Credit where due: I am ever impressed by the feral energy of U.S. President Donald Trump and his crew, who are able to do an extraordinary amount of damage every single damned day. And somehow their energetic cruelty seems to drain my own reserves: I want to stay in bed. But we fight as best we can, and so here’s my assessment of one dire day, and more importantly what we still might be able to do about it.

It began, early Thursday morning, with House passage of the budget bill, which somehow managed to get even worse in the wee hours. Among other things, a single sentence was amended in such a way as to potentially kill off most of the rooftop solar industry in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explains:

While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”

That arcane piece of language was enough to knock 37% off the share price of SunRun today, the biggest rooftop installer in the country. And it was only a cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, which would essentially repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Nuclear power gets a little bit of a reprieve, and of course ethanol (Earth’s dumbest energy source) does great. But it’s a wipeout far greater than anyone expected even a few weeks ago. Here’s how Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins and his team at REPEAT (Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Toolkit) sum it up:

• Increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 0.5 billion metric tons per year in 2030 and more than 1 billion metric tons per year in 2035.
• Raise U.S. household and business energy expenditures by $25 billion annually in 2030 and over $50 billion in 2035.
• Increase average U.S. household energy costs by roughly $100-160 per household per year in 2030 and roughly $270-415 per household per year in 2035.
• Reduces cumulative capital investment in U.S. electricity and clean fuels production by $1 trillion from 2025-2035.
• Imperil a total of $522 billion in announced but pending investments in U.S. clean energy supply and manufacturing.
• Reduce annual sales of electric vehicles by roughly 40% in 2030 and end America’s battery manufacturing boom.
• Substantially slow electricity capacity additions, raising national average retail electricity rates and monthly household electricity bills by about 9% in 2030—and as much as 17% in some states (including Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania).

In the midst of all this, the Senate—ignoring its parliamentarian—bowed to the wishes of the auto industry and told California (and the 11 states that had followed it) that it couldn’t demand the phaseout of internal combustion vehicles by the middle of the next decade. (This is among other things federalism in reverse).

“Attacking these waivers will devastate our ability to advance the use of electric vehicles in the state,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference after the vote, flanked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials. “We won’t let it happen, not when we’re facing an air pollution and climate crisis that’s getting worse by the day.”

The 1970 Clean Air Act permits California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency that enable the state to enact clean air regulations that go further than federal limits.

Oh, and then at day’s end the Department of Homeland Security told Harvard that 27% of its student body couldn’t study there beginning in the fall because they came from foreign countries.

If you add it up, this is all an effort to keep America precisely where it is now. It’s the Make America Immobile Act. Trump is doing his best to freeze things in place: on behalf of oil companies that want to keep pumping oil, on behalf of automakers that want to keep churning out SUVs. That depends, among other things, on shutting down research at universities, because they keep coming up with things that point us in a different direction, be it temperature readings demonstrating climate change or new batteries that enable entirely different technologies. If America lived alone on this planet that would be truly terrible; luckily for everyone else, there are other places (China, and the E.U.) that are not making the same set of stupid decisions. But if this stands it will kill the future for America.

It will also, of course, kill the present. I’m not bothering to talk about the deep cruelty of the Medicaid cuts (and the fact that they will destroy America’s rural hospital system). There’s also the not-small matter of the intense attacks on transgender people the bill contains. And I won’t bother gassing on about the utter grossness of handing over yet more money to the richest among us. (The top 0.1% of earners gain $390,000 a year on average, while Americans making less than $17,000 lose on average about $1,000. This is, among other things, Christianity in reverse).

So, our job is to do what we can to make it… less worse. The U.S. Senate still has to pass its own version of the bill. Given the GOP majority, they’ll pass something very bad. Perhaps, at Trump’s urging, they’ll rush it through in the next 24 hours; more likely it will take a little longer. We need to put as much pressure as we can on that process, in order to take out the most egregious parts of the bill. Here’s what Third Act sent out on Thursday, and here’s the link we want you to use to register your opposition with Senators. It comes from our very able partners at Solar United Neighbors, who have done as much as anyone in America to help people build clean energy. Fill it out so you can get a call script and the numbers to use. Again, here’s the link. If you want a little inspiration, check out Will Wiseman’s video of rural Americans talking about one particular part of the IRA that’s helping change their lives.

I’m not going to bother pretending that this is guaranteed to work. The bad guys here are riding hard and fast, and they’re trying to shock and cow us into submission. But—don’t go easy. If they can summon the feral energy to wreck the country, we can summon the humane energy to try and save it.

Last year, roughly 6 million American families used the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, to help pay their heating or cooling bills. LIHEAP is a program that helps people from Louisiana to Maine and has an amazingly bipartisan support. This support extends to energy providers.

In April of this year, the staff at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who run LIHEAP were fired by Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One of those fired employees was brought back last week to distribute the remaining LIHEAP funds for the current fiscal year.

Why would Collins thank Kennedy, or anyone else, for simply following the law?

This week Secretary Kennedy testified on HHS spending for the next fiscal year before the Senate Appropriations Committee chaired by Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. In fiscal year 2025, Maine received $41.6 million in LIHEAP funding.

At the hearing, Collins praised the Trump for administration for releasing the already appropriated funds and asked Kennedy, “Will you work with this committee in trying to restore LIHEAP so that we can avoid, literally, seniors and low-income families not being able to keep warm in the winter?” Kennedy responded:

Yeah, absolutely, and I’m from New England myself. My brother, for 40 years, has run Citizens Energy, which provides low-cost home heating oil to families in New England. And so many people have come to me over the years and said to me, thank you, your brother saved my life because I didn’t have to choose between food and heat. I was on the Navajo reservation three weeks ago, and Navajo President Buu Nygren said to me, at this point, if we cut LIHEAP, Navajo will die from it. So, I understand the critical historical importance of this program. President [Donald] Trump’s rationale and the [Office of Management and Budget]’s rationale is that President Trump’s energy policies are going to lower the cost of energy so that everybody will get lower cost heating oil, and in that case, this program would simply be another subsidy to the fossil fuel industry.

Kennedy went on to add that if there was not a drop in energy prices, he would spend the monies that Congress appropriated. Concluding his remarks, Kennedy said that “Do that, and I will work with you to make sure that those families do not suffer in that way.”

Collins’ advocacy for LIHEAP is positive, and she should be commended for raising the issue with Kennedy. However, her remarks fell drastically short of what is needed at this moment. Collins was pleased that the Trump administration released already appropriated funds and that Kennedy said he would spend any monies Congress appropriated. This is only doing what the law requires nothing more. Why would Collins thank Kennedy, or anyone else, for simply following the law?

In her remarks, posted on her Senate webpage, Collins did not challenge Kennedy and Trump’s assertion that the energy policies of the Trump administration are going to reduce energy prices to the level that LIHEAP will no longer be needed. Even if there is a major drop in energy prices (this is a big if), would that drop make such a difference that LIHEAP would not be needed in the next fiscal year? The answer is obviously no.

It was good that Collins spoke up for LIHEAP. However, in her questioning she did not challenge the nonsensical reasoning of the Trump administration. Instead, Sen. Collins, who certainly should know better, played along acting as if Trump was normal. As she had done many times throughout her career in the Senate, Collins asked for assurances and hoped for the best. When dealing with the Trump administration, this approach is simply not good enough.

The horrific images of children starving in Gaza, due to Israel's cruel, inhumane blockade of all humanitarian aid since early March, shock the world's conscience. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recently announced plan to distribute aid, while forcing Palestinians in Gaza to move yet again, is a spurious cover for his and U.S. President Donald Trump's ethnic cleansing scheme.

Yet concrete action to end this calamity is hard to organize. How does a genocide end? And specifically, how do people of conscience, acting with majority support of the U.S. public, organize to end it?

The lack of true democracy in the United States, so evident in domestic policy on many issues, is even worse in terms of foreign policy, especially regarding the mostly ironclad support for Israel. However, cracks are showing, and they must be exploited quickly.

Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people?

Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) brought his S. Res. 224, calling for an end to the humanitarian blockade on Gaza, to the Senate floor. The resolution had the support of all Democrats, except Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Angus King (I-Maine).

The resolution was predictably blocked from getting a vote by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair James Risch (R-Idaho), but was significant as no other legislative measure in the year and half since the war on Gaza began has garnered such widespread, albeit partisan support (no Republicans supported it, nor have any called for a cease-fire or cutting off U.S. weapons to Israel).

A companion resolution in the House of Representatives will be introduced very soon, and while both would be nonbinding, they represent progress in the long struggle to exert pressure on Israel, and Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are keenly aware of U.S. political developments. Additionally, the Senate will likely soon vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to stop specific U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. Sen. Sanders forced such votes twice since November, and while they failed, the upcoming votes should attract more support, and add to the pressure on the Israeli government, which of course is opposed by most Israelis.

Legislative initiatives are far from the only strategies and tactics being employed by peace and human rights activists. Other recent and upcoming events and opportunities include the following:

Activists led by Montgomery County, Maryland Peace Action showed up at new U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks' (D-Md.) "Sick of It" rally protesting the Trump-Musk cuts to health programs, and had a strong showing about also being sick of the Gaza genocide, including confronting the senator. It may have had some impact, as she later signed onto Sen. Welch's resolution, after having been largely silent on the genocide in Gaza, and voting against Sen. Sanders' most recent JRDs.

The impressive anti-genocide commencement speech by George Washington University student Cecelia Culver has received significant media coverage. She is now shamefully being investigated by the university. Similarly, New York University student Logan Rozos condemned the Gaza genocide in his commencement speech, and the university is withholding his diploma. Both students, along with other students similarly persecuted for speaking out for an end to the horrors in Gaza, deserve support and solidarity.

Reprising and expanding an effort from last year, New Hampshire peace activist Bob Sanders is conducting a cross-country bike ride to raise awareness of the dire situation in Gaza.

Veterans for Peace and other allies are supporting a 40-day fast for Peace in Gaza.

Groups in Philadelphia will hold a People's War Crimes Tribunal on May 31, building on the difficult but necessary advocacy aimed at Sen. Fetterman.

Lastly, Do Not Turn on Us is a new initiative calling on military and National Guard personnel to refuse unlawful, fascist orders. While more aimed at stopping fascism in the United States, it certainly is a contribution to the overall movement to establish peace, human rights, and the rule of law, domestically and internationally.

Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people? No one can know for sure, but all are worthy of support and persistence. As Ms. Culver stated, none of us are free until Palestine is free.

On Tuesday, after releasing a joint statement with France and Canada threatening “concrete actions” if Israel did not allow aid into Gaza, the U.K. government suspended talks on its upgraded free trade deal, summoned the Israeli ambassador, and imposed new sanctions on settlers in the occupied West Bank. While this might appear substantial for the goal of isolating the Zionist state, it amounts to little more than face-saving measures.

In his speech announcing these measures, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy couldn’t even bear to say these words without condemning the October 7 operation and maintaining Israel’s right to commit genocide. We can’t fall for these empty measures, even if they appear to be a positive push toward some justice. In reality, they are a distraction and feign action from a government supporting Israel as it accelerates its genocidal attacks. Each day, as Israel commits new massacres with American weapons, it is using the Royal Air Force Akrotiri, a British military base on Cyprus, to conduct surveillance flights and facilitate weapons transfers.

The government’s suspension of negotiations on its free-trade agreement is misleading. This is not the existing free-trade agreement in place between Britain and Israel, but a future plan to deepen relations. Known as the 2030 Roadmap, this was initiated under the previous Conservative government in 2022, and the Labour government continued negotiations immediately after entering government in July 2024. Stopping these negotiations is a good first step, but they must end their current free-trade agreement if Lammy’s words are worth their salt.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the world “won’t stop us.” Our leaders bought by Zionism will certainly not, but the people will.

The sanctions on a handful of people and companies in the occupied West Bank might be a generally positive step. But at a closer look, these measures are only on three people, two outposts, and two organisations. All of the 700,000 settlers occupying the West Bank in their 150 settlements and 128 outposts are illegal under international law. These very narrow sanctions then give wider justification for the illegal occupation of the West Bank, scapegoating a handful of “extreme” characters but not contending with the occupation itself. Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal. Once again, Britain is ignoring international law, just as it does in refusing to hand over surveillance data on Gaza to the International Criminal Court.

Britain’s recent moves should rightly be compared with the United States, which has formed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private company of U.S. military veteran mercenaries to run an aid distribution operation, better described as a trojan horse to occupy Gaza. As Israel accelerates its genocide in Gaza, the U.S. and Britain are attempting to conceal their role in the violence. We might see these as necessary measures for Israel to be committing what many are referring to as the final stage in the genocide.

Over the past few days, the Starmer government’s statements have given us the illusion of a change in course toward Israel. Yet in five of the six days leading up to May 20, Britain has flown a surveillance flight over Gaza for Israel.

Britain has made no material change in its policy of arming Israel, providing surveillance information, and using its military base on Cyprus for weapons shipments. Therefore, not only are these statements hollow and vacuous, but they are a pernicious and sly attempt to divert attention from Britain’s role as it directly participates in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Sunday (May 18th), Britain sent an A400M Atlas plane to Israel from RAF Akrotiri. This aircraft can carry up to 37 metric tons of cargo, including weapons and soldiers. Two hours later, it sent a surveillance flight over Gaza. These operations have been purposefully concealed from public knowledge, but this is clearly shifting. The only reason we know about these flights is because of the work of Matt Kennard, Declassified U.K., and Genocide-Free Cyprus, among other groups. There clearly is mounting pressure as a result of the revelations of Britain’s direct role in Israel’s genocide, and perhaps we must recognize it has a role in Lammy’s face-saving attempts.

