chosen to fund fear over food, detention over dignity, and the interests of billionaires over the well-being of working people.

In the shadow of this federal failure, there’s a hopeful truth emerging in cities and states across our country: When communities act in solidarity, they can reclaim government and transform it to serve the people.

This is evident in the work of countless community organizations, including Chicago-based Equity and Transformation (EAT). EAT creates space for working people across race and language to take action to advance collective worker safety and justice.

Housing, public transportation, public schools, healthcare, and food are the foundations of a dignified life, and must be guaranteed for all.

Thanks in large part to EAT’s community organizing, Cook County has established permanent funding for guaranteed income. This vital work can serve as a protective non-carceral form of community support that addresses some of the economic harm and exclusion EAT’s members face. Especially for communities disproportionately harmed by the violence of policing, a basic guaranteed income can provide material stability that helps ensure essential needs, healthcare, housing, and food are not trade-offs, and that acts as a buffer against criminalization and the trauma of overpolicing.

Now, EAT is scaling its Cook County win, leading a statewide campaign for a permanent guaranteed income program that would support all SNAP-eligible households. The Illinois Future Fund Act would direct 25% of cannabis tax revenue toward direct cash assistance of $500 per month to SNAP-eligible residents in communities disproportionately impacted by decades of drug war policing. If passed, this legislation would be a step toward progress and show Illinois's commitment to using public resources to make people’s lives better.

A Blueprint for a Government That Works for All of Us

We are clear about what's at stake at this moment and what leaders are being asked to do. Leaders of community organizing groups are being asked to meet the pressing needs of their members as services and benefits are cut, fight government overreach as police and ICE target their neighbors, and continue demonstrating that solidarity is central to building the country we want.

Marguerite Casey Foundation is committed to staying in lockstep with grant recipients like EAT and remaining clear about the role of funders supporting grassroots leadership as their communities create a new blueprint for how the government should work.

So, how can we scale this solidarity through the work of community organizing groups and ensure policy choices improve the lives of residents?

1. Create a universe of public goods that belong to all of us. Housing, public transportation, public schools, healthcare, and food are the foundations of a dignified life, and must be guaranteed for all. We have seen global proof that access to public goods reduces poverty and precarity. It’s time our public dollars are used for the public good across our country.

2. Hold corporations and lawmakers that are exploiting our communities accountable. Those who make policies that starve our schools, close our hospitals, and detain our loved ones always find another billion dollars for corporate subsidies and surveillance giveaways. We must create penalties for those who are stealing from the poorest and whose fortunes are built on systems of harm.

3. Continuously practice a politics of solidarity. For Marguerite Casey Foundation, acting in solidarity means using our endowment to surge funds to frontline groups like EAT. Philanthropy’s resources are meant for moments like this. For EAT, it means organizing not just for services but for the power to define and deliver on solutions.

How to Help Build Solidarity Through Community Organizing

If you are a funder, building real solidarity means moving beyond transactional grantmaking. Funders must support bold and creative actions, not only by funding larger efforts but by standing with our partners when they take risks to protect their communities. Solidarity also requires us to bring more than money to the table. We should leverage all of our resources, from our extensive networks to our role as institutional investors, and be intentional about activating those assets in ways that generate momentum to meet the urgency of this moment.

If you are a nonprofit leader, ask for what you need and refuse to settle. Urge funders to meet this moment with courage and capital to fuel the bold experimentation needed. Can they give more, commit to multiyear grants, frontload payments, reduce reporting hurdles, provide no-interest loans, or organize pooled funds with their colleagues in philanthropy to raise the resources needed to fully fund your initiatives?

And if you’re not a funder or nonprofit leader, find an organization to support with your money, time, and talent.

Local organizations building community power are mapping a new way forward in these dark times. They are proving that the government can and must keep its promise to improve people’s lives—to be a means to collective thriving. Nonprofits, funders, and community members, acting in solidarity, can make this promise real.

The Trump administration has largely abandoned the subtle covert coup of the past in favor of much blunter and more exposed overt overthrows. It turns out, though, that there are many ways to forcefully change a regime.

The first is to not change the regime but to do alterations. That is what was done in Venezuela, where the regime was left in place, but alterations were made to make it pliable to US demands. The US operation in Venezuela was a decapitation that removed the head of the government while leaving the government. The president was replaced by the Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, who was forced to execute US policy first with a gun, and then with a gunboat, to her head.

There are unconfirmed reports that when the US captured Maduro, they gave the interior minister, the congressional president, and Rodríguez “15 minutes to respond, or they would kill us.” Once she “responded” and was sworn in as acting president, President Donald Trump warned that the US is “ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so” and that if Rodríguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” First the gun, then the gunboat. Then Rodriguez was told that all American demands had to be fully implemented before the United States would allow Venezuela to pump another drop of oil.

In Cuba, the Trump administration believes that military intervention of the Venezuela type won’t be necessary because “Cuba looks like it is ready to fall.” Already cut off from its Venezuelan oil supply, Cuba’s fall can be precipitated by cutting its final energy lifeline. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA—ZERO!, Trump announced, “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” With that, Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba. “Now there is going to be a real blockade. Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming,” the US Charge d’Affairs in the US Embassy in Havana told his staff.

If the protests fail to bring about regime change, perhaps the air and sea power that is massing near Iran will.

The result is a humanitarian disaster. The spokesperson for the secretary-general of the United Nations has said that “the secretary-general is extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, which will worsen, if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” That is not an accident but the plan: That is what Trump meant by “BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” On February 16, Trump told reporters that Cuba “should absolutely make a deal, because it’s really a humanitarian threat.”

Starvation is being used as a deliberate tool for regime change in Iran as well where US sanctions have caused an economic crisis that drove Iranians to the streets to demand economic reforms the government was incapable of making without the lifting of sanctions. It was clear, though, that the terms for lifting the sanction posed a threat to the existence of the nation and the regime. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that “President Trump ordered… maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed… this is why the people took to the street…This is economic statecraft… Things are moving in a very positive direction.” Bessant told the Senate Banking Committee that “what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country… the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

But the US did more than cause the protests: They aided them. Calling for regime change, Trump promised, first to protect the protesters, then to help them. And aid them they did. Though the US has denied Iran’s accusations that they aided the protests, it is now known that they did. After the Iranian government shut down the internet in an attempt to disrupt protesters, the US smuggled around 6,000 Starlink satellite-internet kits into Iran to help the protesters stay connected and in touch.

And if the protests fail to bring about regime change, perhaps the air and sea power that is massing near Iran will. The force gathered in the region is already bigger than the one gathered for US Operation Midnight Hammer that bombed Iran’s civilian nuclear cites last June. There are now two aircraft carriers in the region. They are accompanied by guided missile destroyers, cruisers, submarines, hundreds of fighter jets, and ballistic missile defense systems. If using sanctions for starvation and protests fails to bring about regime change, plan C is bombing Iran.

Regime change in Iraq is taking yet another form: economic blackmail to influence the choice of leader. Iraq’s latest election produced a struggle to form a coalition. It looked like former Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, could emerge as the leader. Then Trump took to Truth Social: “I’m hearing that the Great Country of Iraq might make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister... That should not be allowed to happen again. Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq…” The US then threatened that, if Iran-allied groups, like Maliki’s party, are included in the government, the US would target the Iraqi state, including blocking Iraq’s access to its own oil revenue.

The same regime influencing plan of using the threat of withholding economic aid if the candidate acceptable to America is not chosen was used in Honduras where Trump told Hondurans that if they vote for the wrong candidate, they will face economic abandonment. “If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive,” Trump said, “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.”

Similar interference has been employed in the choice of leader in Haiti, though the ominous consequences were more ambiguous than the withdrawal of economic support. In Haiti, a majority of the Presidential Transition Council signed a resolution to replace the prime minister. Though the Organization of American States says that decision “rest[s] with Haitian leadership,” the US Embassy in Haiti says it considered the resolution “to be illegal” and warned that “the corrupt politicians” who signed the resolution will “pay the ultimate price.” Accusing the signatories of “support[ing] violent gangs and sow[ing] terror in the country,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared that, “The US would consider anyone supporting such a disruptive step favoring the gangs to be acting contrary to the interests of the United States, the region, and the Haitian people and will act accordingly.”

There seems to be a lack of imagination at the State Department, where the only way to negotiate is to negotiate with a gun to your interlocutor’s head. But there seems to be no lack of imagination about ways to hold the gun to your interlocutor’s head.

The US Department of Education recently withdrew its unlawful directive that would have restricted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and universities nationwide. The guidance was framed as an attempt to enforce “neutrality” in education. In practice, it would have narrowed how institutions identify and address inequity, discouraging efforts to create learning environments that reflect the realities of an increasingly global student population.

That national debate can feel abstract, just another skirmish in a broader culture war over higher education. But equity is not abstract. It lives in the quiet mechanics of institutions: who gets seen, who gets filtered out, and which barriers are treated as incidental rather than structural. I am reminded of this not by a court ruling or federal directive, but in the ordinary work of teaching and mentoring students from around the world as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It shows up during office hours, committee meetings, and the quiet moments when institutional rules do their work.

Americans are fluent in a familiar story about immigration: Immigrants come to the United States for opportunity—better education, better jobs, better lives. That story is not wrong. But it is incomplete. What is talked about far less is how immigrants improve the institutions they enter, often by exposing the limits of systems that were never designed with them in mind.

Case in point: Like many graduate programs, ours used procedures that filtered out applicants who had not paid an application fee before faculty review. When they failed to pay, I was never supposed to see their application. The fee, common by US standards, was prohibitively expensive in some local currencies. Until I learned about that procedure, I hadn’t fully appreciated how many judgments about who “belongs” in graduate school happen long before any evaluation of research potential or intellectual fit. Once I understood the implications of that policy, I advocated to have it amended, and a student I would never have otherwise met was later admitted and enrolled.

The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.

That experience crystallized something for me. The student’s presence highlighted how even well-intentioned programs can struggle to value ways of thinking they were never designed to account for. The student, meanwhile, navigated those gaps with a practicality that exposed where the system itself needed adjustment.

The same design logic operates across American institutions that confuse neutrality with fairness. Even institutions that are equity forward, including my own, must navigate a shifting and often constraining federal landscape, making progress real, but necessarily incomplete.

This kind of exclusion is not unique to admissions policies. Across higher education, international students routinely navigate US systems calibrated to financial, cultural, and administrative norms that quietly penalize difference. More than 1 million international students are enrolled in US colleges and universities, and an analysis from the Association of American Universities estimates that international students contribute nearly $44 billion to the US economy annually. Yet research consistently shows that international students experience higher levels of social isolation than their domestic peers.

From a public health perspective, these barriers are not incidental—they are risk factors that function as chronic stressors. Uncertainty around visas, financial precarity, cultural dislocation, and exclusionary policies shape mental health and academic persistence long before a student ever sets foot on campus. Research shows that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality among international students have risen sharply over the past decade, even as access to culturally responsive mental health services remains uneven.

In public health, we name these design failures plainly: policy choices—not personal deficits. Improving the experience of international students is less about individual support than about whether institutions are willing to change the conditions they create.

What struck me most, though, was not my student’s resilience in the face of these barriers, but what institutions gain when those barriers are confronted. They were adept at finding workarounds where institutions offered only walls—and unapologetic about pointing out the walls. That resourcefulness did not just help them navigate the system; it revealed where the system itself needed to change.

The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.

