For all the uncertainty about what will happen next on the military and diplomatic front in the Iran war, there is certainty about what has already happened on the economic front. And it is not good.

The world has seen a spike in oil prices that has been moderated so far by large drawdowns in global oil reserves. In addition, the most vulnerable populations of the Global South are suffering ever-increasing distress, while most of the world has been experiencing rising inflationary pressures and increasing interest rates on government bonds. And even if the US stock market appears relatively unperturbed, a version of this unpleasant mix has also hit the United States.

Global oil prices are much higher than they were before the war, with the financial market benchmark price of Brent crude late last week (down to $91 on weekend news of a possible deal), well above the $60 per barrel of early January. That said, crude prices have been relatively stable within a broad range over the last two months despite a dramatic drop in energy shipments out of the Persian Gulf since the war began.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), as of May 13, the cumulative shortfall in global oil deliveries from the Gulf was roughly 1 billion barrels. This shortfall has been absorbed by reduced oil demand (a consequence of higher prices); increased production outside the Gulf; and by a drop in global oil inventories of roughly 250 million barrels, as these were released to hold down prices in the absence of new production from the Gulf coming to the market. However IEA head Fatih Birol warned last week that inventories were dropping at an unsustainable pace, particularly with summer driving season approaching in the Northern Hemisphere.

For all that US energy exporters might benefit from higher global oil prices, US consumers do not.

The biggest shock from the higher cost (and outright shortage) of fuel, petrochemicals, and fertilizers is being felt by the poorest in the Global South. A recent story in The New York Times described how the price for transporting corn into refugee camps in Somalia had doubled or even tripled, as had the price of water at diesel-powered public tubewells. Meanwhile, protests this week in Kenya against fuel price hikes have led to four deaths, and political and financial stresses are mounting across the continent.

In India, sharp jumps in the price of Liquid Petroleum Gas have hit urban households hard, particularly those whose breadwinners work in small-scale industrial establishments. Many such enterprises rely on LPG as fuel and have shut down, displacing a workforce composed of recent migrants from the countryside. And because informal migrant workers in the city do not have access to India’s price-controlled public distribution systems, they have been forced to purchase cooking fuel on the black market at exorbitant rates. The combination has sparked fears of a repeat of a mass return to the countryside, as happened in the Covid-19 summer of 2020.

Stories like these abound across the Global South. A report from the World Food Program (WFP) two months ago (when the war was two weeks old) projected that 45 million more people could be thrust into acute hunger if the war persisted. And a panel of global officials had already warned the world at the International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington in mid-April that even an immediate cessation of the war would require at least two months before global shipping approached a semblance of normalcy.

Weakness in the real economy of many developing countries has been compounded by financial pressures in the form of larger trade deficits driven by the jump in oil prices, higher inflation, depreciating currencies, drawdowns in central bank reserves, and the threat of central bank rate hikes to keep inflation in check even if the economy is weakening.

In the face of such pressures, many countries were forced to sell foreign exchange or gold reserves to defend their currencies from further depreciation. According to Bloomberg, losses in the Philippines amounted to 8.1% of all reserves, in India to 5.1%, and in Indonesia to 3.8%. India has also imposed stiff tariffs and other restrictions on gold imports, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged Indians to avoid “unnecessary foreign travel,” in additional efforts to limit further pressure on the Rupee from non-energy imports or tourism. And Malawi is reportedly selling not just gold reserves but also semi-processed gold bars bought from local miners.

Europe is less dependent on Persian Gulf oil, with only 7% of it sourced there, as opposed to Asia, which draws roughly 60% of its oil from the region. Even so, it is not immune to the impact of higher prices, with the European Commission’s economic czar warning that the continent faces a stagflationary shock. As a relatively wealthy continent, the EU (and the UK) can afford to grant fiscal subsidies to affected businesses, thus reducing the pain there. However, such measures also force the need to reduce oil demand on the poorest countries that are unable to afford such backstops.

Latin America has proven more resilient to the shocks from the Iran war, helped by the fact that Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador are all net energy exporters, while Mexico runs a small energy deficit but buys most of its natural gas from the US. Chile is the sole large outlier on the front. Still, the energy trade might cushion most major Latin American currencies from sharp depreciation and financial stress, but as an agricultural exporter, the region is vulnerable to higher fertilizer prices and to inflation that could force central banks to raise interest rates.

In the United States, the administration has downplayed the impact of the war on the American people and emphasized how the dramatic increase in US oil production has led to a substantially lower reliance on imported energy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that the administration's policies of “energy abundance” have helped the country withstand the shocks from the Iran War. And President Donald Trump said in April that “the United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future…We don’t need it.”

In his recent remarks, Bessent observed that the war had also allowed the US to “focus on the opportunity at hand” as global demand for US energy surged. And, indeed the war has led to a dramatic increase in US exports of crude oil and downstream products. A recent piece in The New York Times noted that the US has exported an additional 145 million barrels of oil since the war began, leading to an increase in revenues of roughly $50 billion.

However, the flip side to this is that US consumers have reportedly spent an extra $40 billion on gasoline prices since the war began. For all that US energy exporters might benefit from higher global oil prices, US consumers do not. And research from the New York Fed suggests that lower-income households were hit much harder by higher energy prices, changing travel patterns in order to keep their gasoline budgets from getting out of hand.

American agriculture, meanwhile, has been hit with a double whammy as two major operating costs, fertilizer and diesel, have both seen sharp price increases. A report last month by the Farm Bureau suggested that 70% of all farmers say they are unable to afford all the fertilizer they need. This in turn could translate into lower crop yields and higher food prices—a worry that is even more pronounced among smallholders in the Global South, underlying the global effects of this war.

And while the US stock market has remained relatively buoyant through all this, boosted primarily by Artificial Intelligence and Semiconductor stocks, there are signs of deeper worries in global bond markets, including in the United States. Concerns over inflationary pressures driven by rising energy and food prices have combined with worries over the rising fiscal costs associated with increased defense budgets, fuel subsidies, and massive reconstruction needs to push global bond yields up significantly.

After annual consumer price inflation in the US jumped to 3.8% (far above the Federal Reserve’s 2.0% inflation target), the US Treasury’s 30-year bond hit its highest yield in 30 years last week. And while that might be good news for those who own newly issued bonds and will receive the interest paid on them, it is less favorable for those looking to buy or refinance a home as mortgage rates rise alongside US government bond yields.

Thus, the impact of this war within the US might not be as severe as that in large parts of the Global South, but even within America, there will be many more who lose than gain from the economic consequences of this war.

On May 22, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a policy memo announcing a major shift in immigration policy. As USCIS Spokesperson Zach Kahler explains: “From now on, an alien who is in the US temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes.”

This new policy is unlawful, immoral, and xenophobic. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as well as the LIFE Act, Congress created various pathways for immigrants to apply for “adjustment of status.” This allows a temporary legal resident to apply for legal permanent resident (LPR) status without having to leave the US.

Such adjustments are not limited to “extraordinary circumstances.” As the USCIS Policy Manual makes clear:

Aliens who are present in the United States and who are beneficiaries of approved immigrant petitions may generally file an application with USCIS to adjust their status to that of an LPR, or they may depart the United States and apply for an immigrant visa abroad. One reason Congress created the adjustment of status provision was to enable certain aliens physically present in the United States to become LPRs without incurring the expense and inconvenience of traveling abroad to obtain an immigrant visa. Congress has added additional adjustment of status provisions to: Ensure national security and public safety; Advance economic growth and a robust immigrant labor force; Promote family unity; and Accommodate humanitarian resettlement.

If Congress intended “adjustment of status” to be limited to “extraordinary circumstances,” then they would have made that clear. What’s more, if that was their intention, then they would not have consistently added more adjustment provisions. The fact of the matter is that neither the plain language of the relevant statutes nor the history of “adjustment of status” guidelines justify this policy revision. Rather than “returning to the original intent of the law” as USCIS Director Joseph Edlow claims, the agency is twisting the law to satisfy President Donald Trump’s desires.

That USCIS had the audacity to even release such an obviously politically motivated and illegal policy speaks to the broader decline in the integrity of American institutions.

As former USCIS senior adviser Doug Rand noted, “Trump has banned people from over 100 countries from returning to the US, so forcing them to go abroad for consular processing is no pathway at all.” This includes nationals from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen—countries that Trump has bombed in his second term; as well as Cuba, which is still suffering under a US oil blockade and sanctions.

For those from countries not included in one of Trump’s travel bans, the new process will be significantly more expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. Applicants will be forced to leave their loved ones and wait months or years before they can return to the US.

Now, the memo does acknowledge “limited exceptions” to this new requirement. This includes people on “dual intent” visas such as the H-1B (for specialized workers) or O-1 (for those with “extraordinary ability or achievement”), as well as “immigrant categories where only adjustment of status provides a pathway to permanent resident status.” While the memo fails to specify, the latter may include refugees and asylum-seekers.

Two points are worth emphasizing here: First, the policy memo states that “adjustment under most provisions is granted only as ‘a matter of discretion and administrative grace.’” Maintaining lawful status under a H-1B or O-1 visa “is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion.” As Kahler further clarified in an email to Newsweek on May 24, “People who present applications that provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest will likely be able to continue on their current path.” He added, others “may be asked to apply abroad depending on individualized circumstances.”

Ultimately, however, as the memorandum makes clear, USCIS officers are advised to consider “if approval of the alien’s adjustment of status application is in the best interest of the United States.” This means weighing multiple factors, including “the applicant’s moral character.”

Second, even if one of the “limited exceptions” applies to refugees, it may amount to very little given the Trump administration’s concerted efforts to weaken the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).

In October 2025, the Trump administration lowered the cap on the number of refugees the US will admit to 7,500. Between October 2025 and April 2026, the US only admitted 4,499 refugees. All, except three from Afghanistan, were South African.

In November 2025, USCIS issued a memo ordering the review of about 233,000 refugees who entered the US between January 20, 2021 and February 20, 2025. It also halted all processing of green card applications for refugees who entered during that period.

As part of their operations in Minnesota in January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and USCIS launched a sweeping initiative to re-review and potentially terminate the protective status of refugees who had not yet obtained permanent resident status. This led to more than 100 refugees with no criminal records being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on allegations of fraud, transferred to detention centers in Texas, and threatened with deportation.

The USCIS policy effectively redesigns the system such that for some nationalities—predominantly those from African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American countries—no realistic legal pathway to obtain a green card exists. For all others, it becomes a matter of administrative discretion—or more precisely, Trump’s discretion. The true dividing line here is not whether one contributes economically to the US or follows its laws, but rather whether Trump believes a person comes from a “shithole” country or a “nice” country.

This divide has a further implication: Under Trump’s birthright ban, only children born of US citizens and lawful permanent residents automatically acquire citizenship. If the Supreme Court upholds his order, and if this policy revision survives its inevitable lawsuit, then it would dramatically alter who could become a citizen. This has been an underlying goal of Trump’s immigration agenda from the start.

Kahler insists that this policy is necessary to close a dangerous loophole that immigrants exploit to stay in the US indefinitely. He remarks, “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the US illegally after being denied residency.”

This is bullshit, plain and simple. US Customs and Border Protection calculated that in 2024 the US visa overstay rate was 1.15%. “In other words, 98.85% of the in-scope nonimmigrant visitors departed the United States on-time and in accordance with the terms of their admissions.”

The true goal rather is to force people to leave the US and have consular officers abroad quickly and quietly reject their applications without any consideration for due process or the applicant’s legal rights. As the CATO Institute reports, even prior to this new policy, DHS had already cut green card approvals by roughly half.

Hopefully, the courts or Congress will intervene and put an end to this policy. However, that USCIS had the audacity to even release such an obviously politically motivated and illegal policy speaks to the broader decline in the integrity of American institutions. Even if this attempt fails, the Trump administration will continue to go after immigrants. They will not stop; so, neither can we. We must remain vigilant and continue to keep our communities safe.

On December 18 1865, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Republican from Pennsylvania, during debate on how to treat the traitorous Confederate states and on support for newly freed people who had been enslaved in the United States and in British North America for almost 250 years, warned, “If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power, we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages." The United States failed to rectify injustice in the past, and it is failing once again.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a key contributor to The New York Times’ award winning The 1619 Project, recently wrote that “The Civil Rights Era Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes.” In Tennessee, the white-dominated Republican controlled state legislature eliminated the state’s only Black majority congressional district after the MAGA-dominated Supreme Court ruled that congressional maps that ensured political representation for African Americans and other racial minorities now violated the Constitution. Other white-dominated, Republican-controlled states are racing to make similar changes. It is as if the Republican Party, with the aid of the Supreme Court, is trying to return the United States to the level of racism that dominated the country in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

After the Civil War, Congress passed and the states ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution. The 13th Amendment ended chattel slavery in the United States. The 14th Amendment defined citizenship to include people born in the United States with very limited exceptions and ensured that all persons, whether citizens or not, were entitled to legal due process. The 15th Amendment prevented states and localities from denying Black men the right to vote. Each amendment included a clause that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” Rebelling Confederate states were required to approve the 14th and 15th Amendments to fully reenter the Union.

A right-wing dominated Supreme Court then proceeded to systematically emasculate the amendments and supporting legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The first Civil Rights Act enforced the 13th Amendment after a number of Southern states passed "Black Codes" to limit the rights of freedmen, and the Reconstruction Acts required the former Confederate states to accept the 14th Amendment. The Enforcement Acts provided federal protection for voting rights that were being interfered with by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 targeted racial segregation and guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations including hotels and theaters and transportation and prohibited attempts to exclude them from juries. To put teeth in enforcement, violations were tried in federal, not state courts.

The Trump administration has launched a systematic campaign to undermine civil rights protections passed into law and approved by the Supreme Court in the 1950s and I960s.

In 1873, in the Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court limited the ability of African Americans to sue in federal courts against discriminatory state laws. In 1876, in the United States v. Cruikshank, the court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not apply to private acts of violence, preventing federal authorities from prosecuting hate crimes, and in the 1883 United States v. Harris case the Court threw out the Enforcement Acts because Congress did not have the authority to punish private groups like the Ku Klux Klan for conspiring to violate the civil rights of African Americans.

The most damaging court decision was in a consolidated case known as the Civil Rights Cases. In 1883, by an 8-to-1 majority, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The majority ruled that the 14th Amendment only applied to discrimination by state or local governments and did not permit the federal government to prohibit discrimination by private individuals. The only dissenting justice was John Harlan, who argued that government and individual actions often overlapped and the court was interpreting the 14th Amendment too narrowly. Harlan was also the only justice to vote against the majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that established that the Constitution permitted racially segregated “separate-but-equal” facilities.

It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, in what has been called the Second Reconstruction, that Supreme Court decisions and federal legislation, under intense pressure from the African-American civil rights movement, restored civil rights for African Americans stolen by a conservative Supreme Court in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The best known Supreme Court decision was in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. Brown combined five cases challenging the legality of school segregation pursued by the NAACP and the legal team headed by Thurgood Marshall. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that segregated schools established a racial caste system and violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In other decisions, the Warren Court ruled that Mexican Americans and all other racial groups had equal protection under the 14th Amendment (Hernandez v. Texas, 1954); that segregation in facilities serving interstate transport was illegal (Boynton v. Virginia, 1960); that election districts intended to prevent the election of Black representatives violated the 15th Amendment by disenfranchising Black voters (Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 1960); against segregation in public accommodations overturning the 1883 Civil Rights Cases decision (Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 1964); the federal government had the authority to abolish discriminatory literacy testing for voter registration (South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 1966); state laws banning interracial marriages were unconstitutional (Loving v. Virginia, 1967); and that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banning discrimination in the sale of rent of housing was constitutional (Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 1968).

Federal civil rights legislation passed in the Second Reconstruction included the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It was the first federal civil rights law passed by Congress since 1875. This law established the United States Commission on Civil Rights and a Justice Department Civil Rights division to investigate charges of racial discrimination. A 1960 law established federal penalties for interfering with someone’s ability to vote. Federal courts were authorized to appoint officials to assist African Americans in registering to vote in states and localities with a documented history of discrimination, and the 24th Amendment, ratified in 1964, outlawed poll taxes.

The two most important pieces of federal legislation during this period were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in public accommodations including hotels, restaurants, and theaters; ended discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce these regulations. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established the “disparate impact” legal standard which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). The disparate impact standard prohibits policies that disproportionately impact protected groups and does not require proof of discriminatory intent. It was later codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

The Voting Rights Act included a number of key provisions. It allowed people to sue to overturn discriminatory laws and voter registration and candidate nomination procedures and provided for federal legal assistance. It also required states and localities with histories of discrimination to obtain prior approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing voting rules. As a result of the Voting Rights Act, the racial disparity in voting registration rates declined from about 30% to 8% 10 years later. As a result of the Voting Right Acts, In addition, the number of Blacks serving in Congress increased from four in 1960 to 62 in 2023. In 2006, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized by Congress with wide bipartisan support.

However, since 2013, the Supreme Court has whittled away at voter protection for minority groups. In a 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the court eliminated the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2021 the Supreme Court made it more difficult to bring lawsuits challenging discriminatory voting rules, and in 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court further gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing state governments to redraw election districts dividing up Black communities so it would be more difficult to elect Black officials.

The Trump administration has launched a systematic campaign to undermine civil rights protections passed into law and approved by the Supreme Court in the 1950s and I960s. In an attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April 2025 ordering federal agencies not to support or enforce disparate impact claims, arguing that it was discrimination against white people and violated its interpretation of the equal protection of the law. The administration has cut funding for enforcement of fair housing laws, equal employment opportunities, and environmental justice for minority communities disprotortionately impacted by climate change and pollution.

With the Supreme Court’s rulings against the Voting Rights Act and the Trump administration’s refusal to enforce the Civil Rights Act, they are trying to repeal the legacy of the Second Reconstruction and return the United States to the era of Jim Crow segregation and racism institutionalized in the 19th century.

On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations, and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets.

Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided “ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,” in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

Since no agreement with the United States or Israel is worth the paper it’s written on, it’s hard to imagine an agreement that would really protect Iran from future attacks. Without a more radical change in US policy, the United States and Israel will keep attacking Iran, in open violation of the UN Charter, no matter what they all agree to.

The only effective ways Iran has found to protect its land and its people are to build strong military defenses, including the capacity for devastating retaliation, and to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of the impact on the world’s oil and gas supply and the global economy. By attacking Iran, the United States and Israel forced it to defend itself and triggered a war that is reshaping the Middle East and possibly the world.

The final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.

Losing this war is forcing the United States to finally start reevaluating the neoconservative tactics it has blindly substituted for a rational US foreign and military policy since the 1990s: sanction; threaten; bomb; kill; destroy; occupy; escalate; leave countries mired in violence and chaos—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon—never admit defeat; never question American exceptionalism or superiority.

The systematic US disdain for the rule of international law that undergirds this policy appears to make peace impossible in today’s world. But the final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has effectively exempted itself from the entire system of treaties, international laws and agreements that are supposed to govern international affairs, starting with the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force between countries, and the Geneva Conventions, which protect civilians, prisoners-of-war and wounded soldiers and sailors from the impacts of war.

These treaties were drawn up and universally adopted in the wake of the Second World War, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” as the UN Charter says in its preamble. President Roosevelt returned from his Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in 1945 to tell a joint session of Congress that they were designing the United Nations as a “permanent structure of peace.”

“It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed,” FDR told Congress. “We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”

The UN Charter codified and strengthened the age-old common law prohibition against international aggression, and the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy in the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact, which German leaders tried at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for violating.

However, amid overblown Western triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, a new generation of US leaders, like Madeleine Albright and Dick Cheney, came to see the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions as obstacles to their ambitions to further expand US global power by more widespread and unrestricted use of military force.

Believing that the new imbalance in military power freed them from compliance with post-1945 treaties and conventions based on the hard-earned wisdom of past leaders in two world wars, the US and its allies unleashed their armed forces to attack and invade other countries, torture, rape and kill prisoners, and massacre civilians.

US officials assumed that the new military imbalance so greatly favored the United States that neither the UN, international courts, other powerful countries, nor even the entire people of the world could enforce the rules of international law and the laws of armed conflict on the United States if it chose to ignore them.

It is ironic, and deeply frustrating and confusing to US officials, to find out that what they hailed as a position of overwhelming power and impunity has led them to squander America’s day in the sun and waste the chance that its great good fortune provided to improve the quality of life for Americans and their neighbors.

The supposedly unlimited freedom of action attained by disdaining and trampling international law and institutions has proved to be a double-edged sword. There is no such thing as unlimited military power, short of the mass suicide of nuclear war. The idea that America’s virtually unlimited investment in weapons and war would give it the final word in every dispute was a mirage, as even Trump is now finding out.

As Americans reexamine the state of the world and the conflicts by which warmongering US leaders have tried to define it, it is obvious that war and military power do not lead to peace or prosperity, for Americans or anyone else. The more countries the Pentagon and the CIA take aim at, the more people they kill, and the more resources our leaders throw at them, the more other people all over the world rightly come to see the United States as a threat to their own lives and futures.

Governments around the world face difficult choices between meeting the needs and aspirations of their own people or complying with the hegemonic and undemocratic demands of the United States.

After holding itself up as the champion of democracy and freedom for 250 years, the United States is only accelerating its own decline by wasting trillions of dollars, and what little is left of the world’s good will, on this failed, ill-fated bid for global imperial power.

When the United States rose to great power in the first half of the 20th century, its leaders were wise enough to recognize that exercising naked imperial power would not succeed in a world still fighting to free itself from the ravages of European colonialism. So FDR and his colleagues based the UN system on sovereign equality between nations, and created a framework for international relations that the whole world could agree to.

While the United States and Israel commit systematic and barbaric war crimes, presuming themselves immune from accountability, the world is slowly—too slowly—coming to grips with the international cooperation needed to enforce the “permanent structure of peace” that all countries have agreed to live by.

Like all legal and political systems, the success or failure of the UN system rests on whether the most powerful countries will agree to live by the same rules as the others. The veto is a poison pill that corrupts the system, as Albert Camus predicted when it was unveiled in 1945.

“If this report is accurate, … it would effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy,” Camus wrote in Combat, the underground French Resistance newspaper he edited. “The world would be ruled by a directorate of five powers… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”

However, the UN has developed the “Uniting For Peace” process, which allows the General Assembly to hold Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) on international problems when a veto prevents the Security Council from acting to resolve them. The General Assembly used that process to resolve the Suez Crisis in 1956, and it has been using it, albeit intermittently and inadequately, to address the crisis in Palestine since 1997.

In response to a request from the General Assembly in its Emergency Special Session on Palestine, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end without delay. And so, the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding that Israel must bring “to an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories… and do so no later than” September 2025.

Israel did not comply, so the General Assembly must take further steps, such as an arms embargo and an economic boycott. But it does have the means to do so and just needs to muster the political will.

While the United States and Israel commit systematic and barbaric war crimes, presuming themselves immune from accountability, the world is slowly—too slowly—coming to grips with the international cooperation needed to enforce the “permanent structure of peace” that all countries have agreed to live by, and on which the lives of millions of vulnerable people and the future of humanity depend.

While US leaders are finally realizing that they do not have the power to intimidate and conquer the whole world, the American people are gradually understanding that we have an even greater power, the power to refuse to fight their criminal wars, and to insist on making peace and cooperating with all our neighbors on this small planet that we all share.

During the past week, the Trump administration announced three separate but connected decisions that are so outrageous they may lead to his comeuppance. Collectively, they reward lawlessness and undermine the very foundations of our democracy.

The first of these was the announcement by the Department of Justice that a $1,776,000,000 fund was being established to compensate “victims” of the previous administration’s “weaponization” of the law by “unfairly investigating and punishing them.” As a quid pro quo, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his questionable $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for what he charged was their role in failing to stop a contractor from leaking one of his tax returns to the media in 2019. To cap off the president’s trifecta, the DOJ added an amendment to the “victims’ fund” stating: “The United States releases, waives, and forever discharges [Trump, his family, his business] and is hereby forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims [that] have been or could have been asserted [by the IRS against them or] related or affiliated individuals.”

As problematic as each of the three may be, it’s the ways they are connected that is most troubling. The Trump lawsuit against the IRS was set to be dismissed by the judge who was hearing the case. She had argued that it was improper for the White House to sue a federal agency it controlled, as this put the administration in the position of being both plaintiff and defendant. The decision was to be announced by May 20th, forcing the White House to act to drop their suit before it was dismissed. It was, therefore, no coincidence that the DOJ announced on May 18th and 19th both the “victims’ fund” and the ban on any future IRS action against the president.

But the story doesn’t end there as serious questions must be asked about the entire IRS affair. The contractor who leaked the document has already been arrested and convicted for his crime. There was no connection between his admittedly criminal act and the IRS as an institution. Therefore, the president’s lawsuit against the institution and the $10 billion award in damages he was seeking was both unwarranted and excessive. Like many of Mr. Trump’s previous suits against media outlets, it was meant to intimidate in order to seek some sort of settlement.

The DOJ’s handling of the matter validated the judge’s concern that the head of government couldn’t sue an agency he oversees (not to speak of trying to secure a massive payout from that agency). It simply didn’t pass the smell test. Finally, the DOJ addendum giving the president, his family, and business a free pass from any further tax audits, investigations, or prosecution for any claims against them raises the obvious question: What tax problems are they covering up?

The creation of the $1.776 billion fund to compensate individuals who claim to have been victims of the government’s “weaponization” of law represents the culmination of the president’s six-year effort to go beyond just defending the violent insurrectionists of January 6th, 2021. This is important to Mr. Trump, because by defending them he is defending his claim that he won the 2020 election and, therefore, the violent mobs that stormed the Congress weren’t lawbreakers. They were heroes and persecuted martyrs who deserve compensation.

In this regard, it’s important to examine what Trump has done.

Just over six years ago we witnessed the horrifying scenes of violent mobs storming the US Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying outcome of the 2020 election. They struck out at Capitol police who were doing their jobs protecting the members of Congress and the building itself. Some were injured; a few died. The scenes of what these rioters did were broadcast to a shocked nation.

Because the president egged on the mob, he was impeached by Congress. Ten Republican members of Congress voted to impeach Trump and seven Republican senators voted to convict and remove him from office.

After Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign mobilizing his supporters to demand loyalty, most of the 17 senators and representatives who voted against him are gone. They either resigned because the heat was too great or were defeated by Trump loyalists.

And the polls tell this story. In 2021, most Republicans were outraged by the mob violence. A poll from January of 2021 found that 78% of Trump supporters disapproved of the insurrection. A more recent poll reveals a dramatic shift that has taken place. When asked to describe the events of January 6th, 2021, 60% of Republicans say they were “people participating in legitimate political discourse.” Only 18% said that it was “people participating in a violent insurrection.”

Believing that he had set the stage to allow for his complete rewriting of history, the president, who had already commuted the sentences and/or pardoned more than 2,000 of the insurrectionists, now felt emboldened to have the government reward them for their blind loyalty to him. But in doing so, he may have pushed too far. Republican senators who consider themselves law-and-order, fiscal conservatives recoiled in horror over what a few called “utterly stupid,” “morally wrong,” and an abuse of power. Instead of acting to pass some of Mr. Trump’s legislative priorities, they criticized the president’s actions and took an early recess.

Like the rest of the country, California is in a hugely consequential fight for the future. Will we protect our democracy and build a sustainable future where we can all afford to live well? Or will victory go to the forces that are undermining democracy to protect their ability to profit from destroying the planet? Will we elect a Governor who supports the forces tearing our country apart? Or will we elect one who is dedicated to protecting democracy and building a world that works for all of us? The stakes could not be higher.

As inequality grows at an unprecedented pace, life is becoming precarious for more and more people. The rich aren’t just getting richer, they are also becoming more powerful. And the fossil fuel and tech sectors are at the leading edge of those devastating changes to our society.

The fossil fuel industry is the single largest funder of right-wing extremism in this country. It supports ultra-right think tanks, including the Heritage foundation which gave us Project 2025. It is also the biggest spender in California politics. As the world moves away from dependence on its products, the industry is in a fight for survival. It is ready to take the whole world, and democracy itself, down to remain profitable. Those are the forces we need to challenge if we want to make our country work for those of us not in the 1%.

There are three pieces of evidence we can use to see which side of that great divide the candidates are on: What is their relationship to fossil fuel money? What is their position on the Billionaire’s Tax? And what is their position on AB 1790 Water’s Edge which would close a $4 billion a year tax loophole that was fought for by the fossil fuel industry in the 1980’s.

Clearly both of the Republicans front runners for the California governorship are ready to undermine democratic institutions to help serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry and tech oligarchs.

There is one Democratic front runner who passes all three tests with flying colors. It is painful that the one person who has spent the past decades aggressively supporting democracy, fighting for immigrant rights, fighting the tendency toward oligarchy in our politics, and challenging the fossil fuel industry is himself a billionaire. But the facts are that Tom Steyer will not veto the billionaire’s tax, has pledged to support closing the Water’s Edge Tax loophole, and has pledged to not take fossil fuel money.

The same cannot be said for the other Democratic contender, Xavier Becerra. Becerra has taken the largest legal contribution from Chevron and he publicly said “I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron.” He has publicly opposed the Billionaires Tax. He has not publicly declared his support for the Water’s Edge bill. The California Resources Corporation spent $500,000 supporting his campaign

Steyer is dedicated to protecting our democracy from the forces that are working overtime to undermine it. Becerra plans to continue us on the path of business as usual which is heading us for a train wreck with the future of democracy and of the climate. In spite of the fact that he is a billionaire, I am excited to support Tom Steyer for governor.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” jumped at the prospect of such a conflict.

“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump recently recalled at a press event. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’”

Americans join the military for any number of reasons: to serve their country, gain economic stability, or simply join a community. For Hegseth, a thirst for martial victory and a desire for a masculine metamorphosis seemed to surpass all else.

Much to Hegseth’s chagrin, however, his career as an Army officer corresponded to a series of distinctly failed military campaigns. After graduating from Princeton in 2003, he deployed to two doomed military locales—Afghanistan and Iraq—and then relentlessly defended the Pentagon’s occupation of parts of those places in essays, speeches, and, ultimately, as a weekend host on Fox News. While Hegseth’s rhetoric on those wars long reflected mainstream Republican talking points—papering over chaos and death in the Middle East and beyond with pledges that stable democracies were close at hand—his zeal indicated something deeper: a desperation, it seemed, to wring some sort of personal validation from his time in uniform.

“The rank and file, and even some of the officers, have accepted the gravity of the war’s failures,” Adam Weinstein, a Marine Corps veteran and deputy director for Middle East policy at the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on peace and diplomacy, told me, speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s a deep sense of sacrifice and loss for nothing. And that can lead to fatalistic beliefs, it can lead to Islamophobia. In its healthier form, it can lead to questioning the principles of interventionism and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.”

Hegseth, for his part, chose to totally avoid any personal or geopolitical reckoning. Once the Global War on Terror became politically untenable to defend, he cast about for excuses that wouldn’t implicate his own career in the military. Rather than zero in on tactical or intelligence failures, his rhetoric took a dark turn, increasingly inflected by Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity.

As his profile rose, Hegseth argued ever more forcefully that the Pentagon was weak-willed, insufficiently lethal, and overrun by incompetent and cowardly leaders, many of them women or minorities who (in his eyes) had been unfairly promoted. His proposed remedy was as blunt and dense as his diagnosis: America simply needed to fight harder in the Middle East until the mission was accomplished and “Islamic extremism” was eliminated. As one of his former co-workers told me, “I never got the feeling that he wanted to abandon the Middle East.”

I asked Weinstein if, during his own 2012 deployment to Afghanistan, he saw Islamophobia bubbling below the surface. “It was right on the surface,” he responded. “But what do you think the World War II generation was saying about the Japanese? Dehumanization is a natural outgrowth of war.”

“If You Want Something, You Go After It”

As a boy growing up in Minnesota, Hegseth appeared to be a perfect version of the American male. He was religious, athletic, well-spoken, and remarkably handsome. He was ashamed, however, of his self-perceived softness. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it,” he wrote in his 2016 book In the Arena, Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America . In it, he went on to hail his father, Brian, for his “integrity” and “Scandinavian work ethic,” before evincing thinly veiled resentment for not having been reared effectively in the masculine art of aggression. “My father was—and is—an incredible man,” he reflected, “but confrontation isn’t necessarily his forte.”

Military service, Hegseth figured, would imbue him with some much needed and previously missing manliness. It was also his best path to class mobility and prestige. When it came time for college, he applied to West Point, America’s most prestigious service academy, and Princeton, where he was gunning for a ROTC scholarship. He got into both schools and chose the latter, touching down on its verdant New Jersey campus in 1999.

In deciding on Princeton, Hegseth launched himself on a path eerily paralleling that of another Minnesota native of a previous era, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of them were working-class lads who attended Princeton, where they bristled at the elitism while craving its validation. Both developed a writing voice on campus and then joined the Army. Both also struggled with the bottle and with women, though Fitzgerald, unlike Hegseth, was somewhat reflective about his vices. He initially called his first novel The Romantic Egotist (later, This Side of Paradise). It followed a handsome, middle-class Princeton man whose greed and social ambition inhibited his ability to find true love. Hegseth himself expressed a similar ambition in a 2015 interview: “If you want something, you go after it—you’re willing to sleep a little less, put up with more, put up with a little insanity and do things you don’t want to do.”

In a widely read 1927 essay on his alma mater, Fitzgerald asserted that Princeton men “resent any attempt at analysis.” Hegseth also did his best to make such analysis impossible. At Princeton, he was deemed a man with “many faces,” loudly endorsing the Iraq war and attacking feminist groups on campus (even if, in quieter moments, he showed a capacity for nuance and kindness).

One of his former professors has pointed out that Hegseth’s current persona and his Princeton one “don’t fit.” Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that his puffed-up, bellicose military posturing in the Trump era doesn’t match either his Ivy League education or his actual service record. Hegseth came away from the war in Iraq with a Bronze Star that, it’s worth noting, was issued “without valor.” (It was, in short, a lesser version of the medal that, according to the Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the War on Terror years. Some enlisted personnel joked that such a decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.)

Hegseth’s award citation was indeed dry and formulaic, chock-full of the soaring platitudes then used by the White House to sell the American public on the disastrous war in Iraq. It asserted (in what was, historically speaking, a fantasy) that he had “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.”

In reality, the supposed heroes of Hegseth’s war were generally not pedigreed Army National Guard officers like him, but door-busting, ass-kicking Green Berets and Navy SEALs. This was largely thanks to movies like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty that lionized their contributions.

After returning home, Hegseth made inroads with such operators via his advocacy work at a series of astro-turf veterans groups, including the “Concerned Veterans of America” (backed by the billionaire Koch brothers), which advocates for the privatization of the Veterans Administration. As part of his duties, he embarked on a 10-city “Defend Freedom” tour in 2014. Such events featured Madison Rising, billed as “America’s most patriotic rock band,” as well as speeches from decorated military heroes and family members.

On that tour, Hegseth connected with Karen Vaughn, a Gold Star mother whose son, Aaron, a SEAL Team Six member, had been killed in Afghanistan. Vaughn told me that she supports Hegseth mostly because he listens to those who have experienced conflict up close. “His friends are the people who fought these wars,” she said. “They are not the people who sat around white linen tablecloths with glasses of wine discussing them.”

Vaughn later introduced Hegseth to Eddie Gallagher, a SEAL who ignited a simmering debate over the military’s rules of engagement when he was accused of killing civilians and fatally stabbing a wounded captive. Hegseth used the case of Gallagher and two others accused of grisly war crimes against civilians in an attempt to move the Overton window on what should be deemed acceptable rules of wartime engagement. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” he brashly asserted. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.” Ultimately, President Trump agreed with him and reversed Gallagher’s demotion after he was acquitted of the most serious charges, while pardoning other troops who had been convicted of war crimes.

It was through this work that Hegseth earned serious credibility among that badass class of warfighters and ultimately came to embody the essential Trumpian soldier archetype of this moment: White, male, and god-fearing.

The Jerusalem Cross Secretary of War

According to 2019 Department of Defense data, approximately 70% of active-duty service members were Christian (and that undoubtedly hasn’t changed in the era of Donald Trump). It’s the people who look, talk, and pray like Hegseth who also seem most receptive to opposing women serving in combat roles and in favor of Islamophobic war rhetoric. “If we’re going to send our boys to fight—and it should be boys,” he wrote in his memoirs, “we need to unleash them to win. [America needs] them to be the most ruthless.”

But the United States had already sent too many boys into harm’s way in disastrous wars and its citizens were becoming exhausted by conflict. By 2013, as Hegseth’s star was rising, 53% of polled Americans already saw the Iraq war as a mistake. That same year, Hegseth first ventured to Jerusalem, where, in a piece penned for the National Review, he hailed “Israel’s sense of purpose.” Unlike other nations, Hegseth observed, Israel maintained “an ever-present understanding that the fragile peace they enjoy and their nation itself are preserved only through intentional, purposeful, and courageous action.”

Here was a nation that could satisfy Hegseth’s unquenched thirst for military dominance in the Arab world. And unlike the United States, which sought technocratic rationales for war, Israel had the advantage of framing everything in biblical terms. “I find myself envious,” Hegseth concluded, “of the gravity and substance of the Israelis’ task.”

He repeatedly visited Israel in the years that followed, something that helped rejuvenate his faith in both God and war. In Israel, Hegseth consulted with conservative political figures and soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces; visited military bunkers on that country’s northern border; and toured Hebron, a Palestinian city in the West Bank that Israel has targeted with attacks and settlements. He also produced a series of on-the-ground, pro-Israel documentaries for Fox News’s streaming service, including “Battle in the Holy Land,” “Battle in Bethlehem,” and “Life of Jesus.” While filming one of those projects, he first spotted a Jerusalem Cross, a symbol once used by the medieval crusaders, and had it tattooed on his chest “to show that my religion is front and center in my life.”

Hegseth’s skin would come to perfectly illustrate his signature version of hyper-aggressive Christian masculinity. His collage of body ink today includes an American flag, an assault rifle, and the words “Deus Vult” or “God wills it”—a motto from the Crusades that has been adopted by White supremacists and was seen at the deadly 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hegseth also inked the word “kafir,” meaning “infidel” or “non-believer,” on his right bicep.

By 2016, he had come to see Israel’s success as inexorably bound to that of the United States. That January, when President Barack Obama ratified a historic nuclear deal with Iran, Hegseth saw a cowardly capitulation to a country that, he argued then, “would wipe both Israel and America off the map if it could.” During a visit to Israel that year, he pledged to an audience that the United States was forever prepared to “lock arms and shields with all of you in defense of freedom and western civilization.”

It’s this history, as much as anything, that helps explain America’s current war with Iran. In Secretary of War Hegseth, America now has a man with a bone-deep desire for national revenge, one largely animated by his poorly disguised sense of embarrassment at, and personal emasculation over, the utter failures of the wars he fought in.

These are, of course, profoundly flimsy, deeply egotistical excuses for sending American troops into harm’s way yet again. Not surprisingly, then, there have even been a series of public rejections and defections by former Trump administration figures frustrated by the conflict with Iran. The most notable of these is Joe Kent, a former counterterrorism official in the Trump administration who resigned his post, citing “no imminent threat to our nation” from that country. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have also tacitly acknowledged that the war in Iran was not launched by an actual threat index.

As Hegseth has made clear in his words and deeds, the latest American war is largely animated by emotional factors, plus (as reporting has shown) intense pressure from Israel. Now being in charge of the Pentagon, and with a renewed opportunity to pummel the Middle East, he has dropped all institutional pretense to compassion or caution. “We are punching them while they’re down,” he recently told reporters, “which is exactly how it should be.” In practice, this has meant a brutal bombing campaign in conjunction with Israel that targeted, among many other things, a girl’s primary school and oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, acts that respectively killed children and polluted the region. Hegseth also pledged not to offer quarter to enemy combatants in violation of international law.

He certainly hopes that faith and masculine posturing alone can secure success. Absent tangible intelligence, he has taken a page out of Israel’s book by injecting religiosity across the ranks, recently promising on CBS News that “the providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” Asked directly if he views this conflict as a religious one, Hegseth said, “Obviously, we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”

To bolster such an atmosphere, he has hosted Pentagon prayer services involving fiery Christian nationalist pastors and a Grammy-award-winning religious singer. His department’s promotional videos have displayed Bible verses alongside military footage. Watchdogs further claimed that U.S. commanders have counseled troops that the war is fulling biblical prophecies around Armageddon. Hegseth’s fusion of strength, religion, and violence was encapsulated in a poster allegedly displayed at a U.S. military installation in recent days. It featured Jesus Christ firing a mortar round.

Hegseth’s 2024 book, The War on Warriors, further sketches out his theory for reinvigorating the military’s masculine ethos, often through half-assed aphorisms that could fit on a Ford F-350 bumper. Sprinkled in are mythical tales, most of which have Hegseth or another aggrieved White guy at their center. The military has become so warped and woke, he writes, that it has diluted standards to allow women in combat while simultaneously kicking out “good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms.” In Hegseth’s eyes, of course, women should only be on the front lines if they’re naked and in ink.

As Memorial Day approached, polls showed nearly two-thirds of US voters oppose the war against Iran. They’re right. After decades of war since 9/11, Americans now largely agree: War isn’t worth it.

The Iran war has killed thousands of Iranians and Lebanese and displaced hundreds of thousands more. People in poor countries around the world are facing fuel shortages, power outages, and food insecurity, with much worse to come.

Here in the United States, the war has already cost more than $50 billion, and the cost is only going up—not just at the gas pump but in opportunity. For that $50 billion, we could have paid for healthcare for 3 million people in this country and gotten about 1.5 million kids into Head Start, according to the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project.

Which makes us safer?

For the $16 trillion the US had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education, and renewable energy.

President Donald Trump would like us to believe that no price is too high to stop Iran’s “nuclear threat.” But Iran isn’t a nuclear threat. Year after year, including 2026, US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

In 2015, Iran agreed to cut its stockpile of enriched uranium, reduce its reactors, and submit to unprecedentedly intrusive United Nations inspections. The United States, in return, agreed to end many of the sanctions that were crippling Iran’s economy.

It worked. Intelligence agencies around the world, including in the United States, agreed that Iran was complying. UN inspectors kept a watchful eye on Iran’s reactors, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz flowed freely, and Iran was still not trying to build a nuclear weapon, maintaining that a bomb would violate Islamic law.

However, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. He didn’t pretend Iran was violating it; he just claimed he could “get a better deal.” He couldn’t.

Instead, Trump joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ratcheted up threats against Iran. Eventually, those threats turned into reality—first in a short-term bombing campaign in June 2025 and then a full-scale US-Israeli war this year.

Despite repeated ceasefire declarations and claims from the White House that “we’ve won,” the war continues months later. Thousands are dead, gas prices are shockingly high, and the Strait of Hormuz (which was running fine before Trump trampled the nuclear deal) remains largely closed.

It’s easy to say that diplomacy works and war does not. That’s not just a statement of principle—it’s the truth.

Diplomacy is the only strategy that’s ever worked to change Iran’s behavior. It wasn’t because the US asked nicely. It was because the US negotiated seriously; changed its own aggressive behavior; and stopped using its economic, political, and strategic power as acts of war against Iran.

Is this war worth the human, economic, or environmental costs? Clearly not. You could say the same of Trump’s other second-term conflicts—including his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his attacks on Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, and Nigeria.

In fact, today most Americans would agree that none of the major wars in this country’s recent memory have been worthwhile—not in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iraq again.

For the $16 trillion the US had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education, and renewable energy. We could have erased student debt and virtually wiped out child poverty at home and globally.

Instead, our leaders continue to spend money on wars they think will make the United States the undisputed power in the world—wars that instead kill millions of people abroad, endanger US troops, and make life harder at home.

Veterans know this. “The US has been at war in one form or another since my deployment in the Persian Gulf, 36 years ago,” said Michael McPhearson, executive director of Veterans for Peace.

“Trillions of tax dollars spent, thousands of US military service members dead, and tens of thousands wounded. The toll on the rest of the world is even more staggering, while warmongers and those who send us to war get richer,” he added.

“It’s time to invest in people and life and stop spending money on death and destruction,” McPhearson said.

I agree—and so do most Americans.

This piece was originally published in DC Journal.

The Trump administration collected $166 billion in tariff payments before the Supreme Court struck them down. Refunds have already started hitting the bank accounts of US importers—and more could be owed soon.

As more than 300,000 companies scramble to get their money back, one large group is getting stiffed: American consumers.

After President Donald Trump imposed sweeping, indiscriminate tariffs on so-called “Liberation Day” last year, companies moved swiftly to pass on their higher prices to consumers. Consumers, already facing an affordability crisis—and reporting historic dissatisfaction with the economy—paid those higher prices at the grocery store, hardware store, and clothing store.

Instead of focusing on strategic sectors where American manufacturers were being undercut or where we’re developing new technologies, Trump imposed tariffs seemingly on a whim—hitting inputs that drove up costs for manufacturers and goods (like bananas or coffee) that are not made in the mainland United States and never will be.

With corporate profits at record highs, Congress should step in to ensure that consumers see some relief.

The results were as expected.

New data from the Federal Reserve found that businesses were able to pass through tariffs almost completely, raising core goods inflation by 3.1%. The Harvard Pricing Lab finds that retail prices for imported goods are up 5.4% compared with pre-Liberation Day trends.

Furthermore, the shock and confusion of the Liberation Day tariffs and dozens of subsequent adjustments allowed companies to take advantage of the pricing environment, raising prices even if they were not directly affected. Some even bragged about it on calls with their investors.

Unsurprisingly, consumers think this arraignment is unfair.

Polling from my organization, Groundwork Collaborative, found that 44% of Americans think refunds should go to consumers—and 34% believe that refunds should go to consumers and businesses.

Just 7% say that only businesses should get their money back. But that’s what’s happening.

Consumers won’t see a dime from the refunded tariffs—and in all likelihood they’ll keep paying for them. Prices, as retail experts like to say, are like “rockets and feathers.” When they go up, they go up quickly. But when costs fall, prices come down slowly—if they come down at all.

Big corporations that were able to pass through the price increases will now get a windfall, with no plans to pass on those savings. Costco made news by announcing they planned to use their sizable refund to lower prices, but almost no other corporations have followed their lead.

In addition to hurting consumers, the benefits of tariff refunds are unequally distributed between big and large corporations. Some 56% of small businesses reported that tariffs negatively impacted their operations, and many have shared difficulties and confusion with navigating the tariff refund portal.

Larger companies have used their size and market power to negotiate with suppliers and push costs onto consumers, but many small businesses had to pay whopping bills or risk going under. Some even sold the rights to their future refunds to Wall Street for pennies on the dollar to get cash up front to weather the storm, and now companies like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik’s old firm are profiting.

Families are hurting in this economy. They’re facing rising prices at the pump—up 50% because of Trump’s war in Iran—along with runaway utility bills and further uncertainty as Trump’s latest round of tariffs wind their way through the courts.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration hasn’t lifted a finger to ensure that corporations pass their savings through to consumers. In fact, Trump has even asked businesses not to claim the refunds at all, telling them he’ll “remember” companies that opt out.

With corporate profits at record highs, Congress should step in to ensure that consumers see some relief. Americans already paid these tariffs once—they shouldn’t have to pay again while corporations cash the checks.

The Democrat's 2026 midterm electoral strategy remains essentially the same as it was during the melted-down 2024 presidential election: Focus on President Donald Trump's obvious character flaws and failings rather than highlight the critical issues and offer progressive alternatives. Waiting for Trump to shoot himself in the foot is not a winning campaign strategy. Neither are abstract ideas about defending democracy and saving the nation from autocracy or fascism. Voters want practical approaches to everyday challenges of rising food costs, prohibitively expensive and inadequate health insurance, skyrocketing medical costs, exorbitant childcare and pre-K expenses, and spiraling energy pricing.

Since the last quarter of the 20th century, establishment Democrats and their leaders have slid so far to the political right that progressive, populist initiatives are undermined by fear of taxes and debt. The Democratic Party has allowed conservatives to label it as a party of spendthrift liberals and radical leftists rather than actually embracing a progressive agenda offering optimistic, creative, and constructive alternatives to the conservatives' agenda favoring the wealthy and corporations. Due to its conservative turn, moreover, Democratic leadership is decidedly reluctant to back progressive and politically aggressive Democratic candidates, as seen in the candidacies of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Graham Platner in Maine.

The political table has been so tilted toward conservative goals that the survival of the Democratic Party and popular elections itself are clearly threatened. Gerrymandering, opposing mail-in ballots, requiring stricter voter identification, confiscating state voting records and increasing the presence of security forces at polls are among the voter suppression tactics that conservatives are employing to rig the midterm and other future elections. The use of the military to confiscate ballots in the upcoming midterm elections is far from out of the question. Financing independent candidates to siphon off votes from Democratic ones is another ploy to be expected. To counter these anti-democratic tactics, Democrats must frame these challenges in practical personal terms—as corrupt means to prevent citizens from influencing policy, as ways to deny such popular initiatives as universal healthcare and control over other cost-of-living expenses. Complaining about the threat to democracy simply isn't concrete and personal enough.

Absent vociferous opposition to the conservative direction in international affairs, the Democrats also cede this critical ground to Republicans. This effectively facilitates the displacement of diplomacy by militarism as the principal approach to resolving global issues and conflicts. Without alerting and educating the American public to its profound and eminently dangerous military, political, and economic implications, the Democrats' influence here is essentially neutered. The present conflicts in the Middle East illustrate this point. Despite expressed public concern for supplying Israel with the munitions used against Palestinians in Gaza, the Democrats demurred from leveraging the removal of military support to promote a ceasefire and negotiated settlement. Neither did the party bring to the public's attention the US abandoning diplomatic negotiations with Iran in February, negotiations that were reportedly making progress on nuclear energy concerns. The combination of unrestricted military aid and disingenuous diplomacy fueled a regional war. This is a reality that must be made emphatically clear to American citizens.

Running against a personality cult and election rigging without offering hope for a better future through specific, concrete policy commitments effectively puts Democrats on the defensive and abandons the progressive populist movement in its own party.

Despite positioning itself to the conservative center of the political spectrum in recent decades, the Democratic Party can yet build on its members' near universal call for a more muscular confrontation with Republicans and Trump. One starting point is massive military spending. The disastrous domestic and global effects of US military campaigns and overall defense spending present Democrats with a historic political opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity the party must immediately take the offensive by highlighting the deleterious impact of unparalleled military expenditures. This campaign strategy can unfold in specific ways, drawing into high relief the connection between allocating vast resources away from social programs into military coffers.

First, levels of defense spending are inversely, and critically, correlated with spending for services that profoundly impact the quality of life of the vast majority of Americans. The proposed $1.5 trillion military expenditure for 2027—a 44% increase over 2026 and more than half of the total government budget—sequesters funding that could be used for domestic purposes, programs ranging from education, public health, housing, transportation, and social services to agriculture, science, and environmental protection. This comparison highlights the distorted priorities of the nation and directly relates to the jaundiced attitude toward the federal government and the disaffection of large swaths of American voters. It further counters the impact of disinformation and misinformation that aggravate divisions and suspicions fueled by negative propaganda and conspiracy rhetoric promoted by the Trump administration.

Second, heavy defense spending and military confrontation and conflict contribute to global economic and political instability beyond the devastating human suffering inflicted by military tactics and war. This course blazes a treacherous path that violates human rights and international law, fraying alliances and degrading the country's respect and reputation internationally. The escalation of military exchanges and strategies that Iran and the US are pursuing in the Strait of Hormuz signify not only the destructive international impact but also the extensive domestic economic stress it thrusts on Americans. The price of gasoline and its broad inflationary effect are prime examples. Defense spending drives up national debt with minimal social benefit. While military expenditure does provide jobs in the defense industry, a portion of savings resulting from limiting military spending can be used to retrain displaced workers for new high-paying employment in renewable energy and other industries the government could incentivize, industries where workers and their unions could be protected by statutory law.

Third, and amply illustrated by the militarized standoff in the Gulf of Hormuz, the Iran War is strengthening American economic competitors while splintering alliances with nations now losing confidence in US military and commercial relations. Fearful of the impulsive, unreliable posturing and military aggression of the Trump administration, countries in various regions of the world are forging commercial relations with China. Moreover, Beijing's massive investment in improving and producing renewable energy and its delivery—a strategic market position the current administration and its congressional supporters have ceded to the Chinese—is a wise and calculated enterprise. This investment displaces future scientific, technological, and commercial development in this country, further restricting employment and scientific investment in a growing sustainable energy source. At the same time, the progressive shift from oil and gas to renewable fuels may redirect international finance based in Wall Street to direct and indirect investment in economic expansion in China and in parts of the world that adopt and eventually depend on Chinese technology.

Last, the enormous investment in defense is not justified relative to defense spending worldwide. The US spends more on defense than the next six countries combined—three times as much as China and five times as much as Russia. With an over 40% boost in next year's military budget the disparity in military expenditures will even widen the military spending gap between America and other countries. Given the many social needs in this country and the military's aggressive engagement in projecting its power, enormous resources heedlessly dedicated to the military undermines quality of life across the nation and is simply unsustainable. Favoring diplomacy over military action, moreover, brings greater stability to international relations, reduces unnecessary military expenditures, and, in turn, can redirect funds to investment in international commercial relations to spur sustainable domestic economic growth.

As this brief examination of America's misplaced priorities demonstrates, the Democrats not only have clear opportunities to undermine the false narratives of the present administration and its supporters, they also have the public responsibility to do so. A similarly focused, analytical, and expansive argument may be made with tax cuts for the wealthy, with the severe personnel reductions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and elsewhere, and with myriad other issues. These campaign arguments should be, moreover, framed as national security threats.

Squandering such a political opportunity and advantage will weaken the party overall. It further undercuts the groundwork laid by local party members—through demonstrations and campaigns to increase voter turnout—by ignoring local calls for a more aggressive campaign strategy that directly challenges Republicans and offers sustainable social, economic, and environmental policies.

The party should not wait for a wave of nationalism to be ginned up in the wake of a specious “deal” with Iran or for an “October surprise” like the sudden discovery of funds to help pay Americans' medical bills. Running against a personality cult and election rigging without offering hope for a better future through specific, concrete policy commitments effectively puts Democrats on the defensive and abandons the progressive populist movement in its own party, sacrificing forward-thinking and future planning to backward-thinking and complacency. This is a losing proposition in the short-term and long-term future. It not only erodes the power of the vote but it will also alienate millions more Americans at a time when creative, constructive leadership and citizen engagement are imperative to meet the existential social, economic, and ecological challenges of the coming years and decades.

Governance in Honduras shifted sharply to the extreme right within months of National Party’s Nasry Asfura taking office on January 27, succeeding the Libre party’s progressive Xiomara Castro. In November 30 elections, the National Party was trailing a poor third before US President Donald Trump threatened to end all aid to Honduras unless Asfura won. Even then, Asfura had only a wafer-thin plurality, which might well have disappeared had the electoral council not broken its mandate by halting the count before all the votes had been tallied.

Compounding this blatant interference, Trump announced just two days before the election that he was pardoning former Honduran President and National Party stalwart, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been extradited to the US and was serving a 45-year sentence for narco-trafficking. Corporate media treated Trump’s pardon as just a typically blatant political maneuver. Yet they have since largely ignored what appears to be a much bigger element of the same plot.

The Emerging Regional Offensive

The wider conspiracy has been revealed in a trove of leaked audio recordings, now dubbed “Hondurasgate.” The 37 recordings appear to show that Hernández—still in the US—is preparing a return to Honduran politics and, in league with Republican Party officials, is actively producing propaganda directed against progressive governments across Latin America.

Claims by Hondurasgate investigators that the recordings have been independently verified now appear to be at least partially substantiated by a separate investigation commissioned by Drop Site News. BBC Mundo recently interviewed Hernández and asked for his response to the controversy, but received no response.

The blatant US intervention exemplified by Hondurasgate may be an ominous foreshadowing of likely interference in the upcoming elections in Colombia (this month), Brazil (October), and Mexico (2030), all currently governed by progressives.

Shocking as the revelations are, Hondurasgate is symptomatic of a much more ambitious project to exploit Honduras and impose the “Donroe Doctrine” across the region. Whether or not the recordings are all genuine, the wider project is very much alive.

Power Consolidation Through Lawfare and Repression

Since taking office, Asfura wasted no time consolidating control over Honduran institutions. The elections left the Libre party with fewer than one-third of the seats in the National Congress, reverting to the historic pattern in Honduras in which the National and the Liberal parties—both neoliberal and subservient to Washington—swap power. This has enabled Asfura to move quickly against his enemies.

Marlon Ochoa, Libre’s representative on the electoral council and the first official to call out the electoral fraud, was impeached by Congress on fabricated charges, received death threats, and fled the country.

The sitting attorney general, also from Libre, was dismissed. The Supreme Court president was forced to resign, while other leading congressional members were impeached. Many of those kicked out of their jobs also had their US visas revoked.

“It is a political lawfare operation in which Honduran institutions are acting against the country’s own legal framework to eliminate political opponents,” wrote Diario RED. Carmen Haydeé López, Libre’s press officer, describes the moves as “state capture” by the ruling National Party.

Worse may follow: “If we have to kill people so we can have peace of mind, we’ll do it,” Hernández says in the Hondurasgate audios. Further, “If we have to resort to repression to control the country, we’ll do it.”

Far-right operative Roger Stone—a Trump associate said to have orchestrated Hernández’s pardon—even called for the US to kidnap Xiomara Castro and her husband, former president “Mel” Zelaya, “like they did with Maduro.”

Return to the Narco-State

These developments signal Honduras’ return to the corrupt and criminal neoliberal order that prevailed after the 2009 military coup and lasted until Xiomara Castro’s presidency in January 2022.

For most of this earlier period, Juan Orlando Hernández dominated politics, transforming Honduras into a “narco-state.” Over the years, he facilitated the trafficking to the US of at least 400 tons of cocaine, accepted huge bribes (including $1 million from Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán), and ran a regime marked by extreme violence.

The leaked recordings show Hernández expects a reconfigured judiciary to clear him of outstanding charges in Honduras. This would pave the way for his return and even to make a run for president again in 2029.

Rolling Back Social Gains and Imposing Austerity

In the meantime, Asfura has moved rapidly to dismantle the Libre government’s modest achievements. Castro had begun to invest heavily in a public health service that fell apart during the Covid-19 pandemic. Asfura halted construction of three hospitals her administration had partially completed. He also withdrew a popular subsidy for electricity bills benefiting 600,000 low-income families.

In the last few weeks, Honduras has witnessed widespread protests against the weakening of workers’ rights, a march organized by 30 campesino movements against legislation that strengthens the hands of big landowners, and student demonstrations over cuts in university budgets.

Another worrying hint of a return to the narc-ostate has been a sharp increase in homicides, extortions, kidnappings, and femicides. Violence peaked on May 21, with 24 violent deaths in two incidents: 19 peasant farmers murdered in a land conflict and five people killed in a gang assault on a police vehicle.

Cuts in public spending and attacks on the rights of the 60% of Hondurans living in poverty constitute Asfura’s austerity program. But Asfura’s and Hernández’s aims are for a much wider transformation of the country.

One of Castro’s reforms was to declare illegal the private model cities or “ZEDEs,” which Hernández and his predecessor initiated in the face of community protests. Asfura has reversed her decisions, thus neutralizing huge pending lawsuits filed against Honduras by the libertarian investors in two ZEDEs, Próspera and Morazán. US investor and billionaire Trump adviser Peter Thiel is a key figure behind Próspera. The congress is now exploring how to promote more of these libertarian “states within a state” that ride roughshod over the rights of local communities.

Militarization and Reassertion of US Hegemony

Another payoff for Trump in return for Hernández’s pardon is the promise of a second US military base in Honduras. Because of its strategic position in Central America, the US already has the huge Soto Cano base, which Castro threatened to close. Soon, according to Marlon Ochoa, the US will install another base on the island of Roatán, further strengthening Washington’s naval domination of the Caribbean.

If built, it will be part of a wave of US militarization in the region, with a strengthened base in El Salvador and US troops newly deployed in Panama.

Another dramatic change is the restoration of close ties with Israel. During Castro’s presidency, Honduras (along with Colombia and Nicaragua) was one of Latin America’s fiercest critics of the Gaza genocide. Hernández, when president, had close links with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who (according to the Hondurasgate recordings) had "everything to do" with Hernández’s pardon.

This month, Israeli President Issac Herzog embarked on a diplomatic tour of Central America, stopping in Panama and attending the inauguration of Costa Rica’s new President, Laura Fernández. While in San Jose, Herzog met Chile’s new right-wing President José Antonio Kast and Honduras’s Nasry Asfura who, despite his Palestinian ancestry, identifies as a Christian Zionist. Asfura’s administration is part of a broader regional trend in which Trump-aligned governments (such as Bolivia’s) restore ties with Israel that were severed by their predecessors.

Asfura is reportedly planning legislation to encourage investment by US and Israeli AI firms. Honduras’s abundant water resources and renewable energy infrastructure would be central to such projects. Yet several of these developments have proven highly controversial with rural communities, including the notorious hydro project which led to the murder of Berta Cáceres.

Testing Ground for the “Donroe Doctrine"

Gerardo Torres Zelaya says that “Honduras is not an isolated case: It is a testing ground for a new offensive against our democracies.” Torres Zelaya, a former vice minister in Castro’s administration, believes that what is at stake is not just the outcome of an election, but progressive Latin American governments being subjected to offensives that “no longer operate according to traditional rules.”

He adds that the region now faces hybrid warfare, strategically combining disinformation, economic coercion, criminal networks and, if required, military force. Trump’s intervention in Honduras raised the stakes further when compared with previous electoral interference. Yet even that was soon surpassed by the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In March, Trump assembled his regional allies in pursuing his “Donroe Doctrine” to create the “Shield of the Americas.” Nasry Asfura was there, of course, along with his opposite numbers in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama.

The blatant US intervention exemplified by Hondurasgate may be an ominous foreshadowing of likely interference in the upcoming elections in Colombia (this month), Brazil (October), and Mexico (2030), all currently governed by progressives. If no-holds-barred measures were deployed in the Honduran elections, they might be anticipated on a much bigger scale, again with little restraint, when the prizes could be Latin America’s biggest economies. Hondurasgate signals that Trump will not act alone; his accomplices will be the 12 members of his “Shield of the Americas.”

This president’s proclivity for deploying distractions to avert public scrutiny of what’s really going on and what the effects are, has consequences far beyond the obfuscation of illicit activity. Outlandish assertions cover up the undermining of democratic principles and the evisceration of critical institutions. National capacity to address our most critical concerns is severely hampered. Most nefarious is the theft of a decent future from young Americans.

In the 20 months since President Donald Trump took office, he has overwhelmed public discourse with a virtual tsunami of distractions. The theme of all of them, some personal, some national, some international, is domination.

• Perpetual Bluster: “I’m in charge; I’m on top of this; I keep winning in Iran”—over and over again.
• Acquisition Aspirations: Encroaching on other countries’ sovereignty—Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba.
• Grandiose Building Projects Aimed at Redefining National Identity: A gigantic ballroom, a triumphal arch, a rehabbed national arts center.
• Reverberations of “Dear Leader”: Affixing his name to major institutions, his picture on paper currency and passports.
• Arbitrary Prosecutions and Harassment: Indictments regardless of cause—James Comey, John Bolton, Letitia James.

There is frequently a measure of verisimilitude to these moves, yet the timing of their announcement usually coincides with developments that the administration would rather the public not heed. Included are links to Jeffrey Epstein, subverting the independence of the Department of Justice, suspicious stock market windfalls. That the media feels obliged to report the distractions as news may be understandable, but the result is that they become complicit in promoting increasingly outrageous distortions.

Good governance is defined by the concentration of attention to matters central to public welfare, not only in the moment, but in the long term. This is what we count on from our elected leaders. To our misfortune, the main aim of the present administration is “pillage and plunder,” so as to feed private coffers. Beyond covering up seedy, illicit, and corrosive activity, these manufactured diversions detract from a focus on addressing common needs.

Rather than expending the energy to mislead, our government should be about injecting consideration of the following concerns into public discourse. Sidelining them will likely be this administration’s most enduring legacy.

• Education: American public education is in crisis. Across the country, students’ academic performance is worse than it was a decade ago. From a recent New York Times story, reading scores were down last year in over 80% of school districts. Math scores were down in 70% of districts.
• Healthcare: The US ranks highest among developed countries in the cost of healthcare. The recent elimination of Affordable Care Act subsidies will further erode access to adequate coverage for middle- and lower-income individuals.
• Home Ownership: Owning a home is largely out of reach for young people and those of lesser means. Because of wage stagnation, low housing inventory, and high interest rates, many younger buyers can’t afford to buy a home.
• Climate Imbalance: Extreme weather events are highly probable going forward, the risks magnified by heat reinforcing carbon emissions. Increased hobbling of emergency management capabilities will make matters worse. El Niño’s anticipated arrival will produce a marked increase in natural disasters this year.
• Financial Stability: The national debt is now closing in on $40 trillion, larger than our Gross National Product. The only precedent for this was at the end of WWII. But that level of debt was directly related to the demands of a world-wide conflict, into which we had been drawn.
• Energy Affordability: The Iran War has hamstrung the availability of energy from fossil fuels. Along with AI’s voracious appetite for electricity and the increased demand for AC to keep us cool, the nation’s energy infrastructure is likely to be stretched thin in the years ahead.

The near total absence of governmental attention to these and other critical areas, amid countless distractions, is not just dangerous, it’s effectively suicidal. Palpable is the probability of a stunted future for all of us. But most of the burden and suffering will fall on the shoulders of the youngest among us—on whom the nation depends for its future safety and well-being.

We’re witnessing machinations aimed at covering up crimes that result in neglect which most severely harms those citizens who will be responsible for creating a livable future.

Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? According to a survey of likely midterm voters published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 57% of Americans believe it is. Sixty-nine percent say democracy is under serious threat; and an equal percentage of non-white voters say they fear rising white supremacy.

While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion’s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has issued a blistering succession of dangerously polarizing rulings, ranging from presidential immunity, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, and gun control to affirmative action and abortion rights. The resulting jurisprudential carnage has accelerated the nation’s rupture into irreconcilable belligerent tribes and prompted speculation that we are headed for another existential conflict.

The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. Last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the landmark legislation, which was amended in 1982 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power.

The court’s 6-3 majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito invalidated Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that created a second majority-Black congressional district to operate alongside the state’s five white-majority districts, roughly reflecting the size of Louisiana’s Black population. The ruling handed a victory to the lead plaintiff in the case, Phillip “Bert” Callais, an election denier and alleged conspiracy theorist who had attended the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally on the White House Ellipse that eventually snowballed into the insurrection at the Capitol. Barely concealing their racial animus, Callais and his co-plaintiffs described themselves in court filings as “non-African American voters” who were the victims of reverse discrimination. Louisiana has since moved to redraw its voting maps.

Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts’ lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history.

With the demise of the “effects test,” future Section 2 plaintiffs will have to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps were created with overt discriminatory intent rather than for political purposes. And as the court held in a 2019 opinion written by Roberts in Rucho v. Common Cause, political gerrymandering claims cannot be brought in federal courts because, as the Republican majority sees it, they present nonjusticiable “political questions.”

Both Callais and Rucho built upon Roberts’ 2013 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Alabama gutting two other sections of the VRA that required state and local jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval—known as preclearance—before making changes to their election procedures. Like Alito in Callais, Roberts declared in Shelby that racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past and thus special protections for minorities were no longer necessary.

The combined effects of Shelby and Rucho have led to a proliferation of voting roll purges, onerous photo ID laws, and limitations on mail-in ballots in red states across the country. Now, with Callais, election law experts predict that as many as 19 Democratic congressional seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, returning the former states of the Confederacy to one-party rule.

The court’s handiwork has sparked outrage and alarm. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation, who will likely lose his seat to gerrymandering, has condemned Callais as “equivalent to a second Civil War.” Other observers have compared the current moment in the US to the 1850s, when debates over the future of slavery eventually led to secession and war.

Chief Justice Roberts has also drawn comparisons to Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose 1857 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Black Americans had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott decision helped precipitate the Civil War, and is widely considered the most infamous in the court’s history.

The parallels between Taney and Roberts are beyond hyperbole. Both men began their legal careers as zealous partisan political advocates. Before ascending to the Supreme Court in 1836, Taney was elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, and later served as a loyal foot soldier to President Andrew Jackson, first as secretary of war and then as attorney general, in which capacity he penned an advisory opinion that prefigured his Dred Scott ruling, arguing that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were inapplicable to Black people, even those living in free states.

Similarly, the young Roberts established himself as a dependable right-wing operative, clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and afterward serving as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration. There, he authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 amendment that added the effects test to the Voting Rights Act in addition to ghosting op-eds for Smith and preparing administration officials for their testimony before Congress on the test. Later, as an attorney in private practice, he played an important role as a consultant, lawsuit editor, and prep coach for the GOP’s legal arguments in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.

Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts’ lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history. As the civil rights activist and writer William Spivey argued in an essay published earlier this month in the online journal Level:

Taney held that no Black person, free or enslaved, could ever be a US citizen. He believed that Black people were not part of the political community and the Constitution was written for white men only.

Chief Justice Roberts has been more effective than anyone in disenfranchising Black people. Most of what Taney accomplished can be traced to a single decision that remained in place for 11 years before being reversed [by the 13th and 14th Amendments]. Roberts has spent an entire career whittling away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and, most recently, the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement.

Roberts will also be remembered for composing the majority opinion in Trump v. United States in 2024 that gave the president near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. That decision, along with the evisceration of voting rights, has emboldened Trump to threaten the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the military to polling places and hatch other plots to rig the midterm elections and consolidate Republican power.

It may be premature to conclude a new Civil War is upon us, but a high-stakes battle for the future of the country is well underway.

After an extended pressure campaign, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin finally agreed to release the DNC’s “autopsy report” on the 2024 election. It’s the first document I’ve ever read that would have been better if it had been written by AI. Martin himself said the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” That’s for damn sure. As we’ll see, however, that doesn’t let Martin off the hook.

I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”

These omissions are particularly striking since one activist group was told by report author Paul Rivera that DNC data showed that the administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was, “in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Axios, which reported on that exchange, added that it “independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters.”

RootsAction was one of the groups pressing for the autopsy’s release, and co-founder Jeff Cohen called the document “almost worthless.” Cohen condemned the failure to mention “the Biden/Harris administration’s Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre,” Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election, and what he called Kamala Harris’ “lack of principles.”

Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.

The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation. Don’t read it unless you’re prepared to wade through prose like this:

... the voters decide which choice is most resonant. One party declares itself the winner, and the other party declares that the fight is far from finished.

Effective parties, understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does often rhyme, make it a point to study electoral outcomes after each cycle to identify potential improvements to every aspect of their campaigns. John Adams argued ‘"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know."

Believe me, it doesn’t get any better from there.

The document is 192 pages long, but many of those pages are blank. The page called “Leadership Message”: blank. (Any comment about that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.) “Executive Summary”: blank. And so on.

The section entitled “Electoral Landscape” includes sentences like this: “We must organize everywhere to Win Anywhere”—which doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to organize everywhere to win anywhere. And Democrats already win somewhere! Those “somewheres” are called “Blue States.” The problem is they have to win more “somewheres,” and you can’t win somewhere if you’re “everywhere”! You have to be there to win there!

The next sentence begins, “Winning Anywhere means providing for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South ...” Wait. One sentence ago we were everywhere. Now we’re in Middle America and the South, which happen to be two readily-identifiable somewheres.

That’s what consultant-speak will do to the human mind.

The document, perhaps unsurprisingly, praises the centrist Democratic orientation of the late 1980s and 1990s. But the same pro-corporate orientation contributed heavily to the party’s 2024 losses. That’s what you get what you call on a party to emulate the centrists’ “future-focused directive”—by adopting a 40-year-old strategy.

The report also states that “the DNC and ASDC (Association of State Democratic Parties) have conducted more than 1200 interviews to assess the health of our 57 state parties—in every state, district, or territory.” Where are those interviews?

Martin reportedly told DNC members that Rivera no longer “is with or advises the DNC in any capacity.” But the buck stops with the boss, not the consultant.

I get it; Martin has a tough job. But he campaigned for his position by promising an autopsy. When Rivera’s proved to be unusable, Martin was obliged to have it re-done. By failing to do so, he reneged on his campaign promise. In the meantime, a little transparency would have gone a long way toward avoiding the mess he now faces.

Don’t read the DNC document unless you’re a masochist or a journalist (provided there’s a difference between the two). Read this one instead. Stay far away from the DNC report. Trust me, you’ll “win somewhere” by being anywhere else.

I was briefly sent into a rage last week, throwing ketchup against the wall, when I saw that one of the Murdoch sons was buying up Vox Media. After seeing Elon Musk take over Twitter, Junior Trumper David Ellison take over Paramount and CBS, and now ready to buy Warner Brothers and CNN, and senior Trumper Larry Ellison taking over TikTok, the thought of yet another serious new outlet falling into Trumper hands was pretty appalling.

Fortunately, the buyer turned out to be James Murdoch, the relatively sane Murdoch son. While that is comparatively good news, no one should feel too relieved over this outcome.

It’s good that Vox isn’t being taken over by a right-wing billionaire, but that’s just luck. It could be. There are any number of right-wing billionaires who have the means to buy up just about any media outlet in sight. And once they do, they could turn their new acquisition into another variant of Fox News.

Part of my reason for the ketchup throwing was that I just saw yet another diatribe against Citizens United, with someone attributing the failures of our political situation to this decision. To be clear, I think the decision was bad in both logic and its outcome.

The government creates corporations; how can it not have the authority to limit their political behavior? Individuals and the organizations they create can do whatever they want politically, but leave corporations out of politics. And we certainly saw more money flooding into politics following the Citizens United ruling, but people need to keep their eye on the ball.

Elon Musk contributed close to $300 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024. That was Elon Musk, not Tesla or any other company he controls. Other billionaires have also contributed millions or tens of millions to political campaigns.

Reversing Citizens United will require a Constitutional amendment, which is impossible for practical purposes in any foreseeable future. Alternatively, it can be reversed through a court-packing scheme, which is only slightly more feasible.

And then after this great victory, Elon Musk can still contribute $300 million to elect his favorite reactionaries and racists. Would we be celebrating? For the rich, contributing to candidates through the corporations they control is a convenience, not a necessity.

As a practical matter, we are not going to be able to limit the amount the rich spend on campaigns. The only plausible route to preserve democracy is through various forms of public financing, like the super-match in New York City that multiplies small contributions by a factor of 8. Alternatively, Seattle has “democracy vouchers” where each voter gets $100 to contribute to the candidate(s) of their choice. These programs can allow candidates to have enough money to be competitive even without relying on rich people’s money.

We need the same approach to the media. Many progressives seem to have the view that campaign spending has a magical impact on people’s voting, as opposed to everything else that people come across in their lives.

If voters heard nothing but Fox News 24/7, it would take an enormous number of campaign ads to get voters to take arguments from a candidate like Bernie Sanders or AOC seriously. If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.

Part of that story depends on trying to block the right-wing takeovers that are still in the works. That includes the Paramount effort to take over Warner Brothers and the Nexstar-TEGNA merger, which would lead to an unprecedented consolidation of local news outlets in the hands of a right-wing media group.

But it is also necessary to develop an alternative stream of funding, like the super match or democracy vouchers provide for elections. One route is a system of journalism vouchers that people can use to support the news outlets of their choice. This can be done at the state or even local level, since this Republican Congress is not about to pass a measure challenging the power of the rich.

Building up alternative media to challenge the views being pushed by Trumper media is a long and uphill battle, but it is essential if we’re going to preserve democracy. And the first step is recognizing the need for the battle and getting people to stop worrying about Citizens United. If we’re going to undertake a tough fight, we need to be sure we get something important if we win.

Earlier this year, in a horrific conversation with white supremacist podcaster Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook to rank women’s appearances in 2004, argued that the tech world needs more masculine energy.

Any serious look at the tech world and it’s clear it’s a space already overrun by the male ultra-wealthy class: 88.92% of IT CEOs alone are white men. This is the same cultural demographic and argument now overtaking our governmental systems as well. It’s an arrogance that demands control of all, from the bodies of women, trans folks, queer folks, and young people, to violent control of our environment, the plants, animals, landscapes, and non-human bodies that provide the world’s strength.

Days after serial-sexual-assaulter and white supremacist Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes tweeted, “Your body; my choice.” At his inauguration, Trump proclaimed (insert characteristic Trump voice), “We’re going to drill, baby, drill.”

These two statements are deeply related, echoing the same narratives of control, extraction, exploitation, and domination over our bodies, relatives, and communities.

Our movements must understand the intuitive reality that the attacks on reproductive rights, on reproductive access, and on our bodily autonomy are the same attacks as those on our environment.

All of this is why I found myself outside the Philadelphia Women’s Center near my college on February 8. With dozens of local community members from the grassroots organization Abortion Rights Philadelphia, we chanted, “Abortion is a human right, not just for the rich and white.” Together, we sang Chappell Roan and Beyoncé, building a wall of joy between the clinic’s patients and the masses of anti-abortion protesters, by and large older white men, who had gathered with dramatized pictures of fetuses, attempting to dox and scare patients from accessing their healthcare.

Attacks on the Environment are Attacks on Reproductive Rights

Our movements must understand the intuitive reality that the attacks on reproductive rights, on reproductive access, and on our bodily autonomy are the same attacks as those on our environment. And we must understand the inverse as well.

As New York City-based Afro-Puerto Rican reproductive and climate justice activist Hennessy García points out, “Where we see environmental injustice, we see reproductive injustice as well.” They go hand in hand.

For example, breathing in polluted air increases the likelihood for pregnant people to give birth prematurely. The same is true for exposure to water pollution, toxins from superfund sites and brownfields, proximity to fossil fuel infrastructure, and the effects of extreme heat. All of these environmental hazards are, by and large, located in communities of color, especially low-income communities, across the country. This means that when Trump chants, “Drill, baby, drill” and loosens our already weak environmental protections, he’s putting pregnant people of color at risk of both climate and environmental injustices and harms.

This is also the case for women and transgender or non-binary (TGNB), intersex, and LGBTQIA+ people, independent of pregnancy, and for disabled people as well, due to societal structure, gendered roles, discrimination, and resource inequity. It is also true that sexual violence rates for women and TGNB folks increase significantly in the aftermath of climate disasters.

The clear takeaway here: Women and TGNB people’s lives and sexual and reproductive health are being threatened by Trump, fossil fuel companies, and their Democratic allies, worsening climate and environmental crises.

The Goal is Domination

This is all intentional. While Trump bars the words “environmental justice,” “gender,” “female,” “women,” and “pregnancy” from federal agencies and refers to Gaza and Palestine as “demolition site[s],” he also pushes a proposal of a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery. The Trump administration wants women, on one hand, to reproduce endlessly, and on the other hand, it condemns women in Black and brown communities to death, displacement, and genocide. Whether those be Black and brown communities overburdened by fossil fuels and extractive infrastructure, by police brutality and deportation, or whether they be like in Gaza, by incessant deadly bombardment.

Look at Elon Musk and his 14 children with four different younger women. In November, he tweeted, “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.” As Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian argues, “It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blasé about pregnancy risks: He can outsource them all,” pointing to one of his partners, Grimes, who almost died during the pregnancy of their son X Æ A-12.

As Garcia says, “People with the ability to get pregnant are not machines.” But that’s exactly what the Trump-Musk administration wants.

It’s all, ultimately, about building logics for masculine control across every area of our lives, bodies, and world.

They want those who fit into their racialized view of “America” to reproduce endlessly, and they want those who don’t to be oppressed, to work as capital creators, and to, in many cases, die.

There’s a deep, contradictory nature to this logic. On one hand, Trump is trying to stop people of color from accessing abortion or contraceptive care, and on the other, he is trying to literally facilitate their deaths. And for white women, he’s encouraging them to give birth as much as possible, yet still not offering childcare or maternal care—instead, he scrubs the word “pregnancy” from the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s offering $5,000 to women who give birth—a measly sum compared to the $237,482 it takes to raise a child in the US—and simultaneously plans to limit childcare and eliminate Head Start. Ultimately, it’s not just about eugenic-reminiscent reproductive policy; it’s about control. It’s about strategic destabilization, whether it’s control of land—from Black, brown, and Indigenous communities to Gaza, Panama, and Greenland—or control of bodies and reproductive, life-making capacities, from Nick Fuentes’ “Your body; my choice” to the aforementioned actions of the administration. It’s also about exploitation, whether it’s mass deportations or labor exploitation, like the forms of slavery and exploitation for incarcerated individuals appearing across the country, from Louisiana to California.

Layer in the climate crisis and mass inaffordability, and this image of control becomes an even more frightening picture.

These same narratives of masculine control are what propel anti-climate, pro-fossil fuel policy in this current administration. Trump’s stated goal with his Department of Energy, now led by fracking CEO Chris Wright, is to “unleash [a] aolden era of American energy dominance.” He’s also created the National Energy Dominance Council to bolster fossil fuel exploitation of our climate, of indigenous lands, and of communities of color. The through line is that these men are trying to dominate.

We see this also in popular narratives against climate action. Professional misogynist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate wrote in a now-infamous Twitter exchange, ultimately leading to his arrest, “@GretaThunberg, please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” attaching an image of his collection of over 33 sports cars.

Writing about the exchange, author Rebecca Solnit wrote: “There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference—individualism taken to its extremes—are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.”

Flaunting dominance over people and nature is deemed manly, whilst care is deemed as unmanly. And, taking action with respect to justice, the environment, or our collective future—as epitomized by Greta Thunberg—is deemed as womanly.

It’s all, ultimately, about building logics for masculine control across every area of our lives, bodies, and world.

To Fight This, Our Movements Must Be Deeply Cross-Sectional

These dynamics don’t care for separations between environment and climate or climate and reproduction—it’s all a question of exploitation and increased power and domination for the white male ultra-wealthy few. To face this, our movements for justice, too, must be just as deeply intersectional.

The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a storied reproductive justice organization, defines “Reproductive Justice [as] the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities” (italics added).

There is no reproductive justice without ending fossil fuel expansion. There is no reproductive justice without a just, Indigenous, and worker-led societal transformation to renewable, community-controlled energy.

It means placing bodily autonomy at the center of our fight for climate justice, and breaking down the divides between our movements.

It’s time for us to incorporate reproductive justice just as deeply into our fight for climate justice. That means for us in the climate space to show up at our local abortion clinic to protect patients; it means connecting with and learning from local reproductive justice organizers in our area; and it means bringing in a reproductive justice platform into our climate policy. It doesn’t just mean supporting Planned Parenthood; it means listening to the Reproductive Justice movement and finding the local fights, whether legislative or practical, near you, and getting involved. It means funding local abortion funds that are always in need of donations, like those affiliated with the grassroots National Network of Abortion Funds.

It means placing bodily autonomy at the center of our fight for climate justice, and breaking down the divides between our movements. It means rejecting centrist politicians like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who claim leadership on reproductive rights and climate justice, while vetoing legislation to protect those seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care and fast-tracking new fossil fuel pipelines.

There is no other way to face the capitalist fossil-fueled heteropatriarchical oligarchy that has now overtaken our government and seeks to dominate us all.

Climate justice is reproductive justice.

The recent deportation of Alex Saab from Caracas to the US on May 18, 2026 has generated shock, confusion, anger, and intense debate across sectors of the international solidarity movement and many Venezuelans themselves.

Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who became closely associated with the Venezuelan government during the years of heavy US sanctions, is seen by many Venezuelans as someone who helped the country bypass sanctions, obtain fuel and food, open financial channels, and resist economic collapse under blockade conditions.

The US accuses Saab of corruption and money laundering connected to Venezuelan state contracts, but for many people in Venezuela and across the international left, Saab came to represent something larger than an individual businessman: the broader struggle over sanctions, sovereignty, and Venezuela’s ability to survive under extraordinary economic and geopolitical pressure.

The Venezuelan revolution did not survive the last decade of US economic warfare without contradictions. It survived through improvisation, exhaustion, loyalty, fear, sanctions, migration, stubbornness, and an almost unbearable national fatigue that few outside the country truly understand.

Reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.

The United States did not merely sanction Venezuela. It attempted to break it. It froze national assets, it openly pursued regime change, backed parallel governments, economically strangled the country, and ultimately launched a military operation to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores from Venezuelan soil.

To understand why Saab became such a powerful figure, one must first understand what Venezuela became under sanctions: a country forced into survival mode.

And now, after the deportation of Saab to the United States and the growing accusations against Delcy Rodríguez, I watch many people speak with the confidence of hindsight. As if everything had always been obvious. As if Venezuelans navigating one of the most aggressive campaigns of economic warfare, destabilization, and military coercion in modern Latin American history had the luxury of moral purity.

As a Venezuelan American, I am struggling too to understand and process this moment. I stood there too. I called for Alex Saab’s freedom when he was detained in Cape Verde during the height of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela. At the time, the reality that existed for many of us was that Saab was a Venezuelan diplomat helping the country navigate sanctions.

Recently, Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez publicly stated that Alex Saab has maintained relationships with US agencies since 2019. These revelations, combined with Saab’s deportation, have generated painful questions for many people who spent years defending him publicly.

What did we actually know?

What kinds of compromises were going on inside a country trying to survive under siege?

These are painful questions. And at this moment, there are still far more questions than answers.

Maybe painful compromises were made.

Maybe Saab was never what many believed him to be.

Maybe serious betrayals occurred.

Maybe the deportation was justified.

Maybe realities existed behind closed doors that ordinary Venezuelans never had access to. Or maybe decisions were made inside an impossible reality where preventing wider war, deeper collapse, and even greater harm for ordinary Venezuelans became more urgent.

Because since the kidnapping of Maduro, Venezuela has not been operating in an atmosphere of freedom. It is operating under threat.

And it is easy to demand uncompromising heroism from a country under attack when you are not the one responsible for preventing millions of people from falling into even greater catastrophe.

People who defended Saab for years are now confronting the possibility that parts of the story may have been hidden from them. Others are immediately translating uncertainty into accusations of betrayal against Delcy Rodríguez and the entire Bolivarian process.

But I think there is something dangerous about how quickly so many people are rushing toward absolute conclusions while fragments of information, accusations, leaks, and political narratives are still colliding in real time.

Maybe there will come a moment for deeper criticism of Delcy Rodríguez and others within the Bolivarian process. Maybe new information will eventually clarify realities that today remain obscured by contradiction, secrecy, pressure, and war.

But I think there is a certain political myopia in discussing Venezuela's internal contradictions while removing the broader reality of US pressure and coercion from the story entirely.

Because regardless of what may eventually be revealed about Alex Saab, the larger reality remains unchanged: Venezuela was subjected to years of sanctions, destabilization, economic strangulation, coup attempts, international isolation, and eventually direct military intervention.

The aggressor has not disappeared from the story.

And reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.

It’s difficult not to see the renewed imprisonment of Alex Saab as a disappointing capitulation to US coercion after so many of us fought for his freedom, but we cannot forget the task at hand. If we are serious about ending US aggression toward Venezuela, we cannot allow our solidarity with the Venezuelan people to be deterred. They have shown us how to sustain a revolution amid contradictions, and that is what we must do.

A skeptical friend reading The New York Times asked me why columnist Nicholas Kristof keeps writing columns about recurring poverty in less developed countries. My answer is simple. Because he keeps going to these remote areas populated by brutalized human beings living in dire impoverishment and sickness.

At no small risk to himself (Kristof caught malaria in the Congo), he goes to where the most deprived people on Earth live for his stories. He does what few columnists are willing or able to do by exposing how children, the elderly, and entire families are dying under the most unimaginable cruelty.

I suspect that what keeps Kristof going is that he sees how inexpensively many of these mortalities and morbidities can and have been prevented. For example, a $4 vaccine can prevent cervical cancer, which kills over 900 women worldwide every day!

Knowing all this has led to his sharp denunciation of Tyrant Donald Trump and DOGE Director Felon Elon Musk’s immediate and illegal closure of the Agency for International Development (USAID). Soon after the failed gambling czar re-disgraced the White House on January 20, 2025, the world heard Musk’s sadistic boast, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”

Nicholas Kristof, it is time to break the unspoken reluctance of The New York Times editorial page—replete with specific editorial and op-ed denunciations of bully Trump’s many crimes—and raise the cry of IMPEACHMENT.

Why on Earth would these callous corporatists criminally destroy an agency with an average budget of $23 billion a year (about 10 days of the Trump-bloated Pentagon war budget) to save the lives of millions of babies, children, women, and men? Especially when much of this spending goes right back to US contractors who ship the food, medicines, drinking water, wheelchairs, medical devices, and other materials to poverty-stricken nations.

The Trump-Musk cabal sadistically exuded glee, declaring they were saving taxpayer money. The money spent by USAID is a small price to pay for preventing the atrocities they visited on those most in need of humanitarian assistance on the planet. Given the reputation of the US’ invasive military empire all over Asia, Africa, and South America, war criminal Trump failed to understand the benefit that such aid—often called “soft power”—does to improve Uncle Sam’s tarnished reputation.

In his latest column, dated May 10, 2026, and titled “The Children America Abandoned,” Kristof makes the following points:

“A year after some of the world’s richest men cut aid for the world’s poorest children, …” Trump and Musk retained “some lifesaving programs, particularly for HIV/AIDS…” However, Trump’s “71% cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025…” led to the loss of “750,000 lives worldwide” in Trump’s first year, citing a study by a Boston University researcher. The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet projected that at present official development assistance (ODA) defunding rates, 9.4 million lives will be lost worldwide, including 2.5 million among children 5 years and younger, by 2030.

While these enormous preventable death numbers may shock most Americans, it is because USAID over decades has not been encouraged by its cautious superiors in the White House to toot its own horn for fear of enraging right-wing ideologues in Congress who have long wanted foreign aid abolished.

“A few doses of a $3 malaria vaccine can now save a Congolese child’s life,” Kristof writes. Tuberculosis is a major contagious killer in Africa, mostly among children and pregnant women. A series of regular TB drugs, consistently administered by clinics, can sharply reduce this epidemic. Again, very cost-effective.

What these clenched-jawed Trumpty Muskites ignore is that catching precursors of pandemics in African or Asian countries can prevent deadly viruses and bacteria from migrating to the United States. Without funds and diligent monitoring, the current Ebola emergency in the Congo is spreading.

These are the human costs of the American people electing politicians whose military death cult keeps getting more Pentagon funding from Congress, displacing programs sustaining life. Trump’s war crimes are used to seek an increase of a staggering 50% budget increase or $500 billion for the Pentagon. Trump wants to use deficit financing to further bloat the Pentagon budget so he can keep cutting taxes for the super rich, himself, and giant corporations for the next fiscal year.

In one of his previous columns, Kristof shows how the swollen, corrupt military spending on contractors can be better used in our domestic economy, repairing public services and building infrastructure. The last president to make this comparison was former five-star general President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 in an address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors (See the address.) Two recent books: Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex by William D. Hartung and The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine by Andrew Cockburn unmask the devastating impact of wasteful military spending on human needs.

The Democratic Party refuses to make the runaway military budget, now overconsuming half of the entire federal operating budget, a political campaign issue. Worse, they eagerly join the congressional Republicans in the yearly hoopla for ever more megadollars for the Pentagon. Serious appropriations hearings in the House and Senate are a long-ago memory for this untouchable depravity of blank checks, stealing from the many unmet necessities of the American people and their children here at home, which also cost many American lives.

So, Kristof, who has written devastating critiques of Trump, ends his column with “The truth is ugly: The world’s richest men are crushing the world’s poorest children.”

Nicholas Kristof, it is time to break the unspoken reluctance of The New York Times editorial page—replete with specific editorial and op-ed denunciations of bully Trump’s many crimes—and raise the cry of IMPEACHMENT or, in the vernacular that Tyrant Trump very often uses, say “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, the Impeachment Symposium of April 8, 2026).

As I have said many times, with Trump, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. In addition to manipulating districts, he is openly intending worse takeovers of the November elections, having said in January, “We shouldn’t even have an election” in November. What are our politicians and the mainstream media waiting for? It is time for them to summon the courage of their declared convictions!

P.S. Kristof’s most recent feature exposes the sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against kidnapped Palestinian men, women, and children, including training dogs to rape shackled prisoners (See The New York Times, May 17, 2026, “The Silence That Meets The Rape of Palestinians”).

“In the 21st century, the United States has spent almost $8 trillion on foreign wars, with nearly 5 million lives lost.”

And we’re only a quarter of the way into the century. Are we aiming for 20 million dead civilians by 2100? Here’s a recent Truth Social post from the current president: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.”

There’s a moral insanity to these words, hiding behind a ho-hum collective shrug. People either brush it off as “just talk” or, even more ominously, nod their heads and smile in agreement. Yeah, he’s keeping us safe. War, the planet’s great, lethal abstraction, is necessary. It keeps us safe. It eliminates evil. Yada, yada. No matter it does none of those things—indeed, does just the opposite. Public acceptance of the inevitability and necessity of war has been expanding throughout my lifetime.

The quote at the top of the column, tossing out a few incomprehensible statistics, is one of the findings included in the 2025 bill presented before Congress to establish a Department of Peacebuilding, introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). It’s the most recent in a long, long line of bills and proposals over the years, meant to establish peace—whatever that is—as a matter of national significance and responsibility. No such bill has ever been passed; all have remained marginal... and no doubt cynically dismissed.

Probably the only way to gain political traction is to focus on peace not as political or ideological, but as structurally logical. Peacebuilding works!

Politically, war and militarism, as well as armed policing and the prison-industrial complex—all of which are funded annually by multitrillions of dollars of the federal and other public budgets—are taken utterly for granted. But the “creation of peace” is controversial. Why?

Of all the questions buzzing around in my mind, this is perhaps the largest—and most predatory. Here are some more findings from the 2025 Department of Peacebuilding bill:

• “According to the Centre for Global Research, the United States has been at war for more than 90% of its existence. Many of our citizens today have never known a peaceful year in their lifetimes..."
• “Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Native Americans aged 10 to 34. Approximately 17 veterans a day commit suicide nationwide. About 12 young people in the United States die from homicides each day..."
• “Each day, an average of 132 people died from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes. In 2024, there were more than 500 mass shootings... Young people go to school wondering where to hide when a shooter enters their classroom."

And on and on. The bill also notes:

The preamble of the Earth Charter provides, "To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.”

Which country would you rather live in? That country or this one, as summed up by “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth:

America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and of course classified effects. All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don't waste time or lives.

Can peacebuilding even be acknowledged as legitimate in such a culture? The ever-present necessity of war not only unites the nation state—it’s us vs. the bad guys, the commies, the terrorists, or whoever—it provides moral protection for those who have already committed or supported murder of “the other,” including the murder of children. Including genocide. The vet suicide rate is an example of what happens when this moral protection vanishes.

What a complex reality faced by those of us who believe—with all our hearts—in the recognition and establishment of peacebuilding at the national level. Probably the only way to gain political traction is to focus on peace not as political or ideological, but as structurally logical. Peacebuilding works! Restorative Justice is certainly one example: creating a structure of healing for people harmed by a crime, rather than simply hunting down and punishing the “offender,” changing nothing.

Of course, another problem faced by peacebuilders is that the current violence-based, non-functional system is lucrative for investors—in weaponry, prisons, etc. How dare those peaceniks challenge this!

All we can do is refuse to give up—and refuse to look at “peace” as an us-vs.-them problem, easy (and tempting) as that is to do. The powerful will, and should, also benefit from peacebuilding, though not perhaps in a way they can understand. Power comes with connection, not domination.

Note: I’ll continue to address this issue and, indeed, continue writing my column, even though this is the last one being syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, after 27 years.

The 2026 World Cup was supposed to be a symbol of global unity, cultural diversity, and a shared celebration among nations; an event that would place football beyond politics, borders, and ideology. Yet the closer we move toward the start of the tournament, another image is taking shape: one that speaks not of football’s excitement, but of the heavy shadow of securitization, anti-immigrant hostility, discrimination, and a crisis of human rights legitimacy. Human Rights Watch’s recent warning that the 2026 World Cup could turn into a “human rights disaster” is not merely a publicity-driven statement; it is a sign of a deep rupture between the West’s moral claims and the political reality of the United States today.

The 2026 World Cup is set to be jointly hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico; three countries presented in FIFA’s official publicity as symbols of “multiculturalism,” “freedom,” and “diversity.” In practice, however, the tournament will be held in an environment shaped by hard-line immigration policies, the securitized atmosphere following President Donald Trump’s return, the rise of far-right currents, and intensifying cultural wars—an environment that displays a very different face of these countries.

The remarks by Minky Worden, director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch, are highly significant because she points to an issue that FIFA and the US are trying to sidestep: the possible role of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the security environment of the World Cup. The central concern is not merely the presence of immigration officers in stadiums; the issue is that the World Cup may become a platform for normalizing harsh immigration policies and securitized control. In a country where images of migrant detentions, mass deportations, family separations, and violent treatment of asylum-seekers have repeatedly made headlines in recent years, it is only natural that many human rights activists would be concerned about the psychological and social safety of migrants, Muslims, Latinos, and even foreign fans.

The reality is that the US today is no longer able to preserve the uncontested image of the “land of freedom” as it did in the 1990s, or even during the Obama era. Trump’s return, the intensification of domestic polarization, and the radicalization of the political atmosphere have pushed the United States into a stage in which “security” has prevailed over “freedom” more than ever before. The 2026 World Cup will be held precisely in such an atmosphere: one in which football is not merely a sporting event, but part of the US' internal political and identity struggle.

Perhaps the greatest danger for US and FIFA is precisely this: that the world may remember the 2026 World Cup not for its goals and matches, but for images of migrant detentions, a police-state atmosphere, culture wars, and human rights contradictions.

One of the most important dimensions of the crisis is the issue of the “culture war,” a concept Worden also references. Today in the US, issues such as migrants’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, race, religion, and cultural identity have become the main battlefield of political confrontation. Under such conditions, the World Cup can no longer claim that “sport is separate from politics.” On the contrary, the tournament is likely to become a stage for displaying these very ideological fractures.

This issue is especially significant when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. The fact that only the city of Atlanta has referred in its official programs to support for LGBTQ+ rights shows that even among the US host cities, there is no clear consensus on human rights standards. This comes as FIFA has repeatedly claimed in recent years that it has made human rights one of its strategic principles. The glaring contradiction lies here: An institution that took positions on minority rights in Qatar is now acting with greater caution and silence in the face of potential human rights crises in the US.

At this point, the main issue is no longer only the US; it is the crisis of FIFA’s own legitimacy. FIFA has tried for years to present itself as an institution above politics, but the reality is that global football has long since become part of the structure of power and geopolitical interests. The granting of the so-called “peace prize” to Trump, at a time when his immigration and security policies face widespread global criticism, became so controversial precisely for this reason. Critics believe FIFA is less concerned with human rights than with preserving its relations with the political and economic powers of the host countries.

This crisis is not merely a moral issue; it is directly tied to the future credibility of international institutions. If FIFA remains silent in the face of discriminatory policies, a securitized environment, and civil restrictions, how can it continue to claim that it defends universal values? Are human rights standards applied only to non-Western countries? And if human rights violations in the US are ignored, does the very concept of the “universality” of human rights not fall into crisis?

The US itself, meanwhile, faces a profound contradiction. For decades, Washington has used human rights as a tool for producing global legitimacy and has pressured many of its rivals through this very discourse. But now, the same country that accused others of violating freedoms is facing warnings from human rights organizations about its treatment of migrants, minorities, and its internal security environment. This development is a sign of the erosion of American soft power—power that was once Washington’s most important instrument of global influence.

From this perspective, the 2026 World Cup is not merely a sporting event; it is a test of the gap between the US' official narrative and its domestic reality. If the tournament is accompanied by an intensely securitized atmosphere, the control of migrants, discriminatory treatment, or the suppression of protests, the image of the US that forms in the minds of millions of global viewers will be very different from the traditional narrative of a “free American society.” In the age of social media, even one violent encounter around the stadiums could turn into a global crisis for the credibility of both the US and FIFA.

In the meantime, the more important point is that football is no longer merely a tool of entertainment as it once was. Today, the World Cup is part of the competition of narratives and the war of images. Countries try to use this event to display their stability, legitimacy, and cultural appeal. But if the US cannot manage the contradiction between its human rights slogans and the reality of its domestic politics, the 2026 World Cup may become a symbol of crisis in the very values the West has claimed for decades to defend.

Perhaps the greatest danger for US and FIFA is precisely this: that the world may remember the 2026 World Cup not for its goals and matches, but for images of migrant detentions, a police-state atmosphere, culture wars, and human rights contradictions. In that case, this tournament will not merely be a failed sporting event; it will become a symbol of an era in which even the greatest celebration of world football could not conceal the rupture between power, politics, and human rights.