I know, I know. Recently, Donald Trump has been obsessed with water, at least the algae-green water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that he wants to be a beautiful, pristine blue. But consider that an irony indeed, since when it comes to the planet he now oversees, water is going to be a problem and a half, algae or not.

Phew, in fact, I’m already sweating and I’ve just been reading about the heat in Europe right now, a region which has been warming twice as fast as the global average for quite a while. And mind you, I’m thousands of miles away (although still in a distinctly hot New York City about to soon get hotter still)!

If it were me, the headline during Trump’s recent algal week in the news wouldn’t have been in question anywhere on this planet (of ours?). I’m thinking, of course, about the recent days when the mid-June temperature in Paris, France, hit a wild record of nearly 115 (yes, you read that right!) degrees Fahrenheit and it was in the 106-113 degree range across the European continent. From England to Switzerland and Spain, temperature records of a remarkable sort were being set and then set again (and again!).

No one had ever seen anything quite like it. In the third week of June, it was so hot, in fact, that across Europe at least 40 people drowned just trying to stay wet and cool and four toddlers died trapped in overheated cars. And yet, crisis as it might have been, think of it as just the beginning on this distinctly overheating planet of ours. With at least two and a half more years to go of Donald J. Trump, a fossil-fuel maniac of the first order who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” you can count on this planet becoming ever hotter ever sooner. And count on another thing as well: in the coming years, today’s weather and temperature headlines, however disturbing they might seem right now, are likely to prove all too mild.

In short, we humans—Trump in his wildly pro-fossil fuel views and acts being just the most obviously mad of our leaders—are all too literally hard at work heating this planet of “ours” toward the boiling point. Of course, no one should be surprised that this American president has proven to be an arsonist first class, a fossil-fuelized maniac of the first order. (Or do I mean second class and second order, since this is indeed his second time around?)

Once upon a time, in another age, Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency would have been just a sign of the descent of a great imperial power. But on this planet of ours at this very moment, he represents so much more than that with his bizarre urge to further fossilize-fuelize our world in every way imaginable. Think of him, in fact, as the eerie personification of the decline not just of the United States, but potentially of everything. Yes, the works!

And keep in mind that, on this ever-changing planet of ours, the keys to imperial power no longer lie in war, as Trump and crew made all too clear recently in Iran, and Vladimir Putin has made even more strikingly clear in his never-ending war with Ukraine, the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. And, of course, it continues to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere (just as Israel recently did in Gaza and Lebanon). It’s estimated that the first four years of that conflict have indeed already put 311 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

On Planet Earth today, it’s not complicated. No matter who (if anyone) wins any war, everyone loses. Yes, every last one of us from the almost 82-year-old me to—especially—my grandchildren who, barring a genuine surprise, will inherit what could only be thought of as the planet from—yes!—hell.

And that’s why, for the first time in human history, taking up the keys to global imperial power should no longer mean becoming the greatest military powerhouse around, something that—to give its leaders credit—China has grasped in a significant way. Now, don’t get me wrong, China is indeed arming itself in a traditional (if I can even use that word) fashion, including with the nuclear weapons that are the fastest way we humans have discovered to do ourselves in on this planet. But its leaders have also grasped that, as the heat rises ever more radically, the need for green power will only grow in an astounding fashion.

And so, in its imperial rise on this planet, and despite the way it, too, continues to burn coal, oil, and natural gas in a staggering fashion, it’s become the Earth’s great green power. It’s now selling the equipment to produce solar and wind power in a distinctly record fashion globally. As the Guardian reports, “the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China’s economic growth” in 2025 and “clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country’s investment growth last year, making the sectors bigger than all but seven of the world’s economies.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been trying to ensure that, in our future, the United States will indeed be a lost country on this planet. (Fortunately, he’s been unable to stop the remarkable growth and roll-out of green energy here, too.)

In the meantime, all too sadly, the casualties are rising. And make no mistake, this is indeed war (even if of a different kind than anything we’ve been used to). Under the circumstances, don’t you think it strange indeed that Americans would have elected Donald Trump a second time to be our arsonist-in-chief?

And here’s the thing all of us need to try to grasp: the worst that’s happening right now is nothing compared to what could happen in the years to come. And mind you, nothing makes me sadder than imagining the world my grandchildren may find themselves in when they grow up.

Someday, Donald J. Trump will undoubtedly be remembered as the president from—yes, it’s an all too appropriate and accurate word—hell. He will have been our arsonist-in-chief on a planet that, all too sadly, as in Europe recently and despite everything now being done, could be going to hell in a handbasket.

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?

He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.

It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.