We often talk about immigrants as beneficiaries of American opportunity. But in higher education, healthcare, research and beyond, immigrants are also architects of institutional improvement. They expose inefficiencies, challenge inherited assumptions, and force clarity around what we actually mean by merit.

Immigrants make up a disproportionate share of the US healthcare workforce, including physicians, researchers, and direct-care providers—roles that are essential as the country grapples with workforce shortages and widening health inequities.

Opportunity is not a one-way transaction. Institutions that welcome immigrants while resisting the changes their presence demands are not neutral—they are extractive.

Some people change institutions not by asking for permission, but by refusing explanations that don’t make sense. The question isn’t whether immigrants benefit from coming to the United States—the evidence is clear. The more uncomfortable and more important question is whether institutions are willing to reckon with how much they benefit from immigrants, and whether they are prepared to change to welcome them.

In early February, the barbarians reached my gate. There could be no more comfort or denial here on this island where I live. The masked thugs were roving through a town just across the water, a short ferry ride away, harassing and arresting long-time residents.

I was shocked, but not surprised. What do we do now? Yes, we all knew they were coming, still….

I was raised in the post-World War II “it can’t happen here” era. Hadn’t my parents’ generation crushed the Nazis for all time? While we’d been taught that democracy, like a faith or a marriage, did need tending, we had mostly taken it for granted. Yes, I did understand that life as I had lived it was under attack, but there was still, I thought, some time to respond.

The Republicans would come to their senses, right? They weren’t the Germans of a past era. The monster would sooner or later be brought down. And yes, he was bad, but he certainly wasn’t Hitler. And he looked so sickly. Eventually, the court system would kick in or the Epstein files would produce the Big Bang, whatever that might be. This was America, for God’s sake. We didn’t deserve to go down like this.

I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability.

Like most of my friends, I’d been thinking of little else for much too long and talking about it incessantly in a tone of wonder. Can you believe this shit? Yet living here on my island allowed me the destructive luxury of refusing to understand that we were all Minneapolitans, no matter where we were, even if our portfolios kept rising. Sure, we felt anxious and depressed, were wary of Trumpish neighbors, more generous donors to liberal causes, and active consumers of the media, but we were able to deflect the dangers, given our blind belief that being right was the best defense.

And I had an extra advantage: I was protected by a moat.

Shelter Island is a 28-square-mile town near the eastern end of New York’s Long Island in a region called the East End. It’s surrounded by water, but accessible by ferries from Greenport to the north and North Haven to the south. A third of the island is a protected nature conservancy. There are no street lights. The population in winter is around 3,000, which triples in the summer with tourists and second-home owners.

I’ve owned a home here for more than 30 years and lived here full-time for almost a decade, just about the right amount of time to appreciate the local mythology without entirely absorbing it—that Shelter Island is a quasi-independent republic, populated by rugged individualists who take care of their neighbors, especially seniors, through volunteer organizations (including a fire department and ambulance corps), while stoutly eschewing the glamorous greed of the nearby Hamptons.

It’s not been hard to feel above this country’s recent rush toward autocracy. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the island has been revising its sensibility in some progressive ways. For example, when I first arrived here in the 1980s, Shelter Island’s early history as a place of enslavement and provisioning for the slave trade was not a topic of polite conversation. Now, Sylvester Manor, once one of the earliest and northernmost slave plantations in this country, is internationally known for research and the preservation of slave remains and artifacts. It is also an integral local pillar through its educational farm.

The Pharmacy

It wasn’t until last year that I even realized just how vulnerable this island was to the whims of wealth and power. Yes, rich people routinely built houses and renovated hotels on the island that violated local zoning rules and they got away with it. But it wasn’t until one of our very own oligarchs casually betrayed our trust that I realized just how naïve we had been.

The Soloviev Group, one of the nation’s largest property owners, particularly of agricultural land, had bought a number of buildings on the island, including an iconic hotel, several stores, and the only pharmacy. Town officials mostly applauded the newcomers as “saviors.” Thanks to them, there would be an injection of money and jobs that would cover up the failures of those officials to come up with a comprehensive plan for taking care of Shelter Island, installing affordable housing, and protecting the water supply. They wouldn’t have to raise taxes, already low by regional standards.

“Shelter Island is like a womb,” said Stacey Soloviev, the ex-wife of Soloviev Group CEO Stefan Soloviev and the company’s cheery local face. “You feel very good when you come to Shelter Island.”

And for a while, the Solovievs did indeed go about their business on the island quietly feeling good without doing much good. Their parent corporation was busier. It tried and failed to build a gambling casino in midtown Manhattan. It negotiated with a nearby town to create a large residential development that would include a luxury spa. And then, out of the blue, in a stunning move with little notice, it suddenly shuttered the local hotel and closed the pharmacy, the only dispenser of medicine for a population that (like me) skewed elderly.

Like most Shelter Islanders, I was furious. As a board member of the town’s Senior Citizens Foundation, a support group for municipal senior services, I understood what an existential problem this could pose for people with limited mobility and resources, which just happens to be a large part of the population.

Us and Them

I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability. Our compassion, our tendency toward basic decency, our belief in fairness and equality were an enormous disadvantage in the battle against Trumpism, as was the faint shame so many of us felt for what seemed like a righteous posture, a sense of simply being better than those MAGA voters, handicapped as they were by manufactured fear and distinct inferiority complexes.

As for those super rich and intricately well-connected guys like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, they were just more intellectually refined models of the genuine nightmare of our world, Donald Trump!

Sadly, of course, like so much else, it was even more complex than that. The rich guys were acting out of their best interests and were not even secretly ashamed, while the rural poor who had played such a role in getting us into this mess with their votes in 2016 and 2024 had not acted malevolently. They were flailing against a society that had ignored their needs.

And I was finally becoming truly woke myself.

As long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost.

In late January, while I was still wallowing in rage at the closing of that pharmacy, a massive snowstorm hit the island. I was sitting in my warm house watching three Latino men wrestle with the foot of snow outside that held me hostage. I knew and liked them from past work, but I had no idea what their citizenship status was (or wasn’t), though I could imagine them becoming targets of the same sort of gang of thugs terrorizing Minneapolis and making sporadic forays into the East End. I assumed, of course, that I was safer than they were. But maybe that was only true for now. After all, out in Minneapolis, white American citizens were being executed—“cruel and unusual punishment”—for bearing witness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Only a day before that Island snowstorm, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, had been gunned down in Minneapolis for observing and recording masked ICE agents too closely and trying to help a female protester they had assaulted. He should have known better. After all, two weeks earlier, poet and mother of three Renee Good had been killed for a similar “offense” in the same city.

The Vigil

A week later, on an 18°F night, we Shelter Islanders held a vigil in front of the community center.

Such a passive demonstration evokes both pathos and courage. It’s pathetic in the sense that nonviolence always seems weak in the face of blatant Trumpian-style aggression, however brave it may, in fact, be in its restraint and promise of commitment. In the long run, however, it is also the strategy most likely to succeed. The campaigns for civil rights and women’s rights provide the best historic lessons about that reality: Just keep coming out and ultimately the secret police and the criminal lunatic who sent them will get the message.

Because of that, I felt very proud that night of my 70-odd neighbors at the vigil, including the local Presbyterian pastor who read the names of the 32 people who had died in ICE custody last year. Most of them had Latino names, a grim reality which obscures for all too many whites the degree to which everybody remains in danger. I remembered that the killer thugs of 1964, the Ku Klux Klan, in their campaign to intimidate resistance and suppress Black voting, killed two young white men, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with their Black fellow civil rights activist, James Chaney. As then, it was the killing of whites that got national attention, the bad guys’ intent.

By the night of that vigil, the early tutorials about dealing with ICE—including reminding people of their right not to speak to agents or allow them to search their homes and cars without a judicial warrant—seemed almost quixotic. After all, President Trump’s belligerent rhetoric had clearly set the stage for them to disregard both our rights and court orders. More important now, according to an activist friend I called in Minneapolis, was organizing groups to lower the vulnerability of people who might otherwise be prime targets of “our” secret police—drive them to work sites, do their shopping, and act as their lookouts. The shrilling of warning whistles, he said, had become the soundtrack of resistance to the totalitarian goons.

Arrests at the Gate

As the media has shrunk from its responsibility to bear witness and inform (while also shrinking in size), the involvement of everyday people (who might not yet be directly affected by the crisis) becomes ever more critical—as is sending money to legal defense groups. That need became even more apparent to me one early weekday morning in early February when ICE raided a line of cars waiting at the North Ferry terminal in Greenport, New York to come to our island for their jobs. Three men were arrested, all long-time residents of the area, none with criminal records (other than alleged illegal entry from Mexico many years ago). One of them, Hugo Leonel Ardon Osorio, was on his way to work at Marcello Masonry on the island. My wife and I remembered him from the crew that had rebuilt our driveway several years ago.

The next week, the snows returned and so did the three men who had cleared it away the last time around. I was happy—and relieved—to see them again.

Make no mistake: The barbarians are still at the gates. The Shelter Island Town Board has been holding meetings to determine what to do if they come across the water and land on our island. Will our local police department cooperate with them in any way? Will ordinary citizens be restricted in their demonstrations? Will the school lock its doors to ICE? (On the day ICE breached that ferry line, a quarter of Greenport’s students stayed away from school.)

The barbarians are now coming for most of us. Their mission has extended well beyond deporting some brown-skinned people. They’re trying to convince all colors that resistance is futile, that Trump is all-powerful, and that a totalitarian government with him as its head is inevitable.

And as long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost. I know that my whistle and enhanced wokeness won’t be anywhere near enough. And I don’t have a plan yet, other than to stay the course, fight despair, support the most vulnerable, and preach to the choir that they—that all of us—should hang tough.

President Donald Trump has declared that he has “won affordability.” In his State of the Union speech, he even bragged that he’s bringing costs “way down on healthcare and everything else.“

In reality, the Trump administration is making it much harder for working families to both meet their daily needs—and to fulfill their long-term dreams of higher education.

The Republican tax-and-spending plan adopted last year—the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—includes huge tax giveaways to the rich, paid for with deep cuts to programs for working people. The Congressional Budget Office expects 7.5 million Americans to lose their Medicaid insurance and 4 million to lose some or all of their SNAP food aid benefits.

Slashing these public assistance programs will make it even harder for working families to save money for college. In fact, the same tax law also includes an overhaul of critical federal student aid programs that will destroy many young people’s dreams of pursuing higher education—again, all to finance tax breaks for corporations and the rich.

President Trump didn’t even mention student aid in his State of the Union address. But this issue is central to the health of our union. It’s about whether we as a nation believe working families deserve opportunity—or just survival.

This problem is not abstract to me. It’s personal. I am a first-generation college student and now a doctoral student. My hard-working Black family and my broader community poured everything they had into me because they believed—against every obstacle—that education could be my ladder up.

Federal student aid programs like Pell Grants and the Grad Plus subsidized loan program helped me as I struggled up that ladder. It still wasn’t easy. I worked two part-time jobs and still could barely make ends meet. But without that help, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Now, the aid programs that I’ve depended on are under attack. Students are facing tighter borrowing limits and dramatically reduced repayment options, making it even more difficult to get out from under heavy debts. Under the new borrowing caps, the government plans to slash about $44 billion in aid over the next 10 years, affecting roughly 25% to 40% of graduate borrowers.

Making matters worse, the Pell Grant program, which helps more than 6 million low-income students a year pay for college, is facing a potential shortfall crisis. If Congress doesn’t put in new funds, the program’s deficit will skyrocket to $11.5 billion in 2027, and those grants could very well dry up.

Across the country, families who believed education was their way forward are feeling their dreams fade away. I’ve spoken to aspiring and current graduate students who are unsure if staying in school is still an option. I’ve talked to borrowers who fear they will live the rest of their lives crushed by student debt and parents who are worried they’ll never be able to afford to send their babies to college.

President Trump didn’t even mention student aid in his State of the Union address. But this issue is central to the health of our union. It’s about whether we as a nation believe working families deserve opportunity—or just survival. It’s about whether we as a nation value the futures of our young people—or only the futures of billionaires.

Higher education was supposed to be the great equalizer. But if we continue to shortchange student aid, working families will see it as either a hopeless fantasy or a life-long debt sentence.

I’ve grown accustomed to the violence in Palestine; to seeing my brothers and sisters stripped from their homes and taken away from life itself. That violence has always felt close. And yet, with Nasrallah Abu Siyam, it became unmistakable.

Not only was he my age, he was born just miles from my hometown. An American citizen. Living an ordinary life. Dreaming of ordinary things. And still, he was shot and killed by Israeli settlers, simply for helping guard his fam ily’s livestock in the occupied West Bank.

In nearly every way, his life mirrored mine. The only difference was where he stood. And that difference, it seems, was enough.

What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades—one in which violence is routine, accountability is absent, and loss is absorbed without consequence.

Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it.

That pattern is clearest in how these moments of violence unfold. In Mukhmas, the village where Nasrallah was killed, a resident described what happened plainly:

“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets.”

In other words, the presence of the occupying forces did not interrupt the violence; it emboldened it. This is a reality Palestinians have long understood— that the forces ostensibly tasked with “maintaining order” often function instead as a mechanism for enabling and inflicting violence.

Time and time again, Palestinians are left to bury the result.The scale of that violence is not abstract, nor is it disputed.

Between October 2023 and October 2025 alone, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers—229 of them children. That means more than 1 in 5 of those killed were children. In that same span of time, over 10,900 Palestinians were wounded and nearly 21,000 were detained.

And yet, none of this devastation takes place on a battlefield. There is no armed group to point to, no battle to cite. What remains is an occupied territory where civilian death, injury, and detention occur as a matter of policy and practice—not as rare or exceptional events.

By this point, it may sound like a broken record—not just from me, but from years of warnings repeating what the international community has recorded and then promptly ignored. But repetition becomes inevitable when impunity is preserved at every level.

Impunity—that, I must say—does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained through material support, political protection, and deliberate silence. All of which the United States is deeply embedded in: in the weapons supplied, in the cover extended, and in what goes unsaid. When Americans like Nasrallah Abu Siyam—at least six of them in the past two years—are killed under an occupation supported by US authority, and little is said and less is done, that silence becomes a statement in itself.

Put simply, it is a statement of how Palestinian life—American or not—is weighed, and how little that weight has meant in the political world.

No power should have the authority to dictate which lives are expendable—and which are not. Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it. But again, that failure is not abstract. It has a name, a place, and a date.

This piece was originally published on Substack.

The Supreme Court’s decision is clear. The president did not have the authority to impose most of his tariffs.

President Donald Trump argued that, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, his actions were justified because of a national emergency caused by a foreign threat. In the 6-3 ruling, the court said that, on the contrary, that act provides Congress with that authority, which hadn’t delegated it to the president. The tariffs left standing are largely by sector: cars, semiconductors, steel.

Trump, like the infamous honey badger, don’t care.

The president immediately insulted the six justices who ruled against him, calling them “disloyal, unpatriotic” and “lapdogs… for the radical left Democrats.” Then he turned around and reimposed a global 15% tariff rate.

The court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach.

For a lot of countries, that new rate is actually an improvement. Mexico and Canada have faced higher tariffs, at least for products not covered under the existing US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. China, Brazil, and India will also benefit from the court decision. But for countries that negotiated lower rates with the Trump team—Japan, Indonesia—it’s a slap in the face. That should teach them to made deals with the devil.

To justify his reassertion of tariffs, Trump is using another law, which establishes a ceiling of 15% and a 150-day limit before Congress can weigh in. No previous president has invoked this law to impose tariffs. For good reason: its provisions reference not a trade deficit but an “international payments problem” connected to fixed exchange rates and the gold standard, a world that no longer exists. As such, Trump is simply graduating from one illegality to another. It may not be long before Trump dispenses altogether with his misinterpretation of esoteric laws to sanctify his lawlessness.

A sensible president might have used the court decision as an opportunity to jettison an unpopular policy and pivot toward “affordability” in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, as his advisers have been urging. But that’s not Trump’s style. He almost always doubles down in the face of resistance.

And resistance there will be. The court ruling opens up the possibility for companies to file suit against the US government to recover costs associated with the tariffs. In his dissenting opinion, Brett “OG Lapdog” Kavanagh warned that this could usher in a “mess.” Perhaps Kavanagh slept through his econ classes at Yale, because the “mess” was already created by Trump’s chaotic approach to trade in the first place.

Trump’s intransigence will naturally interfere with a court-driven effort to restore a measure of predictability to US trade policy. However, perhaps the court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach. Low approval ratings, pushback by some Republicans against Trump’s federal diktats, intimations of rebellion from countries like Canada: These are signs that guardrails are going back up to protect against a presidential monster truck gone amok.

Tariff Impact

The United States continues to run a huge trade deficit—in goods and services—of roughly $901 billion. There was a slight decline last year—of $2 billion—that amounted to a reduction of 0.2%—a far cry from the 78% decline that Trump has claimed. Worse, from Trump’s point of view, the deficit in goods—which his tariffs were supposed to target—went up 2.1%.

Okay, but hasn’t the United States pulled in a lot of revenue from these tariffs? With an effective rate of 11.7%—the average for the previous two years was 2.7%—tariffs brought in $194.8 billion in 2025. That’s not a small figure. It ends up in the same place as domestic taxes: the US treasury. From there, Congress makes decisions regarding spending (which the Trump administration has, on occasion, unconstitionally ignored).

The more important concern is: Who pays?

The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”

A majority of Republicans believes that foreigners pay the cost of these tariffs. They are just following the president, who argued this week in his State of the Union that “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.”

However, since they apply to goods entering the United States from other countries, it’s actually American importers who pay the tax. That includes car manufacturers that are using foreign-made components, big retailers like Walmart that are selling foreign-made products, and service providers like FedEx that deliver goods across borders.

Ordinarily, US companies will pass on the cost of tariffs to the consumer. And there has been an overall increase in inflation over the last year: an uptick of 2.7% in consumer prices in December 2025 from the year before. The rising cost of autos is a case in point. The average cost of a car hit a new record in December at just over $50,000. And that’s with car companies making the decision not to pass on to the consumer many of the additional costs associated with imported components. Companies are not likely to continue swallowing their losses in 2026.

It’s not just consumers who are paying for the tariffs in the form of higher costs. It’s also American farmers who aren’t selling their soybeans to China because of the reciprocal tariffs that Beijing has imposed. This year, crop farmers in the United States lost nearly $35 billion, though not all of that can be connected to tariffs. The $12 billion the Trump administration has pledged in agricultural assistance this year only goes part of the way to limit the damage.

Recouping Costs

The Supreme Court decision opens up the possibility for companies to sue the federal government to recover some of the costs inflated by the tariffs. According to economists at Wharton, the total could reach as high as $175 billion. If companies went after that full amount, that would leave only $20 billion of the tariff revenues in the federal kitty.

To get the issue to the Supreme Court, thousands of companies, including Costco, Revlon, and Goodyear Tires, had already sued the Trump administration. Ford says that it has lost $2 billion because of the tariffs.

Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve.

The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”

FedEx is the first company to take the administration to the US Court of International Trade after the Supreme Court ruling. This federal court, located in New York, already ruled against Trump’s tariffs back in May, with even Trump’s appointee to the court siding against him. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has also sent Washington a bill for $8.6 billion, the proceeds to be distributed to all of the state’s households.

Trump promised to run the country like a business. But he has more experience navigating bankruptcy than posting genuine profits.

Peak Trump?

The US president is still exercising his erratic unilateralism in the global arena. He continues to threaten Iran with military strikes if it doesn’t bend to his will. He has encircled Cuba with a new embargo covering oil shipments. The Pentagon is still bombing alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with six strikes this month alone.

But the Supreme Court decision is a sign that US institutions are attempting to claw back authority from an overreaching executive. Some Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s insane moves to seize Greenland. CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce are starting to test the waters with mild criticisms of Trump’s economically destabilizing policies. Back in December, the Republican-controlled Senate in Idaho rejected the redistricting plan the Trump administration was trying to push down the state’s throat.

It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood.

The president has abysmal approval ratings. But it’s not so much fear of public disapproval as of Trump’s retribution that has kept critics within his party and in the economic elite in line. Politicians prefer to retire—Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House, Thom Tillis from the Senate—rather than face the outpouring of hate and death threats that Trump unleashes when he wants you out of office.

Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve. China played chicken with Trump over tariffs, and the US president swerved out of the way. The power of the street in Minnesota forced the administration to reduce its Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in the state. And some independent-thinking Republicans are standing firm—Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul from Kentucky.

Trump seems to be growing increasingly erratic. He has threatened Iran with not just a targeted attack but a rapid escalation. He has lashed out against his judicial allies (like Neil Gorsuch on the court). Rather than deal with all the backlash against his heavy-handed approach to the Kennedy Center programming, he decided just to close down the center “for repairs.”

The president’s attention-deficit problems are legendary. His unlimited capacity to insult people goes all the way back to his youth. But his most recent tirades seem to be tinged with desperation, like the tantrums of a child who can’t get out of the crib no matter how much it screams and shakes its rattle.

It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood. The only solution is to take away his toys before he hurts himself and everyone else. The Supreme Court has shown the way.

The use of key security policy terms in public discourse is intended to suggest facts that serve to calm people down. However, there are many reasons for concern that could also trigger peace forces.

The Illusion of a Nuclear Protective Shield

Political scientist and historian Herfried Münkler called for a European atomic bomb as early as 2023. There is currently an increasingly heated debate about whether Germany should seek refuge under France's nuclear protective shield in view of Russia's aggression in Ukraine. The leader of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, Katarina Barley, also raised the issue of acquiring nuclear bombs as part of European armament in 2024. The German and French heads of government, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron, are also paving the way for talks on European nuclear armament and the extension of France's nuclear umbrella, according to Merz in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in early 2026.

There is repeated talk of a nuclear umbrella. The problem is already clear in this choice of words. Such a protective shield, which one would only have to deploy to be protected, does not exist. This term suggests that Germany or even Europe would be protected from attacking missiles with nuclear warheads if the nuclear protective shield were installed. However, there is no protection against dozens of hypersonic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads attacking simultaneously. The few minutes of reaction time are not enough for a successful counterattack.

Anyone who promises a nuclear protective shield in this sense is trying to deceive people about the real danger of a nuclear conflict in order to achieve their actual military-strategic goals.

So-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those who are more knowledgeable know that the term “nuclear protective shield” refers more to the nuclear deterrence of a potential attacker. This deterrence would result from the nuclear second-strike capability if a nuclear first strike is underway or has already taken place. The question here, of course, is whether a nuclear second strike is still possible if the first strike with nuclear weapons could not be repelled. Here, too, the talk of a nuclear protective shield is problematic.