Last week, the U.K. government defended its continued provision of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, pointing to the need for “national security.” In court, they claimed “no genocide has occurred or is occurring,” that Israel is not “deliberately targeting civilian women or children.” Britain is defending Israel legally, diplomatically, and militarily. No statement can change that fact.

Israel stopped all aid trucks from entering Gaza on March 2. It has taken more than 11 weeks for the government to take any action at all. Every day, the Israeli occupation commits heinous massacres. They are even bragging that the world “won’t stop us.” And so far, they’re right.

In the face of this, we cannot despair. Palestinians in Gaza remain steadfast each day, for the 18 months of this escalation in the genocide that has been ongoing for more than 77 years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the world “won’t stop us.” Our leaders bought by Zionism will certainly not, but the people will. We must continue our demands for a full arms embargo, an end to British surveillance flights, and the total liberation of Palestine.

Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a “Jewish political artist.” The painter’s quick reply was that he wasn’t a “Jewish political artist,” he was just a “political artist.” In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily, that his answer was too pat. Yes, he was a political artist. His paintings had focused not just on Latin America but on war-torn Vietnam and racism in the United States and South Africa. But he had consciously avoided Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Golub admitted that what it meant for him to be a successful artist was never to take the “horrors inflicted on Palestinians” as his subject matter. Only then would he be left free to paint his political opinions on anything else.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve thought of Leon Golub, who died in 2004, many times as the escalation of Israel’s assault on Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank paralleled my own rush to finish a book (just published as America, América: A New History of the New World). Among other things, it traces Latin America’s largely unrecognized role in the abolition of the doctrine of conquest and the creation, after World War II, of the liberal international order, including the founding of the International Court of Justice (today considering South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza).

Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands have.

I’ve been writing critically on how the U.S. acted in Latin America for more than three decades. Unlike many scholars and students of the Middle East, I was able to do so and not be punished because, like Golub, I mostly focused on the “horrors inflicted” on people other than Palestinians. As President Richard Nixon put it all too accurately in 1971, nobody of import in the United States gives “one damn about Latin America.”

A general indifference to the region, as well as the fact that even the most diehard defenders of U.S. global power have been willing to concede that this country often acted in unhelpful ways in its own hemisphere (where Washington undertook at least 41 regime changes between 1898 and 1994!), have made it remarkably safe to speak out about Latin America. Yet, in 2025, the “horrors inflicted” are everywhere and it’s no longer possible to silo one’s sympathies.

Conquest, Then and Now

Consider the Spanish conquest of the Americas alongside Israel’s assault on Gaza. In many ways, the two events, separated by half a millennium, are incomparable. The first was continental in scale, a fight for a New World that was then home to, by some estimates, 100,000,000 people. The second unfolds on a patch of land the size of Las Vegas with a population of just over 2 million. The conquest would claim tens of millions of lives, while so far, Israel is estimated to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more.

Yet there are uncanny parallels between the two conflicts, including the fact that each began in the wake of a communications revolution: the printing press then, social media now.

Spain was the first empire in modern history to actively publicize its colonial atrocities, as printers in Madrid, Seville, and other cities stamped out sheet after sheet of conquest gore: accounts of mass hangings, of babies drowned or roasted over fire pits to be fed to dogs, and of torched towns. One Spanish governor described a post­apocalyptic landscape filled with the walking near-dead, victims of mutilations meted out to Native Americans, this way: a “multitude of lame and maimed Indians, without hands, or with only one hand, blind, their noses cut off, earless.” Today, the internet circulates countless photographs and videos with no less horrific images of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians, of armless boys and “decomposing babies.” Some photographs of children starved by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to a New York Times editor, were simply too “graphic” to publish.

In 16th-century Spain, common soldiers wrote, or paid others to write, their stories of mayhem, hoping to make a heroic name for themselves. Today, we see updated digital versions of a similar kind of conquering pride, as members of the IDF, on platforms like TikTok, upload videos of Gazans “stripped, bound, and blindfolded” and others showing bulldozers and tanks razing homes. Soldiers mock the destruction of schools and hospitals or, as they rummage through abandoned homes, are seen playing with or wearing the bras and underwear of their former residents.

Both Spanish officials then and Israeli spokesmen now have openly declared their intention to “conquer” their enemies by forcing their removal from their homes and concentrating them in more controllable areas. Not all Spanish, like not all Israelis, believed their enemies to be subhuman. But some did and do. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda thought Native Americans were “brute animals,” as “monkeys are to men.” Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls Palestinians “human animals.” Many Spanish priests and royal officials admitted that Native Americans were human, but considered them child-like innocents who had to be violently severed from their pagan priests—just as Israel believes Palestinians have to be violently severed from Hamas. “We are separating Hamas from the population, cleansing the strip,” said Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the IDF’s extreme tactics.

Hernán Cortés had his men level Aztec temples, which he called mosques. Those temples served as healing places, and their destruction parallels the ruin visited on Gaza’s hospitals and other centers of refuge. Not even the dead were safe—neither in the Americas, nor today in Gaza. As did the conquistadores, the IDF has desecrated several burial grounds.

Spanish violence in the Americas provoked a powerful ethical backlash. The Dominican jurist Francisco Vitoria, for instance, questioned the legality of the Conquest, while Father Bartolomé de las Casas insisted on the absolute equality of all human beings, and other theologians of the time condemned the many varieties of enslavement imposed on Native Americans. Such declarations and condemnations were consequential in the long run. Yet they did little to stop the suffering. Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands have.

“The Conquest,” as a singular uppercase event, might have been challenged, but all the individual battles that made up the Conquest, the morning massacres and midnight raids on Indigenous villages, simply went on. Spanish settlers took it for granted that, no matter what priests said from pulpits or jurists argued in seminar rooms, they had a right to “defend” themselves: that, were Indians to attack them, they could retaliate.

Here’s just one of many examples: in July 1503, Spanish settlers slaughtered over 700 residents in the village of Xaragua on Hispaniola (the island that today comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic), killings that Spain’s Queen Isabella deemed “just” because some members of the village had started to violently resist Spanish rule. Israel uses the same kind of legalisms to insist that its war on Hamas is indeed similarly just, since Hamas started it. Just as the conflict on Hispaniola is sequestered from the larger context of the Conquest, the conflict that started on October 7, 2023, is isolated from the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

From Cortés to Hitler

The doctrine or “right” of conquest goes back to Roman times and, apart from the criticism aimed at Spain in the 1500s, remained mostly uncontested until the late 18th century, when—with the breaking free of the Americas from Europe—the doctrine found new champions and new critics.

The leaders of the new United States reinforced the doctrine, invoking the right of conquest to justify their drive westward toward the Pacific Ocean and their taking of Native American and Mexican lands.

At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America’s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar “rules-based” liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted.

Generations of law professors in the U.S. taught their students that the doctrine was legitimate. “The title of European nations, and which passed to the United States, to this vast territorial empire, was founded on discovery and conquest,” as James Kent put it at Columbia Law School in the 1790s. The Supreme Court, too, said that the United States was founded on conquest, and that its doctrine remained applicable. As late as 1928, a widely-assigned English-language law book insisted that, “as long as a Law of Nations has been in existence, the States, as well as the vast majority of writers, have recognized subjugation as a mode of acquiring territory,” deeming it legal for “the victor to annex the conquered enemy territory.”

In contrast, Spanish America’s independence leaders fiercely repudiated the principle of conquest. They had to, since they had to learn to live with each other, for they presided over seven new Spanish-American republics on a crowded continent. If they had adhered to a U.S. version of international law, what would have stopped Argentina from conquering Chile the way the United States conquered the Creeks and the Mexicans? Or Chile from marching on Argentina to gain access to the Atlantic? The result would have been endless war. And so, the region’s jurists and other intellectuals (drawing from earlier Catholic criticisms of Spain’s subjugation of the New World) disavowed conquest. In its place, they cobbled together a new framework of international relations that outlawed aggressive war and recognized the absolute sovereignty of all nations, regardless of their size.

For decades, Latin American diplomats tried to force Washington to accept such a vision of cooperative international law—and for decades Washington refused, not wanting to be a Gulliver tied down by a gaggle of Latin Lilliputians. Over time, however, U.S. statesmen began to grudgingly accept Latin America’s legal interpretations, with the far-sighted among them realizing that a reformed system of international law would allow for a more effective projection of Washington’s power. In 1890, at the first Pan-American Conference, the United States signed a provisional treaty abrogating the doctrine of conquest. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to give up the right to intervene in Latin American affairs and to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nations.

At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America’s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar “rules-based” liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted, especially the rejection of the doctrine of conquest.

Cortés to Hitler, the age of conquest, it seemed, was finally over.

The End of the End of the Age of Conquest

Not really, of course. Cold warriors found many ways to circumvent the “rules,” and didn’t need to cite Roman law doctrine to justify atrocities in Vietnam, Guatemala, or Indonesia, among other places. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, war began spreading again like wildfire in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the U.S.-led first and second Gulf Wars.

Still, the liberal order globally held on to the idea that the world should be organized around cooperation, not competition, that nations had more interests in common than in contention.

Now, though, that idea seems to have been tossed aside and, in its place, comes a new vision of conquest. We see its burlesque version in the boastful pronouncements of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has casually claimed the right to use coercion to take the island of Greenland, annex Canada as “the 51st state,” grab the Panama Canal, and clear out Gaza, supposedly turning the strip into a Riviera-like resort. Far more ferocious expressions of that vision of conquest are seen in both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza.

Of those two wars of conquest, the second touches a deep nerve, in part because Israel’s existence is so tightly bound up with the fortunes of the liberal international order. The United Nations in 1949 conjured Israel (legally at least) into existence. Latin American nations at the time voted unanimously to recognize Israel’s nationhood, with Guatemala serving as Washington’s whip, ensuring that the region would act as a bloc. And the Holocaust has served as the West’s moral reference point, a nightmarish reminder of what awaits a world that forsakes liberal tolerance or doesn’t abide by liberal rules. At the same time, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, the United Nations has also become the most persistent critic of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel ignores U.N. criticism while invoking the U.N. charter’s article 51, which grants nations the right to self-defense, to justify its assault on Gazans.

As we enter what may be the final phase of the Gazan genocide, that long entwinement between a rules-based order and Israel has become a kind of death dance. Many turn away, unable to bear the news. Others can’t turn away, horrified that those in power in this country offer nothing other than more weapons to Israel, which continues to kill indiscriminately, while withholding all food and medicines from those trapped in Gaza. As of April, about 2 million Palestinians had no secure source of food at all. Babies continue to decompose. “When children die of starvation, they don’t even cry. Their little hearts just slow down until they stop,” said Colorado pediatrician Mohamed Kuziez, who works with Doctors Against Genocide.

In early May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet unanimously approved a plan dubbed Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which, if enacted, would drive all Gazans into a small containment zone in the southern part of that strip, with Israel controlling all food and medical aid to them. The IDF would then, as one official described the plan, complete “the conquest of the Gaza Strip.” Gaza, said Finance Minister Smotrich, will then be “completely destroyed.” He added grimly, “We conquer and stay.”

Back in the 1500s, the revulsion felt by some theologians and philosophers at the extreme brutality of the Spanish conquest began the “slow creation of humanity”—the fragile idea, nurtured over the centuries and always imperfectly applied, that all humans are indeed equal and form a single community beyond tribalism and nationalism. Today, a similar brutality is undoing that work. Humanity appears to be dissolving at an ever-quickening pace.

From Cortés to Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump, the end of the end of conquest begins.

A series of internal government messages reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed governments to clear regulatory barriers for Elon Musk’s Starlink. In the messages obtained by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directs U.S. officials to push for permit approvals for the satellite internet service. Governments facing chaotic tariff threats have gotten the message and are rolling out the red carpet for Musk in the hope of avoiding costly tariffs.

This scandal has drawn widespread attention and condemnation, with dozens of members of Congress and senators calling for investigations into Musk and the government agencies that may have pressured countries on his behalf.

While this corruption is shocking, it’s hardly surprising. Before the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, Public Citizen issued a report documenting how the tariff process in President Donald Trump’s first term enabled a quid-pro-quo spoils system that rewarded the rich and well-connected. We warned that Musk’s powerful and ill-defined role in the U.S. government could lead other countries to decide that giving special privileges to Musk’s companies would help them earn brownie points with the Trump administration.

U.S. Government’s Sales Pitch for Starlink

Elon Musk has been pushing for Starlink expansion across the world for years, but some countries have been wary of permitting the service to enter their markets for a number of reasons. For example, experts have raised concerns about threats to “data sovereignty,” a group or individual’s right to control and maintain their own data. To the extent that communications on the Starlink network are routed through the U.S., they may be accessible to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

And it is not unreasonable for countries to consider that access to Starlink services could be weaponized and a nation’s internet access held hostage at the whim of a single man or wayward administration. Alarmingly, claims abound that the U.S threatened to withdraw Ukrainian access to Starlink if the country did not sign the U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement (though this has been denied by Musk).