As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.

McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even louder.

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.

During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.

After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.

So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.

New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).

I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.

So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.

To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.

Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.

Writing a column is like sitting atop a large hill, looking down lovingly—and angrily—at the surrounding world, embracing it in a moral perspective and sharing your analysis of what you see. Primarily, this means telling people what’s wrong.

Today, as I climbed up the hill—this is called research—something felt different, troubling. Where I used to feel enthusiasm, I felt hollow: bereft of self-confidence and certainty. I’ve been writing a weekly column for nearly half of my life, first at a local paper in Chicago for 10 years, then the current column, syndicated until recently by the Chicago Tribune, for the last 27 years. What’s going on here?

I was no longer atop that hill. Suddenly I had nothing to say. The doubt I was feeling—that I had anything relevant and valuable to add to our collective grasp of the world—overwhelmed me.

I had decided to write about what I almost always write about... war. Both current and eternal. Indeed, I had begun scrolling the internet, looking for provocative points of view. I googled the words “terrorism vs. waging war,” seeking to learn what I already knew: that the “official” world has declared a distinction between the two terms as definite as the distinction between “evil” and “good.”

Perhaps the flow of pain I felt was the realization that opposing war in relative safety is too easy. It’s not enough.

My first pop-up response was an AI Overview: “Terrorism and waging war differ fundamentally in their targets, legal frameworks, and combatants. Terrorism targets civilians to induce fear for political or ideological goals. Waging war is typically an armed conflict between states or organized groups, where lawful combatants target military objectives.”

Of course, of course. Terrorists represent evil, plain and simple. They kill real people, always for selfish reasons. But war is official. It’s state-sponsored and legal. It’s registered with God, for God’s sake. And while there’s always an evil side—the enemy—the winners, the good guys, are simply doing what they must. Civilization couldn’t have evolved without it. And that’s how we organize history: from one war to the next. This is the official understanding, which we’re spoon-fed as we grow up.

I see beyond this official certainty and have devoted my life to dismantling it. But the AI Overview explanation, seemingly such an easy target for my ruthless analysis, had an unexpected effect. I felt stabbed with a sense of depression so sharp I could hardly move, let alone write. All I could do was go back to bed, cover my head with my pillow, I wanted to hide.

But the emotional pain didn’t stop. It continued piercing me. I got back up. I saw no relief. I was terrified that old age had set in. Oh my God, am I too old to write anymore (a month and a half away from age 80)? I was ready to give up, blow the column off... spend the rest of the day secretly crying.

Instead, I started writing—cluelessly. I had no idea where my words might go. I was no longer atop a hill. I didn’t know where I was. But an awareness started clutching me. What if I were under the rubble right now? What if I had I just learned that my daughter is 12 years old again and the girls’ school she attended in Iran—in Minab—had just been bombed by an American plane?

A hole had suddenly opened in my life. No, those imaginings aren’t real—not for me—but they are for some of us. Perhaps the flow of pain I felt was the realization that opposing war in relative safety is too easy. It’s not enough. And beyond the realization is simply a dark emptiness. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t even cry.

All I can do, right now, is reach deeper into my soul, to bless every human I encounter, and to publicly share the largest cry I can make for change. The cry tears loose from a poem I wrote a decade ago, which I also shared in a column I sent out last December. It’s called “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side:”

I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.

Congress just passed $70 billion in additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and beyond, children have been detained, families separated, and neighbors stopped based on their skin color or spoken language. ICE violence has killed a mother and an ICU nurse, separated more than 100,000 American children from their families, and left people detained in inhumane facilities.

The decision by congressional Republicans to double down on President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda through new funding is not just another attack on our immigrant friends and neighbors, including those who are legal residents, but it is also a direct attack on our public health and healthcare systems.

The tens of billions in additional funding is on top of an unprecedented $170.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including $30 billion for ICE and deportation efforts, approved last year under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1)—a law which also slashed more than $1 trillion in federal healthcare funding. These cuts have and will continue to kick people off their healthcare coverage, give Americans fewer options for affordable healthcare, and drive up costs at clinics and hospitals across the country, all while billions of dollars have been funneled into ICE raids and violence that threaten the safety and well-being of immigrants and US citizens alike. All the while, American families are facing an affordability crisis, struggling to make ends meet to pay for essentials like groceries, rent, and healthcare.

Put simply: The White House and their congressional allies are funding ICE’s brutal dragnet operations in our communities by cutting health coverage, defunding clinics, and making it harder to get the healthcare families depend on—and it affects everyone’s health.