Lowering the Nuclear Threshold Through ‘Tactical’ Nuclear Weapons

The distinction between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons also poses a semantic problem. Here, technological language suggests that there is a clear distinction between the two. Tactical nuclear weapons are weapons that are intended for limited use due to their lower explosive power, shorter range, and deployment. However, the boundaries are fluid, and Russia also considers tactical weapons to be strategic. If this distinction is nevertheless used, the use of more limited (tactical) nuclear weapons could then be viewed fundamentally differently from the use of larger and longer-range nuclear weapons in terms of explosive power.

The conceptual problem is further exacerbated by so-called “mini-nukes.” Thus, the gradation and differentiation of nuclear weapons pretends that a nuclear war could be confined to a regional or local level. This merely lowers the nuclear threshold and thus downplays the risk of nuclear escalation. Incidentally, so-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is therefore also a linguistic distortion and trivialization of a terrible weapon.

Putin's Special Military Operation as a Crude Semantic Deception

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a clear act of war, albeit without a declaration of war. Russia's war against Ukraine, which has now been going on for over four years, has been disguised as a “special military operation.” To this day, the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge the conceptual truth of its war. In doing so, it attempts to downplay the illegality and barbarity of its aggression to its own population and to the world. "Special military operation" sounds more like a clean, technical intervention. Language could not be used in a more manipulative way, considering that hundreds of thousands of people have already fallen victim to this war, millions have fled, and Ukraine's vital infrastructure and ecology have been destroyed.

When people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them.

Equally problematic is the term "Russian world" (Russkij Mir), which Russian President Vladimir Putin uses repeatedly. A Russian world as such does not even exist in Russia, as it is a multiethnic state created by coercion and military force, with very different cultural characteristics among its peoples. Thus, talk of the "Russkij Mir" serves to justify military aggression against other states with the argument that the Russian world and the Russian-speaking people there are under threat.

This ethnically charged term is also the central ideological construct used to restrict the state independence of countries such as Belarus and Ukraine.

Deception Through the Term ‘Nuclear Sharing’

Since Germany is not permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the 2+4 Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NATO has agreed on the principle of "nuclear sharing." However, this term also serves to obscure harsh security policy realities. According to reports, up to 20 US B61-3/4 nuclear bombs are stored in Büchel (Rhineland-Palatinate), combined with German Air Force Tornadoes capable of delivering nuclear warheads to an enemy target.

However, the American nuclear capabilities stored there—and also in other European NATO countries—do not allow for participation by the German federal government. Participation implies the possibility of having a say. But the US government repeatedly makes it clear that the possible use of these nuclear weapons is exclusively subject to the respective US government. This undermines and circumvents the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear sharing among NATO countries, while at the same time obscuring the fact that these weapons are controlled by a foreign power.

Misuse of the Term ‘Modernization’ of Nuclear Weapons

The potential dangers of the "modernization" of nuclear weapons are also being downplayed. The term "modernization" as used in security policy also implies a positive development of nuclear weapons—after all, "modern" represents a positive innovation in language usage—and obscures the increasing danger of these weapon systems.

A particularly problematic aspect of this modernization is the integration of artificial intelligence and the expansion of its functionality within the framework of nuclear strategies. However, AI works on the principle of probability calculation and is extremely prone to error. The information from hundreds of sensors, which an AI uses to make a statement in a very short time, e.g., about attacking nuclear missile swarms, cannot be reliably verified by those responsible in the few minutes of time available. However, this development could make an accidental nuclear war more likely.

War Readiness Versus Defense Capability—the Importance of Conceptual Usage

When German Defense Minister Pistorius says that Germany must become “war ready,” this contradicts the defense mandate of the Basic Law and the prohibition of wars of aggression (GG Art. 26 (1) and 115a). The concept of war includes both defense and attack. Therefore, if the federal government adheres to the Basic Law, it should only talk about and take appropriate measures to become defensible.

War readiness is based on the postulate of military strength through deterrence. Since no state wants to voluntarily face the military superiority of an enemy state or military alliance, that state will devote an increasing share of its national budget to further armament measures in order to surpass its opponent in military strength. This leads to an arms race and—as World War I shows, for example—ultimately to war.

Defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties.

Defense capability means prioritizing military defense capabilities, e.g., with regard to defending against drone attacks, in conjunction with improved “resilience” of critical infrastructure. Even this kind of resilience is currently unachievable for any state. Today's industrialized nations in the digital age are virtually impossible to protect against hybrid attacks, especially hacking of power and heating networks. Anyone who suggests that this is entirely possible creates a false sense of security.

But when people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them. They are deprived of the civil society power to resist their government's risky course. This also characterizes the dilemma of the current peace movement. Although it clearly addresses the dangers of military escalation and nuclear war in its appeals, it does not find the resonance that would actually be expected in the current crisis situation.

Deployment of US Missiles in 2026 as a ‘Security Policy’ of Deterrence

The deployment of three different missile systems, including hypersonic weapons, planned for November 2026, follows the verdict of strength through deterrence. These weapon systems will be stationed in Germany under US command. This was agreed upon between former US President Joe Biden and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the sidelines of the NATO summit in New York in the summer of 2024, without any debate in the Bundestag. The deployment will take place without any accompanying offer of negotiation to Russia. These are so-called "decapitation weapons," i.e., weapons that are not primarily intended for defense, as stipulated in the Basic Law.

In this case, too, it is problematic to speak of "security policy" in relation to the US missile deployment. It could well be that this deployment could increase uncertainty and the risk of escalation for Germany. These weapon systems, which certainly pose a threat to Russia, could become targets for Russian missile attacks, which in turn would trigger a corresponding spiral of retaliation, possibly even nuclear.

But defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties. In this context, building up military defenses and attempting to secure critical infrastructure is entirely necessary and legitimate. However, the planned US missile deployment undermines this defense policy objective. What will Russia do in this case? It should not be forgotten that Russia has already deployed Zircon and Kinschal hypersonic missiles, for example in Kaliningrad, and has already used the Oreschnik hypersonic weapon, which is virtually impossible to defend against, at least twice in the war in Ukraine. If NATO's Western allies are not prepared to renegotiate the disarmament and control treaties, Russia will certainly attempt to expand and upgrade its own arsenal once the US missiles are deployed at the end of 2026.

Conclusion

Disclosing the dangers implied in security policy language in connection with nuclear weapons does not mean defeatism or resignation in the face of an opponent armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons.

However, if people allow themselves to be deceived by appeasing terminology and its use in public discourse on security policy, this leads to a dangerous lulling of these people into a false sense of security. The security policy promises behind this terminology give them a feeling of security that does not correspond to the actual risk when states focus on military armament, in particular the further development of nuclear weapons systems, and military escalation. The disclosure of real dangers is not intended to cause anxiety about security policy and paralysis, but rather to raise awareness of actual dangers as the basis for the priority need for improved defense capabilities, in particular through negotiations and diplomacy.

Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict.

In summary, it can therefore be said that the security policy goal must be defense capability. This also includes a disarmament proposal that has already been mentioned several times, within a framework controlled by the United Nations, that the two major military powers, the US and Russia, should gradually disarm all weapons systems, including nuclear weapons, to the level of the People's Republic of China. In a next step, under the transparent supervision of international institutions such as the UN and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, these three states would have to disarm to the level of smaller states until, for example, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is fully implemented.

This would be an effective and sensible security policy worthy of the name. Even though there are currently major geopolitical obstacles standing in the way of such controlled and transparent international disarmament, this peace-bringing disarmament strategy must not be lost sight of. The trillions that would be saved by all participating states as a result of disarmament and the elimination of further armament could also be a compelling argument for such an internationally coordinated and balanced disarmament strategy, at least in the medium term.

Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict. A security policy that is oriented toward defense capability rather than war capability would also have to use different language. Obscuring terms that are embedded in a context of meaning and semantically designed to conceal rather than reveal military risks are part of a media-mediated military strategy that will not lead to peace.

We started Black History Month with a critical—though potentially momentary—win for Haitian immigrants, specifically those with Temporary Protected Status. Although the Trump administration has appealed the decision, the current pause of the termination of TPS for Haitians has been a moment of reprieve for our community.

In this period of polycrisis, this victory also demonstrated the continued power of community organizing. But, in order to ensure this win is sustained and pushes us toward Black liberation and collective justice, we have to amplify the monumental role of Haiti and Haitians in our shared struggles for equity and justice in the US—past, present, and future. There’s a great deal for us to learn from Haiti and Haitians about collective liberation.

We felt momentary relief with the court ruling on TPS, but the unease we carry was not able to dissipate altogether because we know this government is undeterred from flouting the legal system. Living in limbo is already difficult for TPS holders, but like with all immigrant communities, there is the heightened fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its inhumane and life-threatening tactics, which we see vis-a-vis their modern-day recreations of slave catchers.

Furthermore, Haitians live with another kind of fear—the fear of being both invisible and hyper-visible, but never fully human. This characterization has been deliberate and by design; a punitive response to Haiti’s successful revolt against slavery—the first in the world—and what it set in motion for Black and other colonized people across the world.

When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms.

The paradox of hyper-visibility paired with erasure is part of a larger pattern of anti-Blackness in this country. White supremacists tend to treat Haiti as symbolic of everything they intentionally mischaracterize or misrepresent about Black people, as a pretense to spew racialized anti-Black hatred. The public imagination they craft around Haiti is carefully curated to dehumanize us and to stoke fears around Black people rising up once again. We are an enduring threat to white supremacy and racial capitalism, which is why we continue to be punished and targeted as a people and a country.

This public imagination is exactly what the Trump administration leveraged to spread sensational lies that many Americans went on to accept as factual. It is why our community faces higher detention and deportation rates, and sees disproportionately lower rates of being granted asylum. And, it contributes to why philanthropy has not prioritized sustained giving to Haitian organizations. Even though we face unceasing attacks from the administration that have stripped over half a million Haitians of their statuses, targeted them repeatedly for halts on adjudication for almost all forms of relief, and imposed the most severe forms of travel bans for both non-immigrants and immigrants, we are not seeing a commensurate response to support us from the philanthropic community, to give us a fighting chance against these attacks.

Every day, there is a reminder of our invisibility. Language justice for Haitians is often an afterthought. We regularly have to advocate to immigrant rights organizations and grassroots organizing groups to provide Kreyòl interpretation for webinars, trainings, and materials that are directly applicable to hundreds of thousands of Haitians. Even though Haitian immigrants are the second-largest population with TPS, language access is usually not extended to Haitian TPS holders.

We are routinely rendered invisible by all factions of US society—policymakers, philanthropy, media, and even progressives—and yet we become hyper-visible in moments of crisis, political convenience, or scapegoating. We saw this hyper-visibility in the response to Haitians arriving in Del Rio, Texas, when Border Patrol agents were caught chasing Haitian refugees on horseback in 2021 and in the last presidential election when Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were thrust to the center of Republican political theater vis-a-vis the circulation of blatant misinformation designed to incite anti-immigrant sentiment.

Being left out of—or misrepresented in—mainstream narratives of immigration and American identity has real-life consequences. We feel it in the lack of services tailored to our community, insufficient language access, and more. We see it when we’re treated as an afterthought in immigrant rights advocacy and grossly underfunded compared to other immigrant communities—multiplying the unseen labor of the few Haitian migrant groups that exist. According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Black migrant justice groups received less than 2% of all funding for the movement, 0.04% of funding explicitly granted for Black communities in general, and overall less than 0.01% of all foundation grants given during 2016-2020,” which is why initiatives like the Black Migrant Power Fund—launched to address these gaps—are so crucial in this moment.

Our exclusion has also led to the distortion and flattening of our identity–we are often seen as victims with no agency, our significant present-day contributions have largely gone unnoticed, and centuries-old imperialist policies by the US and France continue to go unchecked despite playing a big role in the ongoing injustices in Haiti.

We reject this single story of victimhood and believe there is an urgent need to platform the pivotal leadership and perspectives of Haitian migrant rights’ leaders advocating for their communities across the region, which is why the Hemispheric Network for Haitian Migrants’ Rights was started. Haitian leaders’ initiatives and organizations are significantly under-resourced, yet they are undeterred in their battle against the anti-Blackness that knows no borders and confronts Haitians at every turn in their migration journeys.

In terms of contributions to the US, Haitian TPS holders alone contribute $5.8 billion to the US economy and pay $1.5 billion in taxes, but this is rarely considered in discussions about Haitian immigrants. Moreover, in our recent report from Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, we shared that through the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) Parole Program, a two-year humanitarian parole program, CHNV immigrants contributed an additional estimated $5.5 billion to the US economy annually through spending alone.

The February 3 verdict offered momentary relief for the 350,000 of us who have TPS status, but we must continue to fight tooth and nail for humanitarian protection. It remains to be seen whether the appellate or Supreme Court will grant the administration’s emergency appeal, and strip so many people of merited and necessary protections. Legislative efforts to protect TPS continue, with a discharge petition proposed by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) with over 155 co-sponsors.

When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms as the next phase of our fight starts up to protect not only TPS, but to advocate for all forms of policy and practice that ensure Haitian migrants can be safe and thrive. Philanthropy must provide sustained support to our organizations because supporting Black migrant communities is a moral and social imperative, particularly for any institution that espouses a commitment to racial justice.

But above all, we must push back against white supremacy and fascism by finally recognizing that how we treat Haiti and Haitian immigrants, and really any group of people who occupy this paradoxical position of invisibility and hyper-visibility in our society, is a barometer of our commitment to collective liberation.

Incompetence will be President Donald Trump’s undoing. The only question is whether he and his minions will undo the nation first. Today’s subject is Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Bondi’s Blunders and Bluster

In her first year, Bondi has established an unprecedented record of destruction in the service of Trump. Servitude is more apt. Here’s a small sample:

• Thousands of experienced attorneys have left the Justice Department. Bondi fired those she deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. Others resigned in protest over her directives, such as investigating the partner of Renee Nicole Good—a US citizen whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota killed—rather than scrutinizing the actions of her ICE killers.
• Bondi has decimated the department’s civil rights division, which historically investigated whether federal officers had used excessive force in killings like Good’s. As division head Harmeet Dhillon turned its mission upside down, more than 70% of its attorneys left. University of Chicago Law School Professor Craig Futterman explained that the Trump administration “is using a division that has a history of protecting the most vulnerable among us to wage an all-out assault on the civil rights of vulnerable people, including Black people, brown people, women, LGBTQIA folk.”
• Across the country, judges are chastising federal prosecutors for defying court orders and are wondering if the problem is incompetence, work overload, or the executive branch’s systematic attack on the judiciary. At least 35 times since August, federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to explain why it should not be punished for violating their orders in immigration cases: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in West Virginia wrote, calling the warrantless arrest and imprisonment of thousands across the country “an assault on the constitutional order.”
• On Capitol Hill, Bondi refused to answer pointed questions and, instead, descended into bipartisan insults of the elected representatives who dared to challenge her. When ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional law professor, told her not to filibuster through his limited time for questioning, she snapped, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser lawyer.” She called Republican Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) a “failed politician” who had “Trump derangement syndrome.”
• Bipartisan outrage grows over Bondi’s incompetent and incomplete production of the Justice Department’s infamous Jeffrey Epstein files. It took Rep. Massie and a handful of fellow Republicans in the House to overcome the opposition of Trump and his congressional allies in forcing legislation requiring full disclosure by December 19, 2025. That deadline came and went before Bondi’s department finally produced files that included victims’ identities. The public learned on February 24 that the Justice Department’s belated 3.5 million-page document dump excluded files relating to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor, according to an NPR analysis and the New York Times.

Bondi’s Backstory

Understanding Bondi’s loyalty to Trump over her oath to uphold the Constitution requires a timeline:

• In November 2010, Bondi was elected Florida’s attorney general. From February 2008 to May 2011, her Office of Attorney General (OAG) received at least 22 complaints regarding Trump University, the Trump Institute, and related entities.
• In August 2013, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Trump, Trump Entrepreneur Institute aka Trump University, and the former president of Trump University for “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal, and deceptive conduct.” The Florida OAG said it was looking at the allegations.
• In September 2013, the Donald J. Trump Foundation made a $25,000 contribution to “And Justice for All,” a political group backing Bondi’s reelection. The donation, illegal for a 501(c)(3) private foundation, was personally solicited by Bondi from Trump.
• In October 2013, the OAG said it would not act on the complaints against Trump University or join the lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general.
• In March 2016, Bondi became the first big-name Republican in the state to endorse Trump in the Florida presidential primary. A week later, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) filed a complaint against the Trump Foundation. Trump representatives admitted to the earlier illegal donation, blaming a series of clerical errors.
• In June 2016, Bondi’s spokesperson told the Associated Press that the attorney general was unaware of the 20+ complaints against Trump entities when she solicited the donation in 2013.
• In September 2016, the Washington Post discovered that Trump had paid a $2,500 IRS penalty for the illegal donation to Bondi.
• In December 2016, Trump announced that he was shutting down his foundation in response to the growing scandal, which now included claims of self-dealing.
• In March 2017, an attorney hired by the Florida Commission on Ethics found: “[I]t may raise suspicions that within a month after the New York Attorney General announced that New York would be filing a lawsuit against Trump University, Donald Trump contributed a total of $25,500.00 to [Bondi] or her organizations. However, in this case, there is no evidence that [she] was involved with the investigation or decisions regarding Trump University.”
• During Trump’s first impeachment trial in January 2020, Bondi was one of his defense lawyers.

Bondi’s Blind Obedience

Announcing Bondi as his choice for US attorney general to replace failed nominee Matt Gaetz, Trump said, “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans—Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime and Making America Safe Again.”

To Bondi, that mission means slavish devotion to Trump and weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, NY Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, six Democratic lawmakers who recorded a message to troops about not following illegal orders, and on and on and on. In some cases, the only check on her abuse of power has been the refusal of grand juries—consisting of ordinary citizens—to issue indictments that she had sought against Trump’s targets.

Bondi has undermined her integrity, defined her legacy, and destroyed the nation’s Justice Department. As with many members of Trump’s cabinet, her incompetence is catching up with her, but it’s taking a toll on all of us.

In the days surrounding an Axios report last week suggesting that a large-scale conflict with Iran was “imminent,” the US surged additional naval forces and air assets into the region, a posture that reports say amounts to the largest buildup of US airpower in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, raising warnings of another potential war in the region.

Since then, congressional Democrats have issued a growing number of statements criticizing the Trump administration’s moves toward war. Yet some critics say that party leadership has emphasized process and consultation over clear opposition to military escalation, leaving individual lawmakers to articulate their own responses. Those responses have ranged from opposing a war outright, to narrower procedural critiques centered on congressional authorization, to tacit or explicit support for President Donald Trump to have the flexibility to go to war.

There currently exists one legislative vehicle in each chamber through which members can express their position. This month, six new Democratic House members have signed onto a War Powers Resolution aimed at constraining President Trump’s ability to deploy US forces without congressional approval, bringing the total to 82. The legislation, led by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), was first introduced prior to the Trump administration’s unauthorized strikes against Iranian nuclear targets last June. The GOP appears to be largely unified behind a possible war, with Massie being the only Republican House member signed on to the House legislation. Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have introduced a similar effort in the Senate.

Yet despite the resolution’s growing support, Democratic leadership has not clearly rallied behind it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has issued public concerns about Trump’s rush to war, but has not said whether or not he supports the Khanna-Massie bill.

The Democratic Party’s disjointedness in countering Trump’s foreign policy, particularly with regards to Iran, has been evident since before his return to office in 2024.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) statement did not oppose a war, but instead noted the “risks” involved and called for confronting Iran’s “ruthless campaign of terror, nuclear ambitions, regional aggression, and horrific oppression” with “strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity” and urged the administration “to consult with Congress and explain to the American people the objectives and exactly why he is risking more American lives.” Following the Trump administration’s Tuesday briefing to the Gang of 8, Schumer added, “This is serious. The administration has to make its case to the American people," fueling criticism that he was prepared to accept the president’s justifications.

“Leader Schumer’s statements are insufficient. Democratic voters want leadership that’s willing to take a clear stand and oppose the president on major issues like this,” Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, told Responsible Statecraft.

Two recent reports suggest that this lack of pushback could be intentional. A Tuesday story from journalist Aida Chavez’s substack Capital and Empire says top Democrats have worked to block consideration of legislation that would force members to go on record regarding potential military action against Iran.

“The evidence, so far, is that leadership is trying to discourage that vote,” one activist and former congressional staffer familiar with dynamics on the Hill told RS. “And the primary people that serve are the few dozen Democrats whose donors are hawks, but whose voters don’t want regime change war. That’s who the party is trying to protect from having to take a vote, because it's painful for those members to vote against their donors.”

Drop Site News reported last week that some Democrats on the Hill might support pursuing a military intervention in Iran but, understanding a war would likely be politically catastrophic, would rather not go on the record and instead let Trump and the Republicans bear the responsibility and the costs.

“Cynically, Schumer may also have the midterms in mind," the Drop Site report says. “If Trump manages to topple the Iranian government, the ensuing chaos could prove a drag on Trump as the country heads into the November elections.” As a result, party leaders may choose to stand by or tepidly oppose military action as opposed to forcefully weighing in one way or the other. (The Schumer aide who laid out this calculus in the Drop Site story said that the minority leader himself does not subscribe to that logic.)

Two party members have already explicitly said they will not support the war powers effort. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), in a joint statement with GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, said it “would restrict the flexibility needed to respond to real and evolving threats and risks signaling weakness at a dangerous moment.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), meanwhile, told Jewish Insider that the sponsors of the legislation “should just rename it the Ayatollah Protection Act because that’s what it does.”

Some Democratic lawmakers, however, have issued stronger warnings against escalation and pushed instead for a diplomatic solution.

“This recent wave of statements against a potential war is a reflection of pressure coming from both constituents and members within the caucus,” CIP’s Williams said. “There’s an important distinction here: Some lawmakers are making a more legalistic case that the administration hasn’t formally made the case for war, while others are being much more direct about the stakes and consequences of entering into another military conflict.”

Indeed, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), for example, has taken the latter route. “No war with Iran!” she wrote in a post on X. “Trump's illegal warmongering will only bring death and destruction. This is a disaster in the making, and we must do everything in our power to stop it.”

Meanwhile, a joint statement from Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Armed Service Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), and Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee urged a diplomatic approach.

“Diplomacy is the most effective tool available to durably constrain Iran’s nuclear program and reduce the risk of a broader regional war,” they said. “Renewed talks with Tehran show that a diplomatic path remains open, which President Trump should not abandon for a short-term, unauthorized show of military force that leaves Americans less secure.”

The Democratic Party’s disjointedness in countering Trump’s foreign policy, particularly with regards to Iran, has been evident since before his return to office in 2024. The party’s platform that summer criticized the president for his “fecklessness and weakness” when dealing with Tehran during his first term, without mentioning the fact that Trump brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran with the January 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani. In the lead-up to the strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities last June, Schumer released a video accusing Trump of not being hawkish enough by negotiating “side deals” and “folding on Iran.”

Meanwhile, public opinion polling has consistently shown that going to war with Iran is unpopular, especially among Democratic voters. A January poll from Quinnipiac University showed that 70% of Americans, including 79% of Democrats, 53% of Republicans, and 80% of independents opposed military action against Iran if protesters were killed by the government during demonstrations. Trump named the killing of citizens as a “red line” at the height of protests in January, and it has been one of a number of half-baked reasonings for a potential war. A more recent poll from the University of Maryland found that nearly three-quarters of Democrats opposed a war “under the current circumstances.”

In the small town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia where I live, during Israel’s destruction of the Gaza Strip, a Democratic Party activist hung a flag of the state of Israel across the way from the only grocery town in town—so that almost every member of the community would see it.

As if to say—“we stand with the genocide.”

But it’s not just small town Democrats who are clueless.

Take DC Democrats, like former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz.

Was any of this destruction of mosques and olive trees reported in the mainstream news in the United States? Not that we could find. (If you find it, we’d like to know.)

Speaking before the Jewish Federations of North America annual meeting in Washington, DC in November 2025, Hurwitz waved her rhetorical Israeli flag in a speech that went viral on the internet, but pretty much stayed out of the mainstream media.

“So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” Hurwitz said. “And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene.”

Yes you do, Sarah. You sound obscene. But since this is a TikTok free zone, let’s go to the “data and information and facts” you say you want.

On January 29, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran an article under the headline "IDF Accepts Gaza Health Ministry Death Toll of Over 71,000 Palestinians Killed During the War."

“The Ministry’s tally includes only those killed directly by Israeli military fire in its tracking, not people who died of starvation or from diseases exacerbated by the war,” the paper reported.

This after years of Israeli officials saying the Hamas figures were unreliable, untrustworthy, and unbelievable.

And former British Labor Party leader and current Independent Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn pointed out the obvious Sarah—“There’s only one reason the IDF accepts this figure—they know the real number is much, much higher. Palestinians tried to tell the world. Shame on all those who discredited them. By hiding the genocide, you fueled the genocide.”

As we have pointed out repeatedly over the last year in the Capitol Hill Citizen, Israel has killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, not the tens of thousands as now both Hamas and the IDF say. (See for example, "The Vast Gaza Death Undercount: Hamas Says 66,000, It’s More Like 600,000" by Ralph Nader, November/December 2025 Capitol Hill Citizen, page 30.)

As we go to press, Zeteo is publishing a three-part investigation by California surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa titled "The Truth About Gaza’s Dead."

On direct deaths from violence, Sidhwa writes that “the number is likely between 120,000 and 215,000, representing 1 out of every 10 to 18 people in Gaza, but may be significantly higher. It is extremely unlikely that fewer than 120,000 Palestinians have been killed, and it is unlikely that more than 437,000 have been killed directly by US-Israeli military violence.”

Sidhwa is working on a final paper that looks at indirect deaths—deaths from unsanitary conditions, disease, lack of medical facilities, malnutrition, starvation, and exposure to the elements. Epidemiologists often use a ratio of 4 indirect deaths for every 1 direct death in such conflicts, which would place the toll much higher than current reported figures—somewhere in the neighborhood of the more than 600,000 Nader has estimated.

Nor will you see reporting on the fact that Israel has destroyed the vast majority of mosques and olive trees in Gaza.

According to Fayyad Fayyad, the head of the Palestinian Olive Council, Gaza’s olive sector is “almost completely destroyed.”

“There is no olive season this year,” Fayyad told Drop Site News. “We estimate that nearly 1 million of Gaza’s 1.1 million olive trees have been destroyed.”

In 2022, Gaza produced about 50,000 tons of olives. This year, Fayyad said, the total will be well under a thousand.

“The destruction is deliberate,” Fayyad told Drop Site. “Israel aims to eliminate the agricultural sector, including olives. What remains are scattered trees—not groves, not production.”

“The olive trees have become firewood now,” 75-year-old farmer Hajj Suleiman AbdelNabi told Drop Site. “I feel pain with every cut—not just for the loss, but because these trees are life itself. For Palestinians, they are a symbol of steadfastness. When they die, it feels like another disaster.”

According to the Gaza Ministry of Endowments, Israel has also destroyed more than 800 mosques in Gaza—or 79% of the mosques in the Gaza Strip—and completely demolished three churches. More than 150 mosques have been partially damaged.

“The targeting of mosques and places of worship by the occupation forces is a clear violation of all sanctities, international law, and human rights law,” the ministry said. The Israeli army has also targeted 32 of Gaza’s 60 cemeteries, completely destroying 14 and partially damaging 18, the ministry said.

Was any of this destruction of mosques and olive trees reported in the mainstream news in the United States? Not that we could find. (If you find it, we’d like to know.)

And what happens when a Westerner tries to bring this to light?

Let’s take the case of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine.

Last year, the Trump administration placed Albanese on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list—usually reserved for terrorists and money launderers—six days after the release of her report that documents US corporate support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

It was this report—fingering as it does the powerful American corporations and institutions—including Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machines Corporation, Caterpillar, Microsoft Corporation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—that led to the Trump administration sanctioning Albanese.

“Far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid, and now, genocide,” Albanese wrote in the report. “The complicity exposed by this report is just the tip of the iceberg—ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives. International law recognizes varying degrees of responsibility—each requiring scrutiny and accountability, particularly in this case, where a people’s self-determination and very existence are at stake. This is a necessary step to end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it.”

The independent journalist Chris Hedges reports that as a result of the sanctions, Francesca’s assets in the US have been frozen, including her bank account and her US apartment.

“The sanctions cut her off from the international banking system, including blocking her use of credit cards,” Hedges writes. “Her private medical insurance refuses to reimburse her medical expenses. Hotel rooms booked under her name have been cancelled. She can only operate using cash or by borrowing a bank card.”

“Institutions, including US universities, human rights groups, professors, and NGOs, that once cooperated with Francesca, have severed ties, fearful of penalties established for any US citizen who collaborates with her. She and her family receive frequent death threats. Israel and the US have mounted a campaign to get her removed from her UN post.”

“Francesca is proof that when you stand steadfastly with the oppressed, you will be treated like the oppressed.”

“She is unsure if her book—When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine—which has been translated into English and is expected to be released in April, will be distributed in the US.”

Sarah Hurwitz’s obscene narrative?

Or Francesca Albanese’s justice narrative?

You choose, America.

This article ran in the February/March 2026 print edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen. To get a copy of the print newspaper, go to capitolhillcitizen.com)

Each day, I read more news about children as young as two years old who are detained in a for-profit Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Dilley, Texas, away from their friends, schools, and communities. I see reports of handwritten letters from children asking to be released, as they describe the fear they experience day in and day out while in detention. As an applied developmental scientist who spent more than 13 years studying child and youth development, as well as someone who has firsthand experienced the horrors of encountering immigration enforcement and the inhumane treatment and conditions that follow, I am deeply concerned for children impacted by immigration enforcement surges.

There is no shortage of research that demonstrates the connection between family detention and deportation proceedings of children and negative educational outcomes, elevated levels of distress, mental and physical harm, trauma, and decline in multiple aspects of well-being. Currently, approximately 1 in 12 children in the US face risk of deportation of a loved one and the lasting negative impacts on their psychological and physical well-being. ICE has detained at least 3,800 children since mid-January 2025. Of those 3,800 kids, more than 600 unaccompanied children have been put in custody of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and were taken from their parents in many cases.

Regardless of my role as researcher, on a human level I am constantly thinking: What do children feel when they first encounter immigration enforcement, who are usually armed and masked? Do their little bodies tremble or freeze? What happens when federal agents take their parents away from them? What does it mean for a preschooler to be detained? What is their crime? Is it being born or, perhaps, seeking asylum? What sense of childhood remains when immigrant children are detained in inhumane conditions?

What I experienced as an adult paints enough of a bleak picture. As a 30-year-old, I was unlawfully abducted from the street by masked and armed agents for being a co-author in a school op-ed at Tufts Daily that advocated for Palestinian human rights. I was sent to a for-profit ICE prison thousands of miles away from school and the community I’d built in Boston, not to mention thousands of miles away from my family in Turkey. The experience has been profoundly harmful to me, even as an adult. Despite the immense care, love, and support from my community, there has still not been a single day when I have felt safe walking the streets again—not even on my way home or to school. It’s not just the moment of abduction that is terrifying, but also where one will go and the inhumane treatment they may face that cannot be considered developmentally appropriate for any single child. Research suggests that interacting with the immigration system poses harm to children’s long-term development. Previous personal accounts indicate that suffering continues throughout the lifetime.

We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?

As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again. I worry about how they will grow up and carry this adverse experience for a lifetime. Interacting with immigration enforcement not only poses developmental risk to children detained in those shameful places for longer periods of time, but also to children (including citizen children) whose parents are detained at the for-profit ICE prisons. In the for-profit prison where I was unlawfully detained, I met countless mothers who cried everyday longing for their children. I met mothers in the deportation process whose hearts were shattered when their children were taken into foster care. I listened as some mothers tried to speak with their children on tablets, only to have officers order them to close the tablets or take them away, leaving their children in tears. I met mothers whose babies were taken from them just weeks after birth. I met with a pregnant mom waiting for her deportation. Her children are American citizens.

But these cruel immigration raids aren’t only harming immigrant children or children with immigrant parents. The experience also affects classmates who are waiting for their detained peers to return. These same children are trying to make sense of what they see on news reports of kids being detained, of disappearing classmates, students, and adults on the street during ICE raids. Children and their teachers are being taken from their communities, leaving classrooms and communities in fear. There are accounts of BIPOC and immigrant children being bullied at school.

We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?

I hope there is an end to family detention so that these parents and young children can proceed with their cases while living in their communities, going to school, getting medical treatment, and playing with their friends. Too many children are facing detention because of ICE’s rampant operations. But detention is no place for a child. It’s cruel and unnecessary. We can all take action, whether that means raising our voices to demand an end to child detention, or simply educating ourselves on how current immigration policies are impacting children.

Late last month, the US Department of Justice published 3.5 million pages about convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

On top of the grotesque and horrifying photos and emails that appear to offer more evidence of systemic and widespread child abuse, the Epstein files revealed further allegations of his ties to Israel and its intelligence agency Mossad.

The Epstein-Israel revelations have been covered at length by independent and overseas media outlets:

• “The Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building” that Epstein managed (Drop Site News, 2/18/26). Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli spy Yoni Koren were frequent guests at the apartment, and Rafi Shlomo, then-director of protective service at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, “controlled access to the apartment for guests, and even conducted background checks on cleaners and Epstein’s employees.”
• An informant told the FBI he “became convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent” (Middle East Monitor, 2/8/26).
• Epstein emailed Barak in December 2018: “You should make clear that I don’t work for Mossad :)” (Dissident, 2/2/26). Barak responded, “You or I?” Epstein replied, “That I don’t :).”
• Epstein emailed Barak twice in November 2017 (London Times, 2/8/26): “Did Boies ask you to help obtain former Mossad agents to do dirty investigations?” and “Boies said he got to the Mossad guys through you? True? This is getting a lot of press.” Barak responded, “Call me. [Redacted] in Paris.” (Epstein was likely referring to attorney David Boies, who was facing scrutiny at the time for hiring a private firm, run largely by former Mossad officers, to investigate women who accused his client Harvey Weinstein of rape, and journalists trying to expose the allegations—New Yorker, 11/6/17.)
• Epstein’s foundation backed pro-Israel projects like Friends of Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish National Fund, which buys land in Palestine to build settlements (Middle East Eye, 2/7/26).

Adding to Existing Evidence

It is important to note that the Epstein emails contain allegations and intimations, and don’t prove that Epstein was an Israeli agent, formally or informally. However, they do add to the existing evidence that Epstein used his considerable connections and wealth to assist the Israeli state.

The Epstein-Israel ties were reported before the latest DOJ release by various independent media outlets, particularly Drop Site News. Drop Site’s reporting received scant coverage by US corporate media, as I documented at the time (FAIR.org. 11/14/25).

Drop Site based its reporting on a hack purportedly emanating from Iran’s government. The hack’s source seemed to have explained—at least in part—the lack of US corporate media coverage. The latest Epstein-Mossad ties, on the other hand, were uncovered in a release by the DOJ—a more acceptable source by US corporate media standards. (The Justice release confirmed some of the details in Drop Site‘s reporting based on the Iranian hack, such as Epstein’s close ties to the Israeli spy Yoni Koren—Drop Site, 11/11/25; Al Jazeera, 2/9/26.)

And yet only a few US corporate media outlets—most notably Axios, New York magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Atlantic—have referenced the latest Epstein-Israel revelations.

Even then, these outlets cast doubt on the legitimacy of the connections by framing them as conspiracy theories, or conspiracy-adjacent—hardly a surprise, given previous US corporate media coverage.

‘Ample Fodder for Speculation’

Axios (2/3/26) wrote:

FBI source reports and internal emails contain unverified claims and secondhand suspicions about Epstein’s possible ties to Mossad and other intelligence services—material that stops well short of proof, but offers ample fodder for speculation.

A week later, Axios (2/10/26) acknowledged that Barak and his wife “stayed at Epstein’s apartment multiple times from 2015 to 2019,” citing Israeli media reports. Axios‘ Rebecca Falconer wrote that Barak “has said he ‘deeply regrets’ his past relationship with Epstein, and that he never saw nor participated in any inappropriate behavior during their meetings.” Falconer added:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected conspiracy theories peddled online that his longtime political rival Barak’s “unusual close relationship” indicated that Epstein was an Israeli spy.

Although New York features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood (2/6/26) mentioned “former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak” as one of the “seemingly endless list of VIPs” corresponding with Epstein, it warned against looking too hard at Epstein’s ties to the Israeli state by linking an interest in the issue to antisemitism:

The horseshoe nature of the scandal makes it hard to untangle speculation about, say, Epstein’s intelligence ties from the antisemitism that is pervasive in Epstein discourse. “Yes, we are ruled by Satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” announced the YouTuber Candace Owens, who may have been reading the same emails that prompted the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur to post, “To my knowledge no one in legacy media has ever even discussed the possibility that Epstein was Mossad when it is all over the files.”

Right-wing conspiracy theories based in antisemitism (like Owens’) are a toxic form of discourse. But the latest batch of files—and Drop Site’s previous coverage, which Uygur has previously covered—is not hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and does more than just offer “ample fodder for speculation.”

‘Dark Workings of Cabals’

Still, pundits like the Wall Street Journal‘s Barton Swaim (2/11/26) treated questions of Epstein and Israel as necessarily conspiratorial, heaping scorn on “influencers and politicos determined to attribute all bad things to the dark workings of cabals,” and citing how “Tucker Carlson conjectured that Epstein worked with the Mossad to blackmail its enemies.”

And the Atlantic (2/7/26) wrote that, “in death, Epstein has taken on far more significance than he did in life”:

Some Americans were already primed to believe in international pedophilia rings. Bonus points if they were run by wealthy Jews—Jews who were perhaps on the Mossad payroll, as many conspiracists have insisted Epstein was.

Jacob Shamsian of Business Insider (2/14/26) asked whether “there were any truth to the rumored connections to the CIA or the Mossad,” only to hand wave away those connections by citing anonymous sources. Shamsian pointed to “four people who had access to the Justice Department’s files,” who “said there was no trace of intelligence material, which would have been the case if Epstein or Maxwell’s crimes were tied to the CIA or Mossad.”

To Compact editor Matthew Schmitz (Washington Post, 2/12/26), the “scourge of rising antisemitism in recent years has found its latest manifestation in the government’s release of millions of files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” Schmitz referenced “antiestablishment voices” that “have advanced the claim that Jewish networks and interests are corrupting American society.” He lumped together “antisemites on the left and right,” linking Owens and Tucker Carlson with “progressive influencers” Ana Kasparian and Briahna Joy Gray. But Schmitz omitted any mention of Epstein and Barak’s very real relationship.

A Selective List of ‘Powerful Men’

The New York Times, for its part, largely downplayed the relationship between Epstein and Barak, and omitted key context. A Times article (2/5/26) on Epstein’s ties with tech start-ups briefly mentioned that Epstein “suggested to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, that he speak with Mr. Thiel about an advisory role” at Palantir.

The Times quoted a Palantir spokesperson as denying “Epstein ever investing in or being a shareholder in Palantir,” and asserting that Palantir “has never had a business relationship with Ehud Barak.” They failed to mention that Palantir signed its first contract with the Israeli government a year after the Epstein-Barak conversation.

Less than a week later, the Times (2/11/26) wrote that “political score-settling has played a part in the reaction in other countries,” including in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “played up disclosures of emails” between Epstein and Barak.

The Times noted in that piece that “India’s foreign ministry dismissed an email from Mr. Epstein, in which he appeared to take credit for the ingratiating approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a landmark state visit to Israel in 2017.”

The paper omitted the detail that Epstein had connected Barak to Anil Ambani, an Indian billionaire close to Modi, ahead of the trip. Drop Site (1/31/26) reported that the introduction “helped accelerate the burgeoning relationship” between Israel, India, and the US.

More Tangible Ties

The sparse US corporate media coverage of the Epstein-Israel angle sharply contrasts with the extensive reporting of Epstein’s alleged ties to Russia.

Epstein visited Russia at least three times during the 2000s. He maintained a network of recruiters in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, whom he tasked with finding “girls”—often using modeling agencies as a front to traffic them to the US or Europe. He maintained Russian bank accounts and sought investments in Russia.

Although Russia was referenced somewhat more often than Israel in the files—about 5,400 to 4,800 times—Epstein’s connections to Barak were far more tangible than his ties to Russian government figures.

Epstein tried to meet with Putin multiple times, but there is no evidence that he ever succeeded (Washington Post, 2/7/26). Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors, and former Russian government officials, but there isn’t a Russian equivalent to Barak, with whom Epstein shared over 4,000 email messages.

Indeed, Epstein and Barak arranged to meet face-to-face more than 60 times between September 2010 to March 2019. At least seven of these meetings took place while Barak was serving as minister of Defense for Israel (Jacobin, 2/6/26).

‘Might Replace Putin’

At least one email thread even connected Epstein to an anti-Putin dissident. Politician Ilya Ponomarev sent an email in 2011 to Bill Gates’ adviser Boris Nikolic, asking how he could gain access to the World Economic Forum in Davos “to communicate what is going on, so that not only official Putin’s voice is heard.” His email came as Ponomarev was participating in mass protests against Putin and his reelection during the 2011 Russian presidential election.

Nikolic forwarded Ponomarev’s email to Epstein, writing: “We should go soon to Russia and you should meet my friend Ilya Ponomarev,” who he described as the “main organizer of the uprising against Putin.” He “might replace Putin and become a president by himself” if “he does not get killed before,” Nikolic said. He asked how Epstein could help, “not with Davos but with the other stuff in general.”

Epstein replied: “I can do end of March.”

It’s not clear from the files whether Epstein ever met with Ponomarev, but the email thread was noteworthy, showing Epstein’s willingness to meet with an anti-Putin dissident.

Yet it received only one mention in the US corporate media—from Yahoo (2/5/26), which republished an article from the Kyiv Independent (2/5/26), a Ukraine-based news outlet that receives funding from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy.

Beyond including the email in the article, the Kyiv Independent didn’t bother expanding on its significance. Instead, the outlet wrote:

The documents do not prove that Epstein worked for Russian intelligence.

They do, however, reveal sustained, multi-year efforts by Epstein to embed himself in Russia’s political, financial, and diplomatic circles—efforts marked by persistence, access-seeking, and repeated attempts to present himself as useful to the Kremlin.
‘Whom Epstein Was Really Working For’

Among the US corporate media outlets to cover the Epstein-Russia connection in-depth are the New York Post, Washington Post, and New York Times.

A headline in the New York Post (2/2/26) read: “Emails Reveal New Theory About Whom Jeffrey Epstein Was Really Working For.”

The right-wing outlet relied on two anonymous sources—”people close to the Russian tyrant” and “US security officials”—and an article by the British tabloid Daily Mail (1/31/26), which based its reporting on “intelligence sources.”

In the final four paragraphs of the article, the New York Post acknowledged Epstein’s well-established connections to Israel—noting that his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was the daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, widely reported to be a Mossad agent—but excluded any mention of the recent revelations.

Two days later, the New York Post ran an article (2/4/26) that detailed how Poland was launching a probe into whether Epstein was working as a Russian spy.

The right-wing outlet also published an article (2/7/26) about Epstein’s ties to “key Russian government figures.” These figures included Sergey Belyakov, who the Post described as “Russia’s deputy economic minister at the time, and a Kremlin secret service-trained spy who Epstein often appeared to use as his personal fixer in Moscow,” as well as Vitaly Churkin, “Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, between 2015 and his 2017 death.” The New York Post did not mention that Epstein introduced Belyakov to Barak in April 2015 (Reason, 8/27/25; Drop Site, 10/30/25; Washington Post, 2/7/26).

‘Added Momentum to Previous Suspicions’

The Washington Post (2/7/26) similarly hyped up a Russia connection under the headline “Epstein Built Ties to Russians and Sought to Meet Putin, Files Show.”

Jeff Bezos’ Post—which recently largely gutted its foreign reporting desk—wrote that the files “show repeated attempts in the 2010s to arrange a meeting” with Putin, but added that there was “no evidence in the Justice Department files that such a meeting ever took place.”

The Post (2/6/26) ran another article about the Russia ties, this time about “Russian expatriate tech investors who have drawn scrutiny from US intelligence agencies over their past ties with the Kremlin.”

The Post speculated:

The newly revealed extent of Epstein’s Russian connections, which also include senior Russian government officials, has added momentum to previous suspicions that he worked with or was targeted by intelligence agencies because of his personal connections to international elites.

In its own long-form article on the Epstein-Russia connection, the New York Times (2/10/26) similarly wrote that the latest batch of files have “raised new questions among Russia’s critics about whether the relationships opened the door to Russian intelligence activity.”

It is possible that Epstein was a Russian intelligence asset. However, there is no good reason for the US corporate media to frame these allegations as a real possibility, while ignoring the Epstein-Israel ties, or continuing to paint them as a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

The latest batch of files deepens the evidence, documented by Drop Site and others, that Epstein was engaged in assisting the Israeli state, serving as a go-between on commercial, diplomatic, and intelligence matters. Although Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors, and former Russian government officials, no evidence has yet surfaced that he advocated on behalf of Russian interests. The only reasons to think that the former is more newsworthy than the latter are purely political.

MAGA has been, throughout, an amorphous entity—curling, folding, dividing—as it slimed and slithered its way into this American life. Neocon MAGA is one particularly noteworthy division within, a more-than-slightly schizophrenic aberration that, if MAGA-world had any interest in maintaining conceptual coherence, would surely have long ago been run out of town.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is Neocon MAGA’s chief exemplar. In contrast to unreconstructed neocons like Lindsay Graham and John Bolton, who have tried to bootlick their way into President Donald Trump's good graces with spotty results, “Little Marco” was a neoconservative boy who has growth-spurted his way into a Neocon MAGA man.

Rubio recently gave a very buzzy speech at the Munich Security Conference on the 14 of February. This speech was received warmly by a crowd of beleaguered European leaders, threadbare from a year of belligerent rhetoric and mercenary tariff threats by the very Trump administration that Rubio is also underwritten by. In this speech, Rubio argued passionately that the West has lost its mojo. Rubio confidently slalom-skied his way through ideas and histories whose engagement he has only a mediocre competency, replete with omissions and partial truths that start to make one think he just might not be an honest broker. As his speech rounded one particular bend, his central thesis came into view: that ever since 1945, with the formation of the United Nations and what is often called the rules-based order, the West has become, despite its gloriously pearlescent past, a civilization in “terminal decline.” But with strategic solidarity (between Europe and the US), we might restore this civilization to its former greatness. That is his thesis.

There is a lot that is concerning about this speech. Rubio presented anti-colonialist uprisings as a categorically negative thing. He trumpeted dominance as the long-lost coin of the realm. He posited guilt and shame as some pathetic weakness, without any acknowledgment of the truly generative corrective that these kinds of senses can perform. He sounded the alarm about “civilizational erasure,” without buckling even a little under the weight of the cultural and racial supremacy on full display in his language and its implications. This was an expansionary speech, hoisting the sails of Make America Great Again into a full armada of Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again, with all the attendant wink-wink, nudge-nudging that sets folks like this Munich audience into full transfiguration mode, their countenance aglow.

To say European settler immigrants failed to assimilate once they got here would be a remarkable understatement.

But one significant contradiction in his speech that warrants analysis—if not only by me, then his lovingly concerned, anti-immigrant MAGA brothers and sisters—is his profuse, unqualified celebration of relentless, centuries-long, mass migration: the mass migration of westerners to remote corners of the world. In a section of his speech, Rubio enthusiastically proclaims: “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” I mean, come on. Eat your heart out, leftists (or at least the conservative caricature of leftists)! If ever there was a sentiment expressed about a world without borders, this is it.

If JD Vance is concerned about Ohio Haitians eating cats or Randi Fine is concerned that immigrants are here to get “free stuff,” Vance and Fine's vision quests and critical discourse are in pursuit of small potatoes compared with the horrors Western settlers propagated in the “new world.” To say European settler immigrants failed to assimilate once they got here would be a remarkable understatement. Rubio enthusiastically and playfully (he got some laughs; he was working the room) detailed the many, MAGA would say, illegitimate border-crossers (illegals?!) who radically altered the fabric of life of the people who lived in these lands: Italian explorers, English settlers, German farmers, and French fur traders.

But, in a section just a little bit earlier, Rubio seemed to suggest migration is a bad thing, saying, “Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis that is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.” How far can coherence stretch before it snaps? What are the material differences between one migration and this other migration?! It can not only be because now is the time of nation-states who “have a right to exist” and require hardened borders, but then was a time of exploration, expansion, and settlements—different times, different rules—because Rubio is, in a very Winkelmannian sense (J.J. Winkelmann, the German neoclassical art historian extraordinaire), imploring us to do now as our imperialist forbears did then. To do as great men of great civilizations did is the way for us to become great. If that is the logic, then what really is the difference among these migrations?

In, what was meant to be a particularly touching section of the speech, Rubio details his Sardinian and Spanish ancestry, name-dropping good old Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi and Jose and Manuela Reina, who he feels could not have fathomed (and he probably believes would have been very proud) that their direct descendant would have graduated from neocon “Little Marco” to Big Boy Marco giving his big boy speech. But that story excludes an even more critical and thoroughly American portion of the Rubio family history. The Rubios are a family of immigrants, of course. They migrated at some point from Southern Europe to Cuba; the details of what prompted that migration are perhaps lost to history. But then Marco Rubio’s parents migrated from Cuba to the US, not as refugees fleeing the Castro regime and the supposed horrors of communism as he has erroneously claimed. But rather as economic migrants seeking a more prosperous life for their family in the US, a few years before Fidel Castro started organizing in the Sierra Maestra mountains, propelled by the very same economic misery that caused the Rubios to leave a few years earlier.

While Rubio’s family moved around the US a bit when he was quite young, the South Florida Cuban migrant community was enormously culturally, politically, and spiritually (Marco received his first communion in Miami in 1984) formative. Many have speculated that his false claims of his parents being political refugees forced to leave Cuba post-revolution, which were debunked by the Washington Post in 2011, were motivated by the reality that, as a young South Floridian politician, one has far more electoral opportunities connected to such a political-victim narrative. The Post stated, “[in] Florida, being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion." Rubio has argued his narrative was not meant to deceive for political gain, but rather he was just innocently presenting “family lore.”

The reality is that in a speech like what Marco Rubio gave in Munich, there are many assumptions, biases, and contradictions harbored unexamined by this dominant neoliberal capitalist logic. A “migration for me, not for thee” doctrine is allowed to float unimpeded and unquestioned out of the mouths of low melanin-faced folks who hail from particularly choice real-estate markets (preferably Western Europe and the US) because it is underwritten by a system of logic that forgives an ethnic cleansing here, a theft of Black and brown bodies there on the grounds of the “price of doing business.” There is a straight and logical line between the enclosures of common land and the attendant immiseration of peasants and the consolidation of wealth and power among the elites in England in the 16th to 19th centuries, and the brutal colonial enclosure of the Americas in this same period. The difference is scale, not type.

An alternate logic to the domination, conquest, and hard borders of global capitalism is left internationalism. In global capitalism, goods and wealth freely pass across borders, while workers’ bodies and their class solidarities are captured and enclosed. Left internationalist logic is the inverse of global capitalist logic. Left internationalism promotes class solidarity across borders, it rejects nationalist ideologies that align workers with their exploiters, and it seeks global well-being in the face of the very kind of neo-imperialism with which Rubio’s speech is shot through. Left internationalism asks us to see the Global South as an opportunity for planetary solidarity—a real lifting of all boats—not as a region of resource riches ripe for plunder.

There was a time in our not-so-distant past when the US border was far more porous than even the laxest moments of the Biden years. This was a border over which migrant workers came and went, sometimes in the same day, sometimes for a season, to work in various opportunity regions in the US. They would do their work here and then return to their homes and families on the other side of the border. This was a remarkably open flow of bodies across borders, not because of any dominant radical-leftist theory, but because it was a practical arrangement that offered benefits to the greatest number of people. And it worked. If only Make America Great Again harkened back to instances like this, or when American communists and anarchists agitated for and won (for all of us) better working conditions and an eight-hour workday. These are times in our history when the US still had enormous problems, of course. But these were also times when we were seeing real progress, won together across cultural and racial differences in class solidarity.

In 2015, Pope Francis addressed the US Congress, saying, “Millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants.” It was reported at the time that then-Senator and candidate for president Marco Rubio became emotional from this speech, stating later that he was “moved” by the Pope’s statements. Some reported he wiped a tear from his eye. This suggests that Rubio, like all of us, holds his contradictions in his body. And sometimes, we experience an involuntary, emotionally eruptive response to our efforts to contain those contradictions inside. Rubio’s contradictions, of course, include the incongruent differences between MAGA and neoconservatism. But his emotional display may, just may, evidence contradictions inherent in his status as a self-hating child of immigrants, making his otherwise frictionless slide toward neo-imperialist par excellence perhaps a bit complicated.

As he is surely a 2028 presidential hopeful, he is a real threat to the better world we hope to build. The prayers and tears of Marco Rubio may have the potential of curtailing (or at least moderating) Little Marco’s seeming unobstructed pathway to the tyrannical monster he may one day be. But left to this administration’s current direction and the almost unprecedented amount of power Rubio has amassed as both the US secretary of state and national security adviser serving under a remarkably distractible and aimless president, MAGA may very well complete its foul transmutation into MIWIA (Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again).

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board recently declared Donald Trump’s public meltdown in the wake of the Supreme Court’s tariff decision “arguably the worst moment of his presidency.”

I beg to differ. There have been countless others for which notable commentators have argued strongly that he surely can’t go any lower than this. They identify a moment, action, or post that they contend is the “worst of the worst,” the nadir of presidential leadership.

For my part, a strong case can be made for establishing a national competition in which all citizens can participate and advocate for what they consider the absolute “bottom feeding” moment of Trump’s presidency. Many benefits would accrue from such a competition.

One of the most consequential benefits is the aggregation in one place of the thousands of “worst moments” that citizens will cite. Amassed together, they would inform our collective consciousness about the quality of leadership that the nation is experiencing.

We have become numb to moral transgressions because we are drowning in them. This is an extremely hazardous place to be. A “worst of the worst” display will help us regain perspective and moral equilibrium.

Perhaps an appropriate national advocacy organization could take on the task of creating a giant display. Viewers would walk through a museum-like presentation, offering a sequenced timeline of these juried “worst moments.” Each one would be set apart and include explanatory text on why it was chosen and who nominated it.

The display would also provide another critical benefit. It would remind us all of the assault on our moral compass that these last years have wreaked.

It is not accidental or incidental that the unfolding saga surrounding the Epstein files has not produced the moral outrage in this country that it has in Great Britain. We have become numb to moral transgressions because we are drowning in them. This is an extremely hazardous place to be. A “worst of the worst” display will help us regain perspective and moral equilibrium. Without something like this, our status as ethical beings will be nullified.

Here are three of the “worst of the worst” that I believe warrant serious consideration for the display. I have chosen ones in particular that involve Trump’s blatant attempts to dominate other persons in a way that diminishes their basic humanity. These speak eloquently of his motivation to harm his fellow human beings and encourage followers to violence.

The president’s recent posting of the Obamas as jungle apes ranks high on my list. Denigrating a predecessor in such a blatantly racist fashion, while also including his wife who is revered by a good proportion of the citizenry, makes this a good fit for the “worst of the worst.” Unlike the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, there was not even a wisp of policy implication here. Rather, it concerned the basic regard we owe other people.

When Rob Reiner and his partner were killed by his drug-addicted son, Trump disparaged him, calling him “deranged.” As with his treatment of Sen. John McCain, he expressed disdain for a highly regarded individual, who through no fault of his own had become a victim.

The most legendary “worst of the worst” is the “grab them by the pussy” assertion. Here Trump objectifies and denigrates over half the world’s population, displaying for all to see how threatened he is by the power of women. He leaves no doubt of his inclination toward sexual abuse and intimidation.

So, my fellow Americans, I urge you to identify the moment you think qualifies for the “worst of the worst.” There is an endless array from which to choose. Our qualification as a caring and right-minded people depends on your thoughtful deliberation.