But now, Musk’s proximity to the White House and Trump’s innermost circle has provided him with powerful new leverage to push his businesses on foreign governments: the threat of Trump’s chaotic tariffs. For some countries weighing the pros and cons, the chance that approval for Starlink helps stave off tariffs has changed the equation.

Trump and his cronies have made it clear since Day 1 of his 2015 presidential primary campaign that he will bend public policy to benefit himself and his wayward inner circle of Yes Men.

The Washington Post exposé highlighted several diplomatic cables from various embassies commenting on foreign governments’ decision-making on the satellite internet service.

For example, a March cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia explains it “has observed the Cambodian government—likely due to concern over the possibility of U.S. tariffs—signal its desire to help balance our trade relationship by promoting the market entry of leading U.S. companies such as Boeing and Starlink.” Leaders of the American Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia advised the Ministry of Economy and Finance to take “decisive action in offering concessions to the United States… recommending that Cambodia… expeditiously approve Starlink’s market entry request.”

Cambodia is facing a 49% Trump tariff rate.

Another cable from April highlighted that Starlink was pushing for a license to operate in Djibouti. State Department staffers noted Starlink’s approval would be an opportunity to open the country’s market and boost “an American company.” Embassy officials “will continue to follow up with Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

Djibouti is facing a 10% Trump tariff rate.

The Pressure Is Working—At the Expense of Public Interest Policies

Sec. Rubio “encouraged Vietnam to address trade imbalances,” in an early March 2025 phone call with the nation’s Foreign Ministry. Shortly thereafter, the Vietnamese government laid out a battery of appeasements to the Trump administration, including a waiver of their domestic partnership requirements, enabling the launch of a five-year pilot program with Starlink. An unnamed source speaking with Reuters said this can be seen as “an olive branch” to Musk and his company, a “demonstration from the Vietnamese side that they can play the transactional diplomacy game if the Trump administration wants that.”

Vietnam is facing a 46% Trump tariff rate.

A Bangladeshi representative visited the White House in mid-February to offer concessions to stave off the promised tariffs and was brought to a surprise meeting with Elon Musk. Musk wanted to discuss the ongoing negotiations between Starlink and Bangladesh’s regulatory agency—the implication being that Bangladesh would not get favorable trade terms from the U.S. if Starlink wasn’t permitted. Early April saw Bangladesh’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission issue what was described as “the swiftest recommendation” in its history for a Starlink license. When Trump announced a punishing 37% reciprocal tariff on Bangladesh, the export-dependent country wrote a letter to Trump requesting leniency and detailing the ways in which it was already taking action to benefit U.S. businesses—including its access for Starlink.

Bangladesh is facing a 37% Trump tariff rate.

Lesotho also granted a license to Starlink in April, despite local objections to foreign-owned businesses. Local NGOs called the licensing decision “a betrayal—a shameful sellout by a government that appears increasingly willing to place foreign corporate interests above the democratic will and long-term developmental needs of the people of Lesotho.” An internal State Department memo states, “As the government of Lesotho negotiates a trade deal with the United States, it hopes that licensing Starlink demonstrates goodwill and intent to welcome U.S. businesses.” Subtle.

Lesotho is facing a 50% Trump tariff rate.

Musk has infamously complained on social media over South Africa’s post-Apartheid reparations rules, claiming that Starlink is “not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because [he’s] not Black [sic]”—despite having never even applied for a license. The Washington Post noted that “the story about Bangladesh was making its way around political and business circles in South Africa,” and it’s assumed that approval of a Starlink license has become “a prerequisite for getting a favorable trade deal.” Legislators have introduced a controversial measure to exempt Starlink from the Black empowerment law.

South Africa is facing a 30% Trump tariff rate.

Musk has been looking to break into the Indian market for years—even launching, then retracting, services in 2022 without the necessary licenses. Around the time of the Bangladesh meeting, Musk also met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi near the White House. According to India Today, a “key agenda” item was Starlink’s pending approval in India. In May of 2025, India dropped two proposed security rules that Starlink had refused during earlier discussions.

India is facing a 26% Trump tariff rate.

In March of 2024, Starlink was prohibited in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, citing concerns from military experts who warned it could be misused by armed insurgent groups including M23. That ban was recently lifted, and Starlink launched in May 2025. This policy reversal comes at a time of mounting frustrations from Congolese civil society over secretive dealmaking with the United States. The resurgence of rebel group M23 has pushed President Felix Tshisekedi’s government toward a controversial deal that has the private military corporation Blackwater’s Erik Prince at the center. The deal would exchange U.S. security assistance for access to DRC critical minerals, not unlike the recent U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal.

The DRC is facing an 11% Trump tariff rate

The list goes on. Mali, Somalia, Namibia, and others are also considering regulatory approval of Starlink and facing varying degrees of resistance from civil society.

Namibia is facing a 21% Trump tariff rate, with Mali and Somalia at 10%.

The Blueprint

Paving the way for Starlink in other countries is just the tip of the iceberg. Trump and his cronies have made it clear since Day 1 of his 2015 presidential primary campaign that he will bend public policy to benefit himself and his wayward inner circle of Yes Men. Anything that can limit their personal gain is on the chopping block.

The attacks on other governments’ legitimate domestic policies aren’t just predictable, they’re predicted. In detail. Not just by Trump’s erratic speeches and TruthSocial policy changes, but across nearly 400 pages, readily available to us all at ustr.gov: the 2025 National Trade Estimate (NTE) Report.

This year’s report targets a litany of public interest laws and policies adopted by countries around the world to regulate the digital ecosystem. Notably, the 2025 NTE report calls out the satellite licensing and approval processes in Brazil, South Korea, and Malaysia, and points out that a number of countries impose import restrictions on certain types of internet and telecommunications equipment. Removing these would smooth regulatory hurdles for Starlink in those countries. The NTE report is also chock-full of other privacy, AI accountability, and competition policies that Big Tech companies want to get rid of around the world.

The report was drafted in large part based on comments submitted by corporations in October 2024 under then-President Joe Biden and before the presidential election. Given the Trump administration’s brazen willingness to openly push the agenda of his billionaire buddies, we can now expect even more extreme demands from companies like Starlink. For instance, in a submission to the Trump administration ahead of the “reciprocal tariffs” announcement, SpaceX complained about governments imposing “non-tariff” barriers impeding global roll-out of Starlink, including having to pay governments for access to spectrum—a standard practice in a number of countries, including the U.S.

As Trump wields his chaotic tariff threats to extract concessions in dozens of closed-door negotiations, we should not be surprised to see even more Big Tech giveaways and lucrative favors for Musk. It is imperative that Congress demand transparency in these trade talks and hold the Trump administration accountable for such inappropriate coercion.

Imagine a woman in her late 20s, raising a young kid and working two jobs. On weekday mornings, she waits tables at a chain diner just off the highway. On weekends, she picks up banquet shifts at a hotel near the airport. Some weeks she hits 40 hours. Most weeks she doesn’t. Her schedule is built around whoever else calls off, whichever babysitter shows up, and how many tips she can pull in when customers don’t walk out on the check. She’s not lazy. She’s tired. She’s not failing. She’s just barely holding on.

She doesn’t ask for much—just enough to stay ahead of the next crisis. One sick day, one bounced check, one broken car door, and it all starts to unravel. Like nearly 60% of Americans, she’s living paycheck to paycheck. This isn’t some outlier story. It’s the American norm, life for millions of workers whose labor keeps the country running, even as their budgets can’t absorb a single emergency.

Last week, she saw a headline. The new House budget plan would eliminate federal income tax on tips. She read it twice. Finally, something for workers like her. Finally, a win.

This budget offers token relief while delivering sweeping cuts.

But what she didn’t see—what the headline didn’t say—is that while she might save a few hundred dollars come tax season, the same bill cuts the healthcare, food, and education programs that actually keep her afloat. It’s not a lifeline, it’s a tradeoff. And it’s a bad one.

Early Thursday morning, May 22, after days of internal negotiations and public brinkmanship, the House narrowly passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a 1,100-page tax and spending package drafted with support from the Trump White House. Despite defections from within their own ranks, GOP leadership managed to push the bill through with no Democratic support and just enough Republican votes to avoid collapse. The measure now moves to the Senate, where further changes are likely, but the core architecture is intact.

The bill includes more than $3.8 trillion in tax cuts, most of which go to the wealthiest households and largest corporations. It makes permanent the 2017 Trump tax cuts, increases the estate tax exemption to $15 million per person, and expands loopholes for business income. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top 1% of households would receive an average annual tax cut of approximately $79,000.

And the waitress? If she reports $10,000 in tips next year, she might see a refund boost of around $700. That’s her win. That’s what she gets.

But here’s what she could lose.

If her hours drop below 80 in a given month, and she can’t prove every one of them with pay stubs or employer forms, she could lose her Medicaid coverage. Under the latest version of the bill, these nationwide work requirements are no longer delayed until 2029. They’re scheduled to take effect as early as the end of next year. These requirements don’t just ask that you work. They ask that you document it, every month, without gaps. Miss a report, and your health insurance disappears. No phone call, no warning, just a closed file and an empty pharmacy counter.

If she misses work because her kid’s school is closed or a sitter falls through, she might lose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits too, especially if she doesn’t fill out the right paperwork on time or fails to meet a new state threshold. The revised bill raises the age limit for mandatory work compliance and eliminates long-standing exemptions for parents. The moment her child turns seven, she’s treated like someone with no caregiving responsibilities at all. And for the first time in decades, states will be required to help fund those benefits. If they can’t, or choose not to, those benefits could disappear.

If she tries to go back to school to finish the associate’s degree she started, she may no longer qualify for a Pell Grant. The bill raises the minimum course load for a full award from 12 credits to 15, more than a full-time load at most colleges. For a working mother juggling jobs, that’s not just a higher bar, it’s a locked gate. She’d have to choose between working more hours to afford tuition or taking more classes she can’t pay for to receive aid. Either way, she loses.

And that’s the pattern. Across the board, this budget offers token relief while delivering sweeping cuts. It takes programs that millions rely on—Medicaid, food assistance, student aid—and sacrifices them to fund tax breaks that primarily benefit those who already have the most. It’s a redistribution in reverse. It shifts risk downward and wealth upward. It wraps itself in the language of freedom and choice, while quietly dismantling the systems that offer working people a shot at stability.

This isn’t a misunderstanding of how poverty works. It’s a bet that most people won’t notice until it’s too late. It counts on workers like her being too busy, too tired, or too stressed to read the fine print. It counts on the headlines focusing on the tip exemption, not the Medicaid paperwork that knocks her off coverage. Not the missed deadline that shuts off SNAP. Not the registration block that forces her to drop out of community college. It makes the punishment quiet and the payoff loud.

We know who this helps. And we know who it hurts.

As of late 2024, approximately 78.5 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. In fiscal year 2023, 42.1 million participated in SNAP each month, and school meal programs served more than 4.6 billion lunches. The majority who rely on these services are children, seniors, and working families. By contrast, according to the Yale Budget Lab, fewer than 2.5% of U.S. households would benefit from the tip tax exemption, and only about 5% of low- and moderate-wage workers are employed in traditionally tipped occupations. And even among them, the average gain won’t cover a single unexpected car repair. The math doesn’t work. The logic doesn’t hold. But the politics do.

Because the waitress at the diner won’t get a press release when her SNAP balance goes to zero. She won’t get a spotlight when her kid’s lunch bill doubles or when she finds herself sitting in the ER without coverage. She’ll just keep showing up. Keep working. Keep holding the line with less and less help.

And that $700 refund?

It won’t pay for the inhaler when her daughter’s asthma flares up. It won’t buy a month of groceries when benefits are cut. It won’t fix the brake line on the car that barely starts. It won’t cover tuition when she’s one semester away from finishing a degree. It won’t save her when the safety net snaps under her feet.

No matter how “beautiful” they say the bill is, it won’t hold her life together when everything else is falling apart.

The old professor in me thinks the best way to convey to you how utterly awful the so-called “one big beautiful bill” passed by the House last night actually is would be to give you this short 10-question exam. (Answers are in parenthesis but first try to answer without looking at them.)

1. Does the House’s “one big beautiful bill” cut Medicare? (Answer: Yes, by an estimated $500 billion.)

2. Because the bill cuts Medicaid, how many Americans are expected to lose Medicaid coverage? (At least 8.6 million.)

3. Will the tax cut in the bill benefit the rich or the poor or everyone?(Overwhelmingly, the rich.)

4. How much will the top 0.1% of earners stand to gain from it? (Nearly $390,000 per year).

5. If you figure in the benefit cuts and the tax cuts, will Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 gain or lose? (They’ll lose about $700 a year).

6. How about Americans with incomes less than $17,000? (They’ll lose more than $1,000 per year on average).

7. How much will the bill add to the federal debt? ($3.8 trillion over 10 years.)

8. Who will pay the interest on this extra debt? (All of us, in both our tax payments and higher interest rates for mortgages, car loans, and all other longer-term borrowing.)

9. Who collects this interest? (People who lend to the U.S. government, 70% of whom are American and most of whom are wealthy.)

10. Bonus question: Is the $400 million airplane from Qatar a gift to the United States for every future president to use, or a gift to U.S. President Donald Trump for his own personal use? (It’s a personal gift because he’ll get to use it after he leaves the presidency.)

Most Americans are strongly opposed to all of these things, according to polls. But if you knew the answers to these 10 questions, you’re likely to be in a very tiny minority. That’s because of (1) distortions and cover-ups emanating from Trump and magnified by Fox News and other rightwing outlets. (2) A public that’s overwhelmed with the blitzkrieg of everything Trump is doing, and can’t focus on this. (3) Outright silencing of many in the media who fear retaliation from the Trump regime if they reveal things that Trump doesn’t want revealed.

Please do your part: Share this as widely as possible.

House Republicans’ tax plan would expand a tax break in the 2017 tax reform for “pass-through” businesses that has overwhelmingly benefited high earners. “Pass-throughs” are entities structured so that profits are not taxed at the business level but instead at the owners’ individual income tax rate.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act introduced a 20% deduction for Qualified Business Income (QBI) for pass-through businesses. House Republicans want to extend this tax break and increase it to 23%.

Contrary to proponents’ claims that the QBI deduction stimulates economic growth, economic research suggests a more nuanced and challenging reality. Recent analysis from our team at American University’s Institute for Macroeconomic and Policy Analysis (IMPA) reveals that extending or increasing the QBI is likely to exacerbate economic inequality, while delivering no economic benefits in the long run.

Extending the QBI deduction would systematically redistribute economic resources in ways that amplify existing inequalities.

Importantly, extending the QBI deduction would reduce government revenue significantly—by approximately 1.9% annually in the long run. Permanently increasing it would reduce revenue by 2.2% annually. These revenue losses represent a substantial fiscal challenge that cannot be overlooked.

Understanding Pass-Through Businesses

Traditional C corporations must pay the federal corporate income tax. Shareholders then pay individual income taxes on any profits distributed as dividends. In contrast, sole proprietorships, S corporations, and partnerships, as well as certain other types of businesses, are called “pass-throughs” because the businesses themselves do not pay taxes; instead, profits are passed through to individual owners, who then are taxed at their own individual tax rate. The QBI deduction reduces the amount of income from pass-throughs that is taxed.

According to Internal Revenue Service data, the number of nonfarm businesses organized as pass-throughs grew by 15% between 1980 and 2015, at which time more than 95% of all businesses were pass-throughs. But pass-through income is highly concentrated among top earners. Congressional Budget Office data show that, while income from pass-through businesses represents more than 20% of total household income for the top 1%, it accounts for merely 3% of income for the bottom 80% of households.

Think high-powered law firm partners or private equity fund executives. Without this tax break, they might owe the top marginal income tax rate of 37%. Under the current Republican proposal, they would owe just a 28.49% pass-through rate.

How Would Extending the QBI Deduction Affect the Economy?

Economic theory suggests that such tax deductions on business income have very little direct effects on real business activity if investment costs can be deducted from taxable income. And that is the case for pass-throughs. Because they can use accelerated depreciation provisions, taxes on their business income don’t change their investment decisions.

It’s not just theory: A recent study using tax record data finds no clear impact on investment, wages, or employment among pass-throughs that got an earlier tax break. A separate study found no impact on wages.

Even if tax breaks for businesses have no effect on individual business decisions, they can have negative effects on the economy as a whole. For example, such tax breaks reduce government revenue. If the revenue shortfall is financed by government borrowing, it can crowd out private investment. If the revenue shortfall is matched by reduced spending on public investment, such as scientific research, it is likely to reduce our standard of living in the long run. Such tax breaks also increase the after-tax required return to investors, which could cause businesses to distribute more profit, leaving less for investment.

We find that extending the QBI deduction would decrease government revenue by about 1.6% annually after 10 years and 1.9% in the long run.

Finally, such tax breaks increase after-tax profits and the market value of businesses, which raises the wealth of already-wealthy owners.

Our estimates using the IMPA macroeconomic policy model confirm that making the QBI deduction permanent would not boost economic activity, as is commonly claimed. Instead, we find that there would be a small decrease in GDP of 0.07% in the long run. Increasing the deduction to 23% would magnify the negative impact on economic activity.

Extending the QBI deduction would systematically redistribute economic resources in ways that amplify existing inequalities. Extending the QBI deduction would increase the share of the wealth owned by the top 1% by approximately 1.1%, while the bottom 50% would see their share fall by approximately 2.4%. Increasing the deduction, of course, redistributes even more wealth from the lower half of the distribution to the top.

Finally, we find that extending the QBI deduction would decrease government revenue by about 1.6% annually after 10 years and 1.9% in the long run. Increasing it permanently to 23% would reduce revenue 2.2% in the long run. How much is that? In the 2023 budget, 2% was enough to cover about three-quarters of the annual cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Or it would support 12 years of cancer research at 2023 levels.

To sum it up: QBI deduction costs taxpayers a lot, does not stimulate growth, and has regressive distributional consequences. There is no economic justification for its continuation.

With the House passing their budget reconciliation bill with a vote of 215-214, hundreds of billions in proposed cuts to Medicaid have moved one step closer toward very real, harmful consequences, including for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or I/DD, whose health, safety, and quality of life depend on Medicaid.

Medicaid doesn’t just provide healthcare. It is the single largest payer for the community-based services people with I/DD need to live, work, and thrive in our communities—services that range from assistance with intimate activities of daily living and personal hygiene, to employment supports to find and maintain a job, to providing residential and in-home supports to support independent living.

If lawmakers approve the proposed cuts to Medicaid, state budgets will be unable to absorb the financial shock. Even if targeted to other groups like those made eligible for services through Medicaid expansion, programs that enable people with I/DD to meaningfully participate and thrive in our society will be the first to go. We know because home- and community-based services for people with I/DD are optional services, meaning they are some of the last services to be funded when there’s a state funding shortfall. We saw this following the Great Recession when, following cuts to federal funding, every single state made cuts to services and 36 states specifically made cuts to services for people with I/DD.

If lawmakers truly care about boosting economies, they would invest in, not divest from Medicaid, because these services actually play a critical yet often invisible role in state economies.

Divesting from Medicaid will be devastating to providers of I/DD services who are already struggling immensely due to insufficient Medicaid reimbursement rates that haven’t kept pace with inflation. As a direct result, 90% of community providers report moderate to severe staffing shortages as workers seek out higher-paying jobs in entry-level retail, convenience, and fast food industries. Without sufficient staffing, 69% of community providers report they’re unable to take new referrals for people with I/DD who need and qualify for services.

Medicaid cuts by another name in the form of increased red tape eligibility requirements or work reporting requirements also threaten people with disabilities, who may lose coverage due to barriers completing onerous reporting requirements, even if they are provided an exemption. Such requirements also threaten to further exacerbate the direct support workforce crisis, as 49% of direct care workers rely on public assistance programs themselves, and approximately one-third work part-time or with inconsistent schedules—two job features that are generally incompatible with work reporting requirements. If direct support professionals, the very backbone of disability services, are unable to meet burdensome reporting requirements, it will only force them to find more stable, higher-paying jobs outside of care work.

If lawmakers truly care about boosting economies, they would invest in, not divest from Medicaid, because these services actually play a critical yet often invisible role in state economies.

New York State’s $6.7 billion investment in home- and community-based services generated $14.3 billion in economic activity, while Maine is estimated to have lost out on over $1 billion due to its shortage of direct care workers. That’s because Medicaid-funded services create jobs, while enabling the family members and caregivers of people with I/DD to remain in the workforce too. Without services, families are also more likely to need public assistance.

The House’s budget proposal will force unthinkable decisions on states and providers. It will undoubtedly lead to people with I/DD losing access to services, potentially being forced to languish in their homes without the assistance they need for using the restroom, supportive hygiene, and preparing and eating meals. It will lead to people with I/DD losing their jobs without the employment supports they need to maintain their careers. And it could mean unnecessary institutionalization of people whose right to live and thrive in their communities was codified by the Americans with Disabilities Act and, later, the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C.

Senators hold the opportunity to continue protecting our most vulnerable populations by rejecting any cuts to Medicaid and not putting further stress on a system already in crisis.

Update: This piece has been edited to reflect the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives passed their budget reconciliation bill on the morning of May 22, 2025.

Laura Loomer is 31 years old and a graduate of Barry University, a private Catholic university. A former commentator on Alex Jones’s Infowars and a far-right conspiracy theorist, she has 1.5 million followers on X. Loomer traffics in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric. She has called herself a “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism.”

And she has U.S. President Donald Trump’s ear.

In 2020, Loomer was the Republican nominee for Congress from the Florida district where Mar-a-Lago is located. She campaigned almost exclusively on her allegiance to Trump who, along with Roger Stone, supported her candidacy. Loomer lost the election, as well as her bid to become the party’s nominee again in 2022.

An Extreme Trump Loyalist

During the 2024 campaign, Loomer said on X that if Vice President Kamala Harris—whose mother was born in India—won the election, “the White House will smell like curry.” Those comments drew the condemnation of even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who called her “toxic.”

“Getting Loomered” means targeting someone to determine the sufficiency of the person’s loyalty to Trump and his agenda.

A fervent Trump supporter during the 2024 Republican primaries, she claimed without evidence that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis exaggerated his wife’s bout with breast cancer to gain sympathy votes during his presidential campaign. Her conspiracy theories range from school shootings to election fraud. She shared a video on X stating that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job.”

According to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans.”

A Powerful Influence

Trump aides have tried to limit Loomer’s access to the president—with mixed results. In 2024, She accompanied Trump during appearances commemorating 9/11 in New York and Pennsylvania and traveled on his plane to Iowa where Trump told the audience, “You want her on your side.”

Trump’s top advisers have learned the price of not being on Loomer’s side. In March 2025, she started her own research firm— Loomered Strategies—to provide high-level opposition research and vetting for hire. “Getting Loomered” means targeting someone to determine the sufficiency of the person’s loyalty to Trump and his agenda.

According to Trump, “She’s a strong person. She’s got strong opinions…”

On April 2, she “Loomered” the National Security Council (NSC). Meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, she attacked the character and loyalty of several NSC officials and named the people he should fire. Michael Waltz, who headed the agency, joined the meeting late and briefly tried to defend some of his people. But Trump immediately fired six of her targets.

Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, managed to survive Loomer’s onslaught that day, but not for long. Less than a month later, Trump announced Waltz’s termination. The intervening revelation of his inadvertent inclusion of The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg on a sensitive group chat on the Signal app had made him vulnerable in any event.

But Wong was out too. Loomer had speculated that Wong’s family was part of a conspiracy and that he had added Goldberg to the Signal chat “on purpose as part of a foreign opp to embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China.” Wong’s father is of Taiwanese descent, and Loomer had referred to Wong’s wife Candice as a “Chinese woman.” Candice Wong had clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was a career prosecutor, and served as a Justice Department official during Trump’s first term.

Three weeks later, Loomer went after an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Adam Schleifer, who had unsuccessfully run for Congress as a Democrat in 2020. She posted on social media that Schleifer was a “Biden holdover” and a “Trump hater” who should be fired. An hour later, Schleifer received a one-sentence email terminating his employment. In a highly unusual action, the message came directly from the White House on behalf of the president personally. It gave no reason for Schleifer’s dismissal.

Impervious to Facts

Loomer has also attacked the National Intelligence Council, an elite internal think tank that reports to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Previously, the White House had asked the council to assess the link between the Venezuelan government and the notorious Tren de Aragua gang. Without such a link, Trump could not rely on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deprive the gang’s members of due process before deporting them.

On February 26, senior analyst at the council Michael Collins reported the intelligence community’s consensus that the Venezuelan government did not control the gang. But on March 15, Trump signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act based on purportedly factual findings that contradicted the report.

With a presidential inner circle that includes Laura Loomer, we’re all in deep trouble.

When Collins’ report became public and revealed Trump’s lie, Loomer blasted the council as “career anti-Trump bureaucrats” who “need to be replaced if they want to promote open borders.” In the same post, she pasted images of Collins’s LinkedIn profile and an article about the council’s memo. Three weeks later, Gabbard fired Collins.

Meanwhile, federal courts have blocked Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in every district where he has tried to invoke it. The courts have found that the act’s predicate—that the Venezuelan gang is engaged in either a “war,” “invasion,” or a “predatory incursion” of the United States—does not exist.

At a Mar-a-Lago press conference in April 2024, Trump praised Loomer as “a woman of courage,” he said, “You don’t want to be Loomered. If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble.”

With a presidential inner circle that includes Laura Loomer, we’re all in deep trouble.

So here's what happened.

We—Mayday Health, an abortion education nonprofit—tried to buy a newspaper ad in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. The ad featured just a few words: "Abortion pills are more popular than ever. Thanks, Amy" with a photo of Amy Coney Barrett, who was born in New Orleans.

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Louisiana said… no. They refused to publish.

They sent us a rejection letter assuring us that they "support First Amendment free speech," of course. They just find our particular speech too "uncomfortable."

Uncomfortable.

Let me tell you about uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable is 900,000 Louisiana women of childbearing age waking up in a state that treats their uteruses like crime scenes. Uncomfortable is pregnant Kaitlyn Joshua bleeding through her jeans in a Louisiana hospital parking lot because doctors were too scared of criminal repercussions. Uncomfortable is driving five hours across state lines for healthcare that used to be 10 minutes away. Uncomfortable is a group of Louisiana Republicans investigating a New York-based doctor for legally shipping pills to patients in the state—prosecutors hunting doctors for simply providing care.

In trying to end abortion access, Barrett accidentally revealed just how determined Americans are to control their own bodies. (Thanks for nothing, Amy.)

Louisiana already had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation before this medieval abortion ban. Black and Native American women die here at rates that would make developing countries blush. And now? Doctors turn away women with pregnancy complications because providing necessary care might land them in a state prison.

So yes, Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yes, clinics shuttered overnight from coast to coast. But here's what nobody saw coming: When you eliminate physical access to abortion care, people don't simply accept defeat. They fight for their reproductive freedom. Today, more Americans are ending pregnancies with pills delivered to their mailboxes than ever before—not because it's ideal, but because it's necessary. The data is unequivocal; Abortion rates have actually risen since Roe fell in 2022, though countless people still face dangerous barriers to care. In trying to end abortion access, Barrett accidentally revealed just how determined Americans are to control their own bodies. (Thanks for nothing, Amy.)

But The Times-Picayune finds our ad uncomfortable. The Times-Picayune chose comfort over truth. They chose to protect their readers from reality, rather than prepare them for it.

Here are the facts The Times-Picayune doesn't want you to read: Abortion pills work. They're Food and Drug Administration-approved. They're safe. And—here's the kicker—they're available by mail in all 50 states, including Louisiana. Right now, as you read this, about 8,000 women per month in abortion-banned states are getting these pills delivered to their doorsteps.

I run Mayday Health. We're the people who put up billboards and buy ads and generally make powerful people squirm by stating the obvious. Like the time we put up three billboards in Jackson, Mississippi that read "Pregnant? You still have a choice." When Mississippi's attorney general tried to intimidate us with subpoenas, we didn't blink. We bought 20 more billboards and ran a state-wide TV ad. We turned their threats into a marketing campaign about abortion pills.

When Spotify rejected our audio ads about abortion pills, claiming we violated their policies, we posted a Tweet thread called the "Spotify Rapist Playlist," a list of convicted felons whose music is still available to stream. A week later, Spotify admitted their "ad reviewer made an error." (Spotify ultimately rejected our ads, and we ended up going on Pandora).

We've danced this dance before. The powerful get nervous when they think they have something to lose.

Here's what kills me: The same people who spread complete bullshit about abortion—that it causes breast cancer, that fetuses feel pain at six weeks, that women regularly use it as birth control—these people get full-page spreads. But a few words of truth about FDA-approved pills? Too spicy for the newspaper of record in the Big Easy.

Amy Coney Barrett and her robed colleagues said they were giving the power back to the states, back to the people. Noble, right? Except how are people supposed to make informed decisions when newspapers won't even print basic medical facts?

The truth is simple: Abortion bans don't stop abortions. They stop safe abortions. Women have been ending pregnancies since before we figured out how to make fire, and they're not stopping anytime soon. The only question is whether they'll have accurate information to aid them in the process.

We're not backing down. Mayday Health will keep taking out ads, conducting undercover investigations into fake crisis centers, flying airplane banners over MLB games, driving digital billboard trucks to fake crisis pregnancy centers, building pop-up abortion stores in Texas, and spreading information to rape crisis pregnancy centers. Because while The Times-Picayune worries about its comfort level, Louisiana women are out here living in the real world—a world where information isn't just power, it's survival.

So here's my message to The Times-Picayune and every other institution that finds truth "uncomfortable:" Get comfortable with discomfort. Because we're not going anywhere, and neither are abortion pills.

How's that for uncomfortable?

Consequent to the escalated Zionist genocide of Indigenous Palestinian people, and after a blockade of all goods since the beginning of March 2025, Gaza is experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis, with widespread food scarcity and starvation among its population. Human rights organizations and international agencies report the Israeli blockade has led to catastrophic levels of hunger, particularly affecting children and vulnerable groups.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) indicates approximately 244,000 people in Gaza face the most severe level of food insecurity, with nearly 71,000 children under five at risk of acute malnutrition. The World Food Program warns famine is imminent, affecting nearly the entire population of 2.3 million.

Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, a gross violation of international law, while noting children have died from starvation-related complications due to the blockade.

Israeli and American strategies of siege, blockade, and forced starvation create the very social fragmentation they later cite as proof of Palestinian dysfunction and innate barbarity.

The United Nations and other organizations have called for immediate, unrestricted humanitarian access to prevent further deterioration. In addition, aid groups have criticized the proposed systems for potentially facilitating distribution of food and other essentials as being inadequate to meet the urgent needs.

Now, seemingly under pressure from the United States and conveniently using its mercenaries, Israel will allow “minimal” food and supplies into the besieged Palestinian enclave, while intensifying its devastating military assault.

In a recent press conference, Netanyahu ally and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demonically said Israeli forces are engaged in a campaign to force Palestinians into the south of Gaza “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President [Donald] Trump’s plan. This is a change of the course of history—nothing less.”

Other than a tool to move the population southward as part of a brazen criminal displacement campaign, which Smotrich openly admits, the starvation of Gaza has another insidious deliberate objective—methodical, socially engineered atomization of the people in Gaza, designed to create extreme deprivation, societal chaos, and internal strife, particularly through food scarcity and lack of control, and subsequently as a pretext for further genocide, expulsion, theft, and domination.

Research in Chimpanzees

Renowned Primatologist Jane Goodall documented a prolonged conflict (1974–1978) between two chimpanzee groups, the Kasakela and the Kahama, in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. This “Gombe Chimpanzee War” saw the Kasakela community systematically attack and eliminate the Kahama group. Goodall’s findings were widely reported as support for the idea that warfare and territorial violence are natural elements of human behavior, inherited from our closest primate relatives.

Notably, reactionaries have co-opted these notions on so-called human nature to justify colonialism, falsely depicting Indigenous tribes as inherently violent “savages” to legitimize land theft and genocide.

Anthropologist Brian Ferguson has challenged Goodall’s interpretation. In a painstakingly thorough analysis of each case of documented aggression during the “Gombe Chimpanzee War,” he argues that the violence observed was not natural or inevitable. Rather, it was the result of external influences, primarily human interference by Goodall, her team, and others. Ferguson points to changes in provisioning (feeding) practices by these researchers, which disrupted social dynamics and led to unnatural group fragmentation. He also cites ecological pressures, such as resource scarcity due to nearby human activity, which may have exacerbated tensions.

Ferguson contends these factors, rather than innate aggression, better explain the conflict, emphasizing violence is context-dependent and can be negatively affected by human interference, and not a fixed part of primate and human nature. Drawing on primate studies, archaeology and anthropology, Ferguson argues war in human behavior is not innate—i.e.“human nature”—it emerged as a cultural construct when social inequalities were introduced with sedentary, agricultural life which enabled resource hoarding. Thus, he cautions against simplistic evolutionary (and reactionary) narratives which use such cases to justify human violence.

Where is the Palestinian Mandela?

The same dynamics are now unfolding in Gaza, where Israeli and American strategies of siege, blockade, and forced starvation create the very social fragmentation they later cite as proof of Palestinian dysfunction and innate barbarity.

The deliberate destruction of food systems, water infrastructure, medical systems, and communal cohesion is not incidental, it is an intentional form of warfare aimed at inducing despair, division, and eventual displacement.

Starvation is a tool of colonization, weaponized to weaken bodies, fracture bonds, undermine social cohesion, fuel internal aggression, weaken resistance, and turn survival into an isolating struggle. These conditions are neither natural nor inevitable; they are constructed and inflicted deliberately to serve a white supremacist goal—to manufacture potentially lethal chaos within Palestinian society and shift blame for genocide onto the victims themselves.

The cynical ploy by Israel and the United States to engineer conditions for forced displacement while blaming the Palestinian people they are starving should be rejected and serve as further impetus for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

As internal conflict escalates, Zionist forces can portray Palestinians as irredeemably violent “savages,” justifying further domination under the guise of civilizing and evicting them “for their own good.” This was reflected by Trump in his immoral plan to turn Gaza into a resort.

This strategy mirrors decades of Zionist colonial tactics—assassination, imprisonment, torture, and psychological warfare—all deployed to reinforce the false narrative that Palestinian anti-colonial resistance is proof of inherent barbarism, rather than a defensive response to European invasion, oppression, and dispossession.

With classical colonial sleight of hand, liberal Zionists then ask, with feigned bewilderment: “Where is the Palestinian Mandela?” as if peace depends on the emergence of a more palatable victim. This notion ignores how many “Palestinian Mandelas” have emerged, only to be systematically assassinated and imprisoned by Zionist forces for embodying the possibility of peace and reconciliation through justice and decolonization. Likewise, the first Palestinian Intifada, a largely women-led uprising, and the “March of Return” were largely nonviolent—a strategy Zionists found more threatening than armed resistance and thus met with brutal, disproportionate force.

The deliberate starvation of Palestinian people in Gaza is an abominable nadir in an ongoing 77-year symphony of Israeli genocide and war crimes. However, it is possible to anticipate Zionist tactics and accompanying propaganda and to respond with foresight and strategy.

The cynical ploy by Israel and the United States to engineer conditions for forced displacement while blaming the Palestinian people they are starving should be rejected and serve as further impetus for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and other protests by all those opposing U.S.-led white supremacist colonialism, instead of allowing it to weaken, dishearten, and fracture resistance. This is the bare minimum for anyone who sees the predatory U.S.-led Zionist experiment in Palestine as a threat to the existence of the Palestinian people and to the rest of humanity.

On May 5, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute held its annual fundraising gala. The event showcases the extraordinary imaginations of people who design exorbitant clothes and the gutsiness of those who dare (and can afford) to wear them.

I’m dimly aware of this annual extravaganza because of my interest in knitting, spinning, and weaving—the crafts involved in turning fluff into yarn and yarn into cloth. Mind you, I have no flair for fashion myself. I could never carry off wearing the simplest of ballgowns, and I’m way too short to rock a tuxedo. My own personal style runs to 1970s White Dyke. (Think blue jeans and flannel shirts.) But I remain fascinated by what braver people will get themselves up in.

One of my favorite movies is Paris Is Burning, a 1990 documentary about the underground Harlem ballroom scene, where drag queens and transgender folks, mostly Black and Latina, recreated a fierce version of the world of haute couture. It was a testament to people’s ability to take the detritus of what systems of racism and economic deprivation had given them and spin it into defiant art.

So I was excited to learn that the theme of this year’s gala was to be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” an homage to the tradition of Black dandyism, about which Vogue magazine writes:

There is something undeniably magnetic about the sharp creases of a tailored suit, the gleam of polished leather shoes, the swish of a silk pocket square. But for Black dandyism, this isn’t just about looking good—it’s a declaration. A defiant reclaiming of space in a world that has long sought to define and confine Black identity. So, what exactly is Black dandyism? At its core, it’s a fashion revolution, a movement steeped in history, resistance, and pride.

The Met’s gala theme was chosen back in October 2024, when it still seemed possible that, rather than electing a fascist toddler, this country might choose a Black woman as president. In that case, the gala could have served as an extended victory toast. (As it happens, Kamala Harris did in fact attend.)

Instead, this country is today laboring under an increasingly authoritarian regime in Washington, one proudly and explicitly dedicated to reversing decades of victories by various movements for Black liberation.

Resuscitating Employment Discrimination

I wrote “laboring under” quite intentionally, because one of one of Trump 2.0’s key attacks on African Americans comes in the realm of work. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in its ominous preelection document Mandate for Change made this clear in a chapter on the Labor Department. The first “needed reform” there, it insisted, would be to uproot DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts wherever they might be found in the government and military. Its authors wrote that the new administration must:

Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution. Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views. The next administration should eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.

In case the reader has any doubt about the evils attributed to DEI, that chapter’s next “needed reform” made it clear that the greatest of those horrors involved any effort whatsoever to prevent racial discrimination against people of color. To that end, Project 2025 wanted the federal government to stop collecting racial demographics in employment. It called on the next administration to eliminate altogether the gathering of such data by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on the grounds that collecting “employment statistics based on race/ethnicity… can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.”

In other words, as I wrote months before Donald Trump returned to power, “If you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you are enjoined from collecting data about race and employment), then there is no racial discrimination to remedy.”

The 1964 Civil Rights Act first established the EEOC’s mandate to collect such employment data by race in its Title VII, the section on employment rights. Title VII remains a major target of the second Trump administration. That’s especially true when it comes to federal employment, where all federal agencies are required “to maintain an affirmative program of equal employment”—an idea abhorred by the Trump administration.

The employment-rights section of the Civil Rights Act covers all employers, including the federal government. And in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson went even further, issuing Executive Order 11246, which applied similar principles to the employment practices of federal contractors. That order established the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which uses the EEOC’s data to ensure that federal contractors don’t discriminate against what are considered protected classes of workers.

Not surprisingly, Project 2025 called on the next administration to rescind Executive Order 11246, which is precisely what President Donald Trump did on January 21, 2025, his second day in office, in an order entitled (apparently without irony) “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” (To be clear, by “illegal discrimination,” Trump, of course, meant imagined “discrimination” against white people.) In addition to eliminating that mandate, Trump’s order also rescinded a number of later executive orders meant to ensure racial equity in employment, including:

(i) Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994 (Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations);
(ii) Executive Order 13583 of August 18, 2011 (Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce);
(iii) Executive Order 13672 of July 21, 2014 (Further Amendments to Executive Order 11478, Equal Employment Opportunity in the Federal Government, and Executive Order 11246, Equal Employment Opportunity); and
(iv) The Presidential Memorandum of October 5, 2016 (Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce).

According to Project 2025, preventing “discrimination” against whites requires another move as well: eliminating any law or policy that prohibits discriminatory employment outcomes. In other words, intentional racial discrimination, which is often impossible to prove, would remain the only legitimate form of discrimination.

Decimating the Black Middle Class

Why have I made such a detailed excursion into the weeds of federal law and policymaking? Because the real-world effects on African American communities of such arcane maneuvering will likely be staggering.

Federal employment was a crucial factor in building today’s Black middle class, beginning in the decades after emancipation and accelerating significantly under the provisions of that 1964 Civil Rights Act and the various presidential orders that followed. As Danielle Mahones of the Berkeley Labor Center of the University of California points out, “Federal employment has been a pathway to the middle class for African American workers and their families since Reconstruction, including postal work and other occupations.” We can now expect, she adds, “to see Black workers lose their federal jobs.”

The Trump administration’s apparently race-neutral attack on supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce is guaranteed to disproportionately remove Black workers from federal employment.

And with Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024, that indeed is the plan that has been brought to the White House by Russell Vought, one of the key architects of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget. Implementation began with the series of executive orders already described, which largely govern the hiring of new employees. But actions affecting federal hiring don’t take effect quickly, especially in periods of government cutbacks like we’re seeing today.

Fortunately for Vought and his co-conspirators at the Heritage Foundation, Trump had another option in his anti-Black toolbox: the chainsaw wielded by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. While estimates vary, the best estimate is that, thanks to Musk and crew, around 260,000 federal workers have by now “been fired, taken buyouts, or retired early.”

Eliminating federal employees in such a way has indeed had a disproportionate effect on Black workers, since they comprise almost 19% of that workforce, while the country’s total workforce is only 13% Black. (At the Post Office, the figure may be closer to 30%.) If 260,000 federal workers have lost their jobs under Trump and Musk, then almost 50,000 of them may be Black. In other words, cutting federal jobs disproportionately affects Black workers.

“Negro Removal”

Of course, Donald Trump’s approach to Blacks is hardly new in this country. “Negro removal” has a long history here. When I first moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s, there was a big blank area in the middle of the city. Acres of empty blocks sat in the section of town known as the “Western Addition” or, to the people who had once lived there, “the Fillmore.” The Fillmore had been a racially mixed neighborhood. Populated by Japanese- and Filipino-Americans, it had also housed a significant Black enclave. As a local NPR podcast described the scene, “If you were walking down San Francisco’s Fillmore Street in the 1950s, chances are you might run into Billie Holiday stepping out of a restaurant. Or Ella Fitzgerald trying on hats. Or Thelonious Monk smoking a cigarette.” The neighborhood was often called the “Harlem of the West.”

But “urban renewal” projects, initiated under the federal Housing Act of 1949, would tear down over 14,000 housing units and an unknown number of businesses there in the name of “slum clearance and community redevelopment.” By the time I arrived, however, much of the Fillmore had been rebuilt, including the Japantown business area, though many empty lots remained. Today, they’ve all been filled in, but the 10% of the city’s population that had been African American when “urban renewal” began has been halved. And while Blacks still represent 5% of the city’s population, they also account for 37% of the unhoused.

The writer and activist James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963, while the Fillmore’s razing was in full swing. “Urban renewal,” he pointed out, “is Negro removal.” And according to Mindy T. Fullilove, a professor of urban studies and health, San Francisco’s urban renewal experience was duplicated across the country. As she put it back in 2001:

[U]rban renewal affected thousands of communities in hundreds of cities. Urban renewal was to achieve “clearance” of “blight” and “slum” areas so that they could be rebuilt for new uses other than housing the poor… The short-term consequences were dire, including loss of money, loss of social organization, and psychological trauma.

As Fullilove argued, federal policies like urban renewal, involving “community dispossession—and its accompanying psychological trauma, financial loss, and rippling instability—produced a rupture in the historical trajectory of African American urban communities.” She believes that such federal intervention foreclosed the possibility that Black people would follow the route to full participation in U.S. social, commercial, and political life taken by “earlier waves of immigrants to the city.”

Policies that appear to be “race neutral” can have racialized effects. The phrase “urban renewal” says nothing about uprooting Black communities, yet that is what it achieved in practice. Just as earlier federal policies led to the removal of Black communities from the hearts of hundreds of U.S. cities, the Trump administration’s apparently race-neutral attack on supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce is guaranteed to disproportionately remove Black workers from federal employment. Together with the planned ejection of millions of immigrants, and following the Project 2025 playbook, Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions like Stephen Miller are doing their best to Make America White Again. (As if it ever was!)

Text and Subtext

The second time around, Trump’s administration sees race everywhere. It’s the subtext of almost everything its officials say and it’s right there in the “text” of its actions and pronouncements.

Ironically enough, Mindy Fullilove’s article is—for the moment—still available from the National Institutes of Health library website. Given the “Negro removal” that the Trump administration has been eagerly pursuing on its thousands of websites and libraries, though, who knows how long it will remain there. Certainly, you can expect to see further erasures of African Americans from any arena this administration enters. As Washington Post columnist Theodore T. Johnson writes,

Not only does this White House see race; it is also a preoccupation: One of its first executive orders enacted an anti-diversity agenda that purged women, people of color, and programs from federal websites and libraries. Trump directed the firing of multiple generals and admirals who are Black, female, or responsible for the military following the rule of law.

Recent weeks have seen the purging (and in some cases, embarrassed restoration) of any number of Black historical figures, including Jackie Robinson, Harriet Tubman, and the Tuskegee Airmen, from government websites.

Nor are attacks on employment and representation the new administration’s only attempts to constrain the lives of African Americans. On April 28, Trump issued an executive order devoted to “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” In addition to “unleashing” local law enforcement, the order prepares the way for military involvement in local policing. It also seeks to roll back consent decrees governing the behavior of police departments judged discriminatory by previous Justice Departments. In 2025, no one should be confused about the respective races of the “criminals” and “innocent citizens” referred to in Trump’s order.

So yes, along with overlapping groups, including immigrants, transgender and other LGBTQ+ folks, women, and union workers, Black Americans are clear targets for this administration. That’s why even as rarified an event as the Met Gala may be, it still inspires me. As Ty Gaskins wrote in Vogue, Black style is a “defiant reclaiming of space in a world that has long sought to define and confine Black identity.”

Isn’t it now time for all of us to reclaim our space—and nation—from Donald Trump?

There is a fable that when Kissinger and Nixon met with Mao Zedong, Mao wondered out loud why the physically unattractive Kissinger was so successful with women. Kissinger quipped, supposedly, that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Anyone who has spent time in political campaigns, political office, or corporate hierarchies, knows there is more than a little truth to Kissinger’s claim. If you hold power or have access to it you are attractive, or at least more attractive than you would be without it. You can feel it and you can use it, and you may do foolish things for fear of losing it. The hunger for it is strong enough to suck away your courage.

Kissinger’s insight gives us, perhaps, a better understanding about how Biden got away with running again when he was so obviously impaired. (You want to kill an aphrodisiac? Talk about your prostate cancer.)

The wound has been reopened with the publication of Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It is the supposedly shocking story of how Biden’s mental and physical maladies were covered up. (What’s really shocking is how Tapper is hawking his own book on his own CNN show and then also covering it as major news, just a bit like Trump selling meme coins from the White House. Yes, in behalf of all authors, I’m jealous!)

And now the revelation that Biden has Stage 4 prostate cancer is leading to further recriminations that he was hiding his declining health both from the public and from his fellow Democrats.

The basic argument is that those in the know knew that Biden was growing more and more feeble during his presidency and covered up the growing problems by keeping him out of the public eye. As a result, Biden and his team pressed for his reelection, while virtually no one in the Democratic Party resisted publicly, even as polls repeatedly showed that a majority of Democratic voters thought Biden was too old to run again.

Why didn’t the Democrats do something about this obvious train wreck in the making? Why didn’t Bernie, AOC, Elizabeth Warren and other congressional progressives call this process into question so there would be time to select a new candidate through primaries? Why didn’t Governors Pritzker and Newsom, along with other presidential hopefuls, say something—anything—to the American public?

The current crop of answers goes something like this: Biden was protected by his “Polit Bureau” of close advisors, as Democrats labeled them. Those in government who were in contact with Biden always reported that he was sharp and fit because he was only made available during his good times. In short, it was largely his advisor’s fault, including his wife Jill, who failed the party and American democracy by protecting him from more scrutiny. And perhaps, more importantly, it was Biden’s foolish ego that pushed him to hold onto power until it was too late.

Much of that may be true, but it’s inadequate. Kissinger’s aphrodisiac explanation goes deeper.

The presidency is the ultimate source of power in American politics. How could anything match being the leader of the free world, the Commander in Chief of the largest military arsenal in history, and the single person who can control U.S. laws and legislation, from the bully pulpit, by executive order, or with a veto? Everyone wants to kiss your ring.

The president has that power. Power for most everyone else (except for the Supreme Court justices, when they show some spine) is largely derivative. As a result, those who have access to the president are far more powerful than those who do not. Gaining presidential access and then holding on to it is the next best aphrodisiac.

Progressives in Congress—like Sanders, AOC, and Warren—believed they had great influence over Biden and his agenda. There was the repeated bluster that Biden was the most pro-working-class president since FDR. Big ideas, like the Green New Deal, gained Biden’s support, and progressives were often in the center of the action, passing progressive legislation and regulations (even when ambushed by Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema).

Had they dared to question Biden’s re-election run, it is likely, very likely, they would have lost their access in a hurry. That threat no doubt quieted their tongues. Proximity to power may even have led them to ignore Biden’s decline, to avoid seeing it, and even to choose not to think about it. The power-high can do that and more.

What about the presidential hopefuls? They are hungry for the fullest dose of the power aphrodisiac. If they challenged Biden and his incumbent advantage in 2024 and failed, they might never get another chance at that ultimate high. The Biden supporters among Democratic elites, especially, would never forgive them for stepping into the race. And if Biden beat them in the primaries, and then lost to Trump, or if they beat Biden and then lost to Trump, they would get blamed, and their lofty political ambitions would be quashed. Just calling Biden out, without challenging him in the primaries, would get them nowhere but down. Just ask Dean Phillips.

But if they sat back and let Biden win, or fail on his own, then the 2028 would be wide open. Their choice wasn’t that hard. The safest path to power was to bide their time.

Unfortunately, that political pragmatism and surrender to the aphrodisiac might turn out to be enormously problematic for the Democrats. It’s not a given that Trump’s scorched earth policies will flip the House back to the Democrats in 2026, and the Senate map is a particularly tough one for the Democrats. The Biden debacle has voters questioning why Democrats remained dead silent even as the rest of the country could see plainly that Biden was too old to govern.

That silence now leads to more questions about the timing of Biden’s cancer diagnosis. Did he release this information to turn media coverage away from the new book’s revelations? How could he not know of his ailment while he was president, given that he had the best health care support in the country, if not the world?

All this adds to the stains on the Democratic brand and further undermines their credibility, which already is severely tarnished among working-class voters.

As this story festers, it might be a good time for progressives to question their lifelong strategy of rebuilding the Democratic Party into an instrument of working-class justice. Maybe, just maybe, they should concede that task is doomed to failure. Most Democratic Party officials do not want to be the defenders of the working class. Most, in fact, are content to work hand-in-hand with their wealthy donors who have gained their riches by siphoning wealth away from working people.

Instead, it might be time to have a serious discussion about what it will take to build a new working-class political formation, possibly a new party, even if it is going to take a decade and maybe longer to come to fruition.

The billionaires have two political parties. We need one of our own—one that is not intoxicated by the enfeebling lust for power.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration prioritized a standard for economic and democratic empowerment of the people. FDR's New Deal advanced the common good and an economy for the people. The 1935 Social Security Act became the boilerplate for universal healthcare.

The post-WWII "Golden Age" of capitalism boosted economic growth, people's prosperity, and middle class expansion, lasting until 1975—subsequently displaced by global neoliberal capitalism.

Principle Political Dichotomy: Corporatists vs. Working People

Since the 1970s white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and aspiring oligarchs have converged under the Republican Party umbrella to seek deconstruction of democracy toward harnessing wealth and political power, while promoting supremacist entitlement—the presumed right to criminalize and hold hostage other people's lives based on gender, ethnicity, religion, and class wealth.

Nixon Supreme Court appointee Lewis Powell's 1971 Memorandum, termed a "capitalist coup," further galvanized corporate money toward rewrite of law, policy, and judicial precedent to consolidate corporate political power.

Since Reagan, continual huge tax cuts for wealthy corporatists have spiked national deficits, paid for with deficit-cutting on the backs of working people by cutting public and social programs.

Kleptocracy, also known as "socioeconomic thievery," describes the half-century robbery of the American people by corrupt leaders who expropriate wealth of the governed for their own gain. Contemporary Gilded Age Robber Barons continue to expropriate people's wealth. A RAND Corporation Report reveals that from 1975-2023 the top 1% robbed $79 trillion from the bottom 90%. Had earnings remained equitably distributed at pre-1975 levels, the average worker in the bottom 90th percentile would earn $32,000 more annually.

Even as the neoliberal "greed is good" ethic prioritized enhancement of shareholder profits, Reagan administration neoliberalism supercharged wealth transfer upward, crushing unions and wages, gutting antitrust law, deregulating banks and industries, enabling predatory private equity practices, and legalizing stock buybacks that continue to multiply billionaires' wealth.

Neoliberalism has spurred 45 years of financialization, as Wall St. pillages-for-profit every sector, from healthcare to housing. Kleptocrats leverage rivers of dark money to capture media and dominate lobbyist-controlled legislatures and elections, flooding the 2024 election with nearly $2 billion.

Commodification of Health for Profit Betrays the Original Intent of Medicare

The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by sociologist Dr. Paul Starr is a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of corporate takeover of U.S. healthcare. Starr describes former President Richard Nixon as the first mainstream political leader to "take deliberate steps to change American healthcare from its longstanding not-for-profit business principles into a for-profit model to be driven by the insurance industry."

A 1971 video exchange between President Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman celebrated the Kaiser CEO's prioritization of profit over healthcare. Enthused Ehrlichman, "...All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make."

Ostensibly intended to cut costs and improve healthcare access, Nixon's 1973 HMO Act advanced the concept of for-profit "managed care" health models. Each manifestation of managed care, including Accountable Care Organizations and Medicare Advantage, have proved increasingly profitable for Wall St. and the health industrial complex.

With passage of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, former President George W. Bush spearheaded privatized, for-profit Medicare Advantage insurance, purportedly written to "compete" with Original Medicare to save costs and improve healthcare access. Failing to do either, Medicare Advantage betrays the original intent of Medicare—to universalize coverage and rein in health costs with transparent pricing. Medicare Advantage plans often lack data and compliance information, while payment rates are manipulated based on a complex "risk modeling" process.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports: Even as Medicare Advantage insurers' profits are inflated, quality of patient care is reduced.

The United States remains an outlier—the only developed nation lacking universal healthcare, the only nation that places profiteering middlemen between patients and their doctors.

Since Reagan, continual huge tax cuts for wealthy corporatists have spiked national deficits, paid for with deficit-cutting on the backs of working people by cutting public and social programs. The 2025 Republican reconciliation bill promotes enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, and huge cuts to Medicaid and SNAP programs.

Were House Republicans serious about cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," instead of cutting Medicaid coverage for 8.7 million people, they would eliminate Medicare Advantage scams that bleed $140 billion in annual overpayments from the Medicare Trust Fund—invested in as a lifetime earned benefit by every U.S. worker. Fraudulent "upcoding" exaggerates patient health conditions, costing $23 billion in 2023 overpayments. Some Medicare Advantage plans employ AI or a computer algorithm to instantly deny payments—reportedly used by Cigna to deny over 300,000 requests for payments in 2022.

Rigged to maximize government overpayments to pad shareholder and CEO profits—ultimately to privatize Original Medicare—Medicare Advantage overpayments are funded by taxpayers and Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare enrollees, who pay, among other costs, increasing Medicare Part B premiums annually—totaling $13 billion higher premiums in 2024.

A physician-authored report advises: "The time has come to declare Medicare Advantage a failed experiment and abolish it." Taxpayer overpayments to Medicare Advantage should instead go to boost an economy and healthcare for the people by eliminating profit-maximizing insurance middlemen. At least 22 studies report annual $600 billion Medicare for All administrative savings, enough to extend comprehensive health coverage to all ages.

A 2018 economic analysis by UMass Amherst Economists concluded that Medicare for All would significantly improve healthcare outcomes, and reduce healthcare spending by nearly 10%—from approximately $3.24 trillion to approximately $2.93 trillion. Additional projected annual prescription drug savings total $200-$300 billion.

Washington Complicity in Half-Century Privatization of Medicare

Further boosting privatization of Medicare, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) "innovative payment" experiments, modeled on "Managed Care" Accountable Care Organizations, were written into the Affordable Care Act. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2023 that CMS experiments with "value-based" ACO payments failed to control costs, improve quality, or increase equity, costing Medicare $5.4 billion more than it saved during its first decade.

Medicare for All Would Vitalize an Economy for the People

The United States remains an outlier—the only developed nation lacking universal healthcare, the only nation that places profiteering middlemen between patients and their doctors. U.S. healthcare spending since 1980 outpaces other nations, and demonstrates "by far the worst overall health performance."

Only Single-Risk-Pool Medicare for All can leverage cost-savings of global health budgets to achieve financially sustainable, universal, comprehensive healthcare, while greatly reducing the 30% administrative costs of thousands of fragmented Medicare Advantage plans. The newly introduced Medicare for All Act of 2025 would eliminates out-of-pocket costs—premiums, copays, and deductibles—and unnecessary supplemental plans—Medicare Parts A, B, C, D, and Medigap.

For the first time in almost a century prioritization of universal health coverage would eliminate profiteering middlemen, boosting an economy that serves working people—not the ballooning billionaire kleptocracy.

First, I heard of your death. Then I heard about your poetry; various—maybe many—people read the now-most-famous poem—“If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale”—or sections of it as part of the news. Like many thousands of others, I bought your book, as a sort of remembrance or sympathy card, something concrete to hold onto, honoring and remembering your life and death. It’s a far cry from the kite you requested, a kite to be seen flying high in the heavens. A kite to bring hope and love to a child, perhaps to one of your children, looking skyward somewhere in Gaza.

Still, there is a tale and I’m writing to tell it. Let me say I found the poem’s opening lines, “If I must die / you must live,” extremely significant. Such a clear instruction to those of us under the weight of the ongoing catastrophe, wondering what to do. Wondering, can we, in good conscience, go about our daily lives knowing the urgency of the situation in Palestine, knowing, in my case, that it’s my government and my tax dollars funding the death and destruction. I’m inspired, and grateful for your dictate that we live.

For the first time, I’ve taken over some vegetable planting in our garden. I thought of you as I pushed in a pound’s-worth of onion sets, hoping to grow “better” onions than we’ve gotten in the past. I thought of you as I hoed and scratched the clumped, rich river-bottom dirt in the garden to ensure my tiny carrot seeds would grow into nice, straight carrots. I thought of you as I planted sweet peas along the garden fence. And the chickens; I had to rebuild my flock, diminished by predators. It was OK, I realized; this is also my life, to be obsessed by possible chick opportunities on Craigslist, OK to check every few hours even as things deteriorated in Gaza.

This is also part of the mandate to live—in a time of catastrophe, to take action, to call out the genocide is a critical part of living.

And then there’s the rest of the property. Areas of our large corner lot have been naturalized and “let go.” Areas where trilliums and jack-in-the-pulpits surprise me; where bloodroot and ferns sprout from out of nowhere. I found a renewed appreciation of these as part of “my life,” as part of living on when others are dying from lack of food, shelter, healthcare and endless bombs. When territory—land and all that lives and grows on it—is being poisoned and confiscated; hundred-year-old trees cut down. While tending and observing the wonders of spring in this verdant yard, I thought daily about your directive to live. I tried to hold it in my mind along with the thoughtful advice of Wendell Berry: “You can describe the predicament we’re in as an emergency,” he’s said, “and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.”

And, then it was May and Mother’s Day was approaching. Mother’s Day! A day historically set aside to honor women dedicated to peace; how could we let Mother’s Day pass without calling attention to the ongoing Israeli-American femicide and infanticide in Gaza? How could the day pass without acknowledging the thousands of mothers without children, the thousands of children orphaned, without mothers? This is also part of the mandate to live—in a time of catastrophe, to take action, to call out the genocide is a critical part of living.

We declared a 24-hour Mother’s Day Vigil and Fast on Main Street—from noon on Sunday, May 11 until noon on Monday, May 12. Like Julia Ward Howe’s original call to action, we asked women to leave home for peace just as men leave house and home for war. We painted signs and banners, we hoisted a Palestinian flag on the wrought iron fence behind us. We wore our keffiyehs, and banged on pot tops. We splayed our stuffed-doll “dead babies” with signs about how many children have been killed on the sidewalk in front of us. Two comrades walked across the broad Main Street intersection with the walk light; horns blasted and whistles blew in support of freeing Palestine and Palestinians. Nao painstakingly copied out your poem in colored chalk on the sidewalk. And so the day passed.

(Photo: Laran Kaplan)

At one point late in the afternoon a man on a bike rode up and stopped in front of me: “What about us?” he screamed.

“We’re for us too,” I said. Unsatisfied, he swore and rode away. He returned a few minutes later, speeding along the sidewalk, bent down, grabbed one of the stuffed figures and rode away despite our protest.

A middle-aged white man came and stood in front of us with a Trump 2025 banner. We asked but he declined to move to another location along the sidewalk. “What about all the children killed by abortion?” he taunted. What about this, what about that. We ignored him, and he eventually left but not before taking some heat from passersby.

People, maybe as many as 20 people at one point—both men and women—came, sat, and stood together throughout the day. We were thanked and blessed by passersby; a few swore under their breath. “It’s Sunday,” said one woman, “have some respect.”

It was getting dark; three of us huddled on the sidewalk around a solar lantern, contemplating my commitment to stay overnight. I’d declared a 24-hour action out of my deep emotional desire to DO SOMETHING. Now, in light of the hassling, the reality of a cold night, alone on Main Street didn’t seem like a great idea. And anyway my comrades reminded me… today is Mother’s Day, tomorrow is “only” another Monday. So, we abandoned the vigil at 10:00 pm, heading home to our respective warm houses and beds.

I wanted you to know Refaat that although we have no kite, we do have a tale, and now we’ve told it. We promise more will come. As per your wishes we’re striving to live—hopefully a deeper and more reflective life, including a life of action against the genocide in Palestine. We’re grateful for your poems, for your tales, for your inspiration and advice.

There was a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to have all the cards. The Palestinian Authority was largely passive, the occupied West Bank was relatively calm, Israel's diplomatic reach was expanding, and the United States seemed ready to bend international law to accommodate Israel's desire for complete control over Palestine.

The Israeli prime minister had also, at least in his own estimation, succeeded in subduing Gaza, the persistently defiant enclave that had for years struggled unsuccessfully to break the suffocating Israeli blockade.

Within Israel, Netanyahu had been celebrated as the nation's longest-serving prime minister, a figure who promised not only longevity but also unprecedented prosperity. To mark this milestone, Netanyahu employed a visual prop: a map of the Middle East, or, in his own words, "the New Middle East."

The intensified Israeli military operations in Gaza are an attempt by Netanyahu to project strength amid perceived political vulnerability.

This envisioned new Middle East, according to Netanyahu, was a unified green bloc, representing a future of "great blessings" under Israeli leadership.

Conspicuously absent from this map was Palestine in its entirety—both historic Palestine, now Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Netanyahu's latest unveiling occurred at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2023. His supposedly triumphant address was sparsely attended, and among those present, enthusiasm was notably absent. This, however, seemed of little consequence to Netanyahu, his coalition of extremists, or the broader Israeli public.

Historically, Israel has placed its reliance on the support of a select few nations considered, in their own calculus, to be of primary importance: Washington and a handful of European capitals.

Then came the October 7 assault. Initially, Israel leveraged the Palestinian attack to garner Western and international support, both validating its existing policies and justifying its intended response. However, this sympathy rapidly dissipated as it became apparent that Israel's response entailed a campaign of genocide, the extermination of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza's population and West Bank communities.

As images and footage of the devastating carnage in Gaza surfaced, anti-Israeli sentiment surged. Even Israel's allies struggled to justify the deliberate killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, predominantly women and children.

Nations like Britain imposed partial arms embargoes on Israel, while France attempted a balancing act, calling for a cease-fire while suppressing domestic activists advocating for the same. The pro-Israel Western narrative has become increasingly incoherent, yet remains deeply problematic.

Washington, under former President Joe Biden, initially maintained unwavering support, implicitly endorsing Israel's objective—genocide and ethnic cleansing.

However, as Israel failed to achieve its perceived objectives, Biden's public stance began to shift. He called for a cease-fire, though without demonstrating any tangible willingness to pressure Israel. Biden's staunch support for Israel has been cited by many as a contributing factor to the Democratic Party's losses in the 2024 elections.

Then, U.S. President Donald Trump arrived. Netanyahu and his supporters, both in Israel and Washington, anticipated that Israel's actions in Palestine and the wider region—Lebanon, Syria, etc.—would align with a broader strategic plan.

They believed Trump's administration would be willing to escalate further. This escalation, they envisioned, would include military action against Iran, the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, the fragmentation of Syria, the weakening of Yemen's Ansarallah, and more, without significant concessions.

Initially, Trump signaled a willingness to pursue this agenda: deploying heavier bombs, issuing direct threats against Iran, intensifying operations against Ansarallah, and expressing interest in controlling Gaza and displacing its population.

However, Netanyahu's expectations yielded only unfulfilled promises. This raises the question: Was Trump deliberately misleading Netanyahu, or did evolving circumstances necessitate a reassessment of his initial plans?

The latter explanation appears more plausible. Efforts to intimidate Iran proved ineffective, leading to a series of diplomatic engagements between Tehran and Washington, first in Oman, then in Rome.

Ansarallah demonstrated resilience, prompting the U.S. on May 6 to curtail its military campaigns in Yemen, specifically the Operation "Rough Rider." On May 16, a U.S. official announced that the USS Harry S. Truman would withdraw from the region.

Notably, on May 12, Hamas and Washington announced a separate agreement, independent of Israel, for the release of U.S.-Israeli captive Edan Alexander.

The culmination occurred on May 14, when Trump delivered a speech at a U.S.-Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, advocating for regional peace and prosperity, lifting sanctions on Syria, and emphasizing a diplomatic resolution with Iran.

Conspicuously absent from these regional shifts was Benjamin Netanyahu and his strategic "vision."

Netanyahu responded to these developments by intensifying military operations against Palestinian hospitals in Gaza, targeting patients within the Nasser and European Hospitals. This action, targeting the most vulnerable, was interpreted as a message to Washington and Arab states that his objectives remained unchanged, regardless of the consequences.

The intensified Israeli military operations in Gaza are an attempt by Netanyahu to project strength amid perceived political vulnerability. This escalation has resulted in a sharp increase in Palestinian casualties and exacerbated food shortages, if not outright famine, for over 2 million people.

It remains uncertain how long Netanyahu will remain in power, but his political standing has significantly deteriorated. He faces widespread domestic opposition and international condemnation. Even his primary ally, the United States, has signaled a shift in its approach. This period may mark the beginning of the end for Benjamin Netanyahu's political career and, potentially, for the policies associated with his horrifically violent government.

The name “Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project” is a masterclass in Orwellian branding. It sounds like public service—what it really delivers is environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and corporate profit at the public’s expense.

My name is Karyn Strickler, and my family farm lies directly in the path of this 70-mile transmission line. Located in Carroll County, Maryland, our farm has been in agricultural preservation for decades. My sister, her family, and my 95-year-old father live on the land. The third generation is now growing up here. Our roots stretch back to the early 1700s in America—and 500 years before that in Switzerland.

We preserved this land for farming. Not for it to be bulldozed by a private utility company.

The MPRP is part of a growing national trend where energy infrastructure is being redirected to power unregulated, fossil-fueled data centers—putting local communities and ecosystems at risk across the country, not just in Maryland.

The Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP) isn’t about homes or communities. It’s about servers—giant fossil fuel-powered data centers in Northern Virginia. And while these billion-dollar corporations get the power, Marylanders get the pollution, the grid drain, and the bill.

Public Service Enterprise Group couldn’t meet the labor standards required by New Jersey for a wind project. So they ran to Maryland—where wage protections are weak, enforcement is inconsistent, and union labor is often ignored. Meanwhile, construction jobs are temporary, low-wage, and often filled by undocumented workers with no protections.

This project is a textbook case of environmental injustice. It would carve through preserved farmland and forests, pollute streams and wetlands, and destroy habitats for the bog turtle and the Baltimore checkerspot—Maryland’s own state insect. These species are already threatened. MPRP could push them further toward extinction.

And let’s be clear: This isn’t about my family alone. There is widespread grassroots opposition across Carroll, Frederick, and Baltimore counties. We are farmers, homeowners, business owners, and residents who see this for what it is: a high-voltage land grab disguised as progress.

The MPRP is part of a growing national trend where energy infrastructure is being redirected to power unregulated, fossil-fueled data centers—putting local communities and ecosystems at risk across the country, not just in Maryland.

This is not reliability. It’s recklessness. It’s time Maryland lived up to its promises of equity, sustainability, and dignity for workers. The bulldozers are warming up—but so is the resistance.

Last week New York University announced that it was withholding the diploma of a graduating senior named Logan Rozos, and commencing disciplinary proceedings against him. His academic “crime?” As a featured graduation speaker, Rozos described the Israeli attacks on Gaza as “genocide” and expressed moral outrage that the attacks were supported by U.S. tax dollars and university investments.

These sentiments, of course, are not universally shared. They, predictably, provoked and offended those present who do not like it when Israel is criticized in this way. More importantly, their expression violates what is quickly becoming an 11th Commandment of Academic Life in the United States: Thou Shall Not Criticize Israel.

And so NYU official spokesperson John Beckman, a true inspiration to his increasingly craven profession, immediately vaulted into action to denounce the student and the speech:

NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views. He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The university is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions. NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.

Apparently, those who “lead” NYU believe that graduation speakers—typically selected because of their academic distinction or other exemplary accomplishments—should not express themselves honestly or say anything controversial, should clear their remarks with university censors in advance, and then say only things that will make everyone happy. To challenge an audience on a campus is thus forbidden. Most importantly, invited speakers must never violate the new 11th Commandment.

If this strikes you as anti-intellectual, censorious, and absurdly patronizing, consider the perhaps even more outrageous controversy surrounding Harvard’s 2024 Commencement Address, given by Maria Ressa, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous defense of press freedom, and civil liberties, in her native Philippines and in the world at large.

While this controversy unfolded at Harvard last year, it was brought to national attention only weeks ago, with the April 29 publication of Harvard’s Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which cited Ressa’s speech as an example of the “bias” that the report is charged with countering.

According to the report’s Executive Summary, “Ressa chose not to deliver prepared remarks that were meant to urge pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students to reconcile. Instead, she substituted new remarks praising the student protestors and delivered off-the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” The authors then ask: “Why did a renowned humanitarian ad-lib seemingly antisemitic remarks against her Jewish critics at a highly scripted Harvard graduation ceremony?”

Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness.

When I read these words, on page 12 of the 311-page report, I was shocked and in disbelief. For I have long admired Ressa, have followed her closely, and consider her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, to be one of the very best books I’ve read in recent years. The report’s question struck a chord. Maria Ressa is an antisemite? How can this be?

The first thing I did was search for her commencement speech to see for myself what offensive things she said. I quickly found both a transcript and a video, read the first and watched the second, and remained confused about the “seemingly antisemitic remarks.” The speech seemed fine to me; and as I watched it, I wished my own university were willing and able to invite such a fine person to give a commencement address.

Only then did I turn to the more elaborate explanation of the problem, on pages 116-17 of the report. Apparently Ressa had shared her prepared remarks in advance (with whom? does Harvard exercise prior restraint on its speakers?), but then deviated from these remarks in her speech, in two ways that troubled the report’s authors and thus merited commentary.

First, while in her prepared remarks she very generally alluded to the many different ways that she has been attacked on social media, in her speech she said this: “Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money. While the other side was already attacking me because I had been on stage with Hillary Clinton. Hard to win, right?”

These, apparently, were the “off the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.”

What????

In the offending brief paragraph, Ressa clearly references attacks from both “sides” of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine controversy. She says that those labeling her an antisemite—a scurrilous charge without a shred of evidence, I might add—have “power and money.” She does not say her attackers are Jews. She says they are rich and powerful. Because they are rich and powerful. The coverage of the event by the Texas Jewish Post—hardly an antisemitic publication—is instructive. After noting that billionaire “Bill Ackman [had] led a revolt of large donors,” the reporter offered this background:

Right-wing media and lawmakers had sought to paint Ressa as antisemitic prior to commencement, pointing to a Filipino-language editorial published in November in her media outlet, Rappler, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, and to her signing of an open letter calling on Israel to protect journalists in Gaza. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, claimed that the Rappler piece compared Israel to Hitler. That claim was amplified on the social network X by New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has gained attention for her combative questioning of university leaders, including Gay, at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. “Harvard chose an antisemitic commencement speaker,” Stefanik wrote earlier this month, sharing a link to the Free Beacon article. “The university has failed to stand up for Jewish students at every turn, revealing the depths of its moral delinquency.”

Was it antisemitic for Ressa to say that “money and power” had denounced her? Hardly. Indeed, the report itself elsewhere comments on the efforts of at least three extremely wealthy donors—Ackman, Len Blavatnik, and Ken Griffin—to use promised donations to influence Harvard in the midst of its crisis, though it does not mention that Ackman himself had called Ressa “antisemitic” in a May 3 X post, three weeks before Ressa’s commencement address. Perhaps this is why the report claims that her “offending” words “appeared to echo” antisemitic tropes, and not that they did in fact echo them? For it is hard to see how alluding to a man who is rich, powerful, and censorious as rich, powerful, and censorious echoes antisemitic tropes.

Ressa’s second “offense”: She apparently omitted a brief section of her prepared remarks challenging keffiyah-wearing pro-Palestinian protesters (the report doesn’t say whether her prepared remarks also included a comment challenging pro-Israeli protesters, but it seems likely that it did and this too was omitted), and instead delivered add-libbed praise of “student speakers who had addressed the topic of Palestine.”

Here, again, are the offending words, worth quoting at length:

I loved the speeches of the students today. They were incredible. Because these times will hopefully teach you the same lesson I learned. You don’t know who you are until you’re tested, until you fight for what you believe in. Because that defines who you are.

But you’re Harvard. You better get your facts right, because now you are being tested. The chilling effect means that many are choosing to stay silent because there are consequences to speaking out.

I’m shocked at the fear and anger, the paranoia splitting open the major fracture lines of society, the inability to listen. What happened to us in the Philippines, it’s here.

The campus protests are testing everyone in America. Protests are healthy. They shouldn’t be violent. Protests give voice, they shouldn’t be silenced.

These words are evidence of “antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias”?

The report proceeds to devote an entire paragraph to the fact that Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi was offended by Ressa’s speech, “quietly requested clarification” of her on the stage, and then walked off stage when she did not respond (apparently, the clarification requested involved her retaking the microphone and revising the speech she had just finished giving to Zarchi’s specifications; are such requests for “clarification” by clergy a regular practice at Harvard commencements? It is one I have never experienced at the many commencements I’ve attended.)

The report’s account of commencement says nothing about the fact that Chabad Rabbi Zarchi was embroiled in controversy back on November 7, 2023, for giving a speech in which he seemed to call both Hamas terrorists and Hamas supporters not a “human” but “an animal... below an animal.” The precise intended reference and meaning of his words notwithstanding—the subject of much semantic discussion, they seem pretty nasty to me—in this speech and elsewhere he made very clear that Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was “antisemitic” and should be decertified by the university, with its protests banned from campus. (Note: Zarchi’s comment and his anti-PSC advocacy was noted earlier in the report, on p. 110; but its obvious connection to his defensive reaction to Ressa’s speech is never drawn.) That many Jewish leaders on campus disagree strongly with Zarchi—who has collaborated extensively with Bill Ackman’s crusade against Harvard, and who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July of 2024—was also unmentioned in this narrative.

Perhaps most important, the report says nothing about the fact that the overall frame of Ressa’s entire speech was the responsibility of all students to be their “best selves” and to work together, with compassion and understanding, to make the world a better place. To reduce that speech to the identity-obsessed concerns of its critics is to engage in exactly the kind of small-mindedness that the report elsewhere decries.

Obviously, the report is about much more than this one commencement episode, and should not be judged by its treatment this one episode. But what it says about Ressa’s Commencement Address is so strikingly tendentious and misleading, that you have to wonder how this account ever made its way into a report claiming to be so very academic and serious, and what this means for the other narratives recounted in the report.

Maria Ressa is a world-renowned journalist and human rights activist. While she has suffered persecution in her own country, and while she surely is hated and even targeted by authoritarians the world over, she is not likely to be materially harmed by the denunciations of Harvard’s Chabad rabbi or the displeasure of Harvard’s top donors and administrators.

But NYU’s Logan Rozos, and many others like him, experience severe repercussions for saying similar things. U.S. Representative Jared Moskowitz—a Democrat who has joined with Elise Stefanik and other Trumpists to attack so-called “antisemitism” on American campuses—was quite candid about Rozos: “He lied to the university... [and] everyone listening. There is no genocide going on in Israel... But at the end of the day, that’s up to the university whether they give him his diploma or not. You know, in fact, they can give him his diploma, it’s not going to matter. Good luck getting a job. That was a stupid, selfish thing, ruined the ceremony for a lot of families.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and many others who have spoken out for Palestinians and against Israel represent an even more serious form of intimidation and punishment for those who dare to violate the 11th Commandment. And make no mistake, while courts have recently ordered the release of many of these individuals pending resolution of their court cases, their cases are still being litigated, and the administration continues to pursue such deportations through every legal means available even as it pushes the boundaries of legality. In the first instance, it is foreign students and noncitizens more generally who are threatened by such efforts.

But in a broader sense, all students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.

This intellectual virus is not circulating randomly. As The New York Times recently reported, The Heritage Foundation has been busy at work planning and then putting into effect its “Project Esther,” designed, as the Times puts it, “to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.” While “Esther” is largely, though not exclusively, the work of right-wing evangelical Christian Zionists, it dovetails neatly with the post-October 7 efforts of the Anti-Defamation League to castigate all pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic” and to pressure campus leaders to crack down on such activity. Most importantly, these efforts have the full-throated backing of the Trump administration and its supporters in red states, like my own state of Indiana, all across the country.

Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness, and contributes to the steady weakening of the freedom of expression and association that is at the heart of any decent, liberal democracy.

Such conduct is not academic leadership. It is craven submission to ideological small-mindedness and political pressure.