What makes our neighborhoods healthier and safer isn’t ICE enforcement. It’s communities that can access the care, services, and resources they need to thrive and remain resilient.

The divergence of federal dollars away from healthcare and into ICE has led to an influx of poorly trained enforcement agents in our cities, in our airports, and on our streets. The aggressive policing and surveillance of our neighborhoods create an environment of fear, turning our streets, schools, workplaces, and hospitals into places of threat rather than safe community spaces. As a result, community members, including vital immigrant healthcare workers, are staying home, unable to contribute to the economic vitality of our neighborhoods or seek and provide necessary healthcare. In addition, as more people lose health coverage, uninsured patients seeking emergency care results in higher uncompensated care costs, putting financial pressure on health facilities, and forcing them to scale back services for all.

We cannot afford to let ICE enforcement gut the health system we all rely on. What makes our neighborhoods healthier and safer isn’t ICE enforcement. It’s communities that can access the care, services, and resources they need to thrive and remain resilient. We should all be treated with dignity and be able to safely access healthcare and other neighborhood resources vital for our health and well-being.

A new poll from the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition finds that most Americans agree. Sixty-four percent of Americans disapprove of how ICE is handling their job, and 83% of Americans support access to healthcare and social services for lawfully present immigrants. The data overwhelmingly show that Americans, no matter where they stand politically, believe in and want to protect the humanity of their immigrant neighbors, despite actions from the federal government.

We urge congressional and state leaders to act. Stand in solidarity with immigrant communities. Codify sensitive locations protections that prohibit ICE raids or presence at schools, places of worship, hospitals and health centers, and other places that are meant to be safe spaces for everyone. Ban local officials from inquiring about immigration status. Secure our sensitive personal and health data from inappropriate federal access. Make future DHS funding conditional on real oversight and accountability for the families being torn apart, the neighborhoods being destabilized, and the dismantling of the healthcare system we all rely on.

The following invented interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Norman Solomon: You’ve downplayed the importance of the individual in history. But the United States now has as president an individual who transformed power relations and the political landscape.

Karl Marx: I can assure you that he did not do that by himself. Power relations are class relations. And by the way, I never said individuals are irrelevant to history. I exhorted individuals to get involved in changing history.

NS: President Trump has rolled back gains from the last hundred years and more. Also, he’s mentally unstable, to put it mildly.

KM: The basics still hold. As I wrote in 1869 about a situation in France where a cult existed around a tyrant, the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”

NS: But now one highly dangerous and unhinged person has taken control of the U.S. government. And he got there with a majority of votes of the working class. It’s been a huge shock to have a virtual psychopath as president.

KM: Those you would call liberals like to disconnect such poisoned flowers from their historic roots. Victor Hugo was like that, as with so many commentators in your day, endlessly heaping their derision on the despicable despot. Hugo excelled at bitter and witty invective against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup d’etat. As I pointed out, “The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.”

NS: Actually, Trump does seem to insanely wield destructive power in ways unparalleled in world history.

KM: But he did not obtain that power through his own will. If you fixate on an individual personality, you’ve lost the historical plot.

NS: One sociologist, Dylan Riley, recently commented: “From a Marxist perspective, much of the left-liberal critique of contemporary American politics can be viewed as essentially petty bourgeois. It revolves around moral arguments advocating for equal opportunities and less social division and conflict.” And he added: “I think that Marx’s central point on this is to emphasize the importance of class struggle as the mechanism through which any class compromise is actually imposed. And if you miss that point then your politics are disabled from the get-go.”

KM: First, I’m glad to say that I am not a “Marxist,” given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves. You can look it up, “Ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” But that aside – yes, certainly, there is just no way to reasonably talk oneself around the primacy of class struggle. The phrase might sound overly polemical to petty-bourgeois ears in the America of the 21st century, but that’s the most powerful engine driving history. You can deny or evade it, but you can’t really avoid it.

NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.

KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.

NS: The horrible fact remains that we are now oppressed by an extremely reactionary vicious president aspiring to become an unlimited tyrant. And he harbors special hatred for women and people of color, with horrendous social impacts.

KM: Class struggle failed to result in the needed remedies to appalling human conditions, with some special victimizations within the working class. On this point, we could leave the last words to my comrade Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1890: “The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”

NS: So, you and Engels agreed that many different forces shape history, yet one individual can conceivably make all the difference at certain junctures?

KM: Fred clarified his point further this way: “We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.” And he went on: “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event.”

NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.

KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion. As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life. The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.

NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.

KM: That’s because it’s always true.

As a journalist from the Gaza Strip, I have lived through the conditions of genocide since the first day, and I am still trying to remain just as strong, not for myself, but for the message I believe I was created and born in the Gaza Strip for, a message that goes beyond individual pain to become testimony to an entire era in which the human being is being erased before the world.

We cannot reduce what we have gone through in the Gaza Strip since October 7, until today to a set of phrases or words or even a journalistic article. What we have gone through and are still going through is an entire history that needs to be documented and taught to entire future generations. Our resilience in Gaza is no longer just passing news; it has become a human condition mentioned in international forums, not as an exception, but as a harsh test of the very meaning of humanity itself.

No family in Gaza has gone through this without experiencing displacement, hunger, fear, pain, and loss. All homes in Gaza have been touched by grief, terror, and fear without exception, even those homes that once believed they would be safe. There is no family that has not lived in tents, and has not been burned by the fire of separation, the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the weight of a long waiting that seems endless.

In Gaza, displacement is no longer an emergency event; it has become an entire life lived on the edge. Moving from one place to another is no longer about seeking safety alone, but about a fragile chance to survive. And every time we thought we had reached a "safer place," fear followed us like an ever-present shadow.

Israel in this war has crossed all red lines, not only in the scale of destruction, but in the very nature of targeting itself, and in the insistence on continuing this scene despite its full exposure before the world.

What Israel has done to us, before the eyes and ears of the world and the international community, has made us in Gaza reorder global concepts from the beginning, word by word and meaning by meaning. Silence and complicity have made the question even more painful and profound: What does justice mean? What do international laws mean? And for whom are they written if they do not protect those being crushed before their eyes?

In Gaza, these are no longer philosophical questions; they have become daily questions asked under bombardment, among the rubble, in bread and water lines, and inside tents that protect nothing. We have begun searching for the meaning of the world itself, not merely an explanation of what is happening in it.

Journalists, doctors, ambulance workers, children, civil defense personnel, the elderly, women, and people with Down syndrome… no one has been spared from this occupation. Everyone has been inside the circle of danger, as if life in Gaza has turned into an open target without exception.

In any place in the world, is it permitted to enter hospitals, vandalize them, destroy them, and burn them in front of cameras, and then ask the world to remain silent? In any place are doctors and hospital directors arrested and tried simply for trying to fulfill their humanitarian duty? And in what world are journalists killed, and even targeted in their homes with their families, because they carried a camera instead of a weapon?

Israel in this war has crossed all red lines, not only in the scale of destruction, but in the very nature of targeting itself, and in the insistence on continuing this scene despite its full exposure before the world. And it is still continuing, as if time means nothing, as if pain can be consumed without end.

In the whole world, we had never heard of a child dying of hunger. But Israel did it in Gaza. Hunger here was not a passing feeling, but a collective state seen in faces before words, in eyes before bodies. We walked through the streets barely able to hold ourselves together from the severity of hunger, and children cried day and night from a famine imposed on us, with no choice but patience or collapse.

We complied with their orders and went to the areas they called "humanitarian," and yet we were killed there, and the tents were burned with those inside them. As if the idea of a "refuge" itself was part of the illusion, as if safety was merely a word said in statements, not in reality.

Do you remember the little girl Warda Jalal Al-Sheikh, who appeared amid flames, fire, and bodies after her tent was burned by Israeli shelling, and all her family members were killed, while she tried to survive in an unbearable scene? An image that summarizes what it means for a human being to be born in the heart of fire without choosing it.

Do you remember our colleague journalist Ayman Al-Jadi, who was waiting for his wife in the delivery room to give birth to their child, when Israel killed him while he was waiting, in a moment that was supposed to be the beginning of life, not its end? How can the world comprehend that death has reached even these smallest details?

All of this is not exceptions, but repeated scenes in a time in which exception itself has become survival.

This legendary resilience after 1,000 days of genocide cannot be read as a news item, nor summarized in a report. It must be taught in history books, not only as a sad story, but as an open indictment of the entire world, and as testimony to a people who have not stopped living despite all attempts to erase them.

And in the end, we are still here… trying to write, to bear witness, and to say that what has not yet been told is far more than what has been said.

After progressives, including self-described Democratic Socialists, won numerous primary victories in New York and elsewhere, President Donald Trump launched a whopper of a lie, even by his crazed standards. He declared that the “communist” Democratic Socialists are “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding…. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, it includes the Pearl Harbor attack.” This comes after his November 2025 White House meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, where Trump praised Mamdani strongly, saying they would work together to make a better New York City.

Trump is singing a different tune now. He is like Senator Joe McCarthy on steroids, who in the 1950s smeared political opponents, activists, and others, falsely accusing them of being communists. Snarling Joe then maliciously exploited the post-war fear of the Soviet Union. Today, Trump is just following in McCarthy’s footsteps by launching his latest BIG LIE yet to firm up his shrinking base of Trumpy MAGA voters.

Look for Trump, an authentic fascist, to dittohead himself on his “communist” tirade. He knows that the pro-Israel, corporate Democrats are distancing themselves from the rising new progressive candidates who, if they’re smart, will make populist domestic demands that are heavily favored in the polls.

These Democratic candidates should push for a much higher minimum wage than the present frozen federal minimum of $7.25 per hour; full Medicare for All; restore corporate and super-wealthy taxation to the levels of the prosperous 60s; crack down on corporate crimes against consumers, workers, and the environment; and adopt the long-time Western European social safety net of childcare, paid worker and family sick leave, and paid vacations. A real child tax credit would cut child poverty nearly in half and would benefit over 60 million children. They should raise the Social Security taxes on upper-income people to pay for raising Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years.

Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.

Candidates should push to cut the bloated military budget, end hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, and direct the savings to public works and safety net services in the community, USA.

These changes have substantial left-right voter support because they are concrete improvements for all families who need and deserve such social benefit returns from the tax dollars they send to Washington.

There are other left-right supported reforms, such as public funding of campaigns; ending the gross, corrupt selling of our elections to the highest toxic profiteering bidders; ending military arms shipments to countries that violate human rights (already federal law but unenforced); and stopping Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, committed with US weapons and unconditional political backing, which violates five federal laws.

All these measures should be integrated into a heavily publicized “Contract for the American People” and turned into a daily vocal call for a commitment to this agenda by these candidates. The class message is that corporations, all created by government charters, should be our servants, not our masters, as the Kleptocratic Trump regime continues to balloon the Trump Dump.

Bolstered by support of such concrete commitments, Trump’s “communist bellowing” will look ridiculous and will be ripe for the sharpest of counterattacks, dragging the GOP’s wreckage out into the open by comparison. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Republicans will be hoisted by their own petard.

The real hurdle to this “Contract for the American People” are the corporate Democrats—indentured to the same Wall Street crowd and military-industrial Empire of war and vast profits. The chief corporate Democrats are the party’s leaders—Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. When asked by a reporter about impeaching Trump (the cruel, corrupt, violent, America-wrecking outlaw, using the White House as corporate-occupied territory to enrich himself), Jeffries replied, “I don’t want to get out ahead of that discussion.” What about getting ahead of Trump’s daily despicable efforts to destroy our democracy and wrecking America?

How about just representing the vast majority of the Democratic voters and about 60% of all polled Americans who think Trump is “a dangerous dictator” and want him impeached and removed from office?

Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.

If Trump does not steal the election with his many voter suppressions, redistricting, and other attempted usurpations of state election controls, he’ll work to paralyze a Democratic-run Congress. Jeffries and Schumer, to preserve their leadership, are susceptible to not rocking the boat and not fiercely rolling back all the Republican Party’s devastating enactments since January 20, 2025.

Let’s see if the incumbent and newly elected progressives know how NOT to marginalize themselves by pushing distractingly marginal ideas instead of showing just how popular the above components of this proposed Contract for the American People are with the voters.

These challenges should also focus on the growing drive for Impeachment around the country, which both Trump, Jeffries, and Schumer oppose (The Hill reports neither Jeffries nor Schumer have endorsed any of the removal efforts)—the latter two enforcing a “Now is not the time” policy. What smug insensitivity to the fears of millions of Americans hurting from Trump’s cruel decrees every day and night NOW!

Jeffries and Schumer are creating their own Achilles heels for emboldening their progressive Democrats to move to replace them in January 2027.

While driving home on June 30, my head nearly exploded as I listened to the evening news. Reporting on a raft of last-minute decisions passed by the Supreme Court in advance of the summer holidays, the SCOTUS correspondent explained that certain contra-Trump statutes barely managed to hold on for dear life while a more substantial pile of pro-Trump agenda items flew through with room to spare. It was the “you win some, you lose some” tone of the report that set my blood boiling. It felt like I was being told that, on the one hand, SCOTUS had cleared the way for the private purchase of thermonuclear weapons over the internet, exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended, but on the other, that such weapons could not (at least for the moment) be purchased by children under 12 without parental consent. So it’s a win for both sides.

It wasn’t as blatantly bad as that, I admit. But the strained attempt to keep things balanced, if only for old time’s sake, was certainly there. Times being what they are now, it did not sit well with me.

But the single most infuriating moment of the report was when the SCOTUS correspondent quoted Chief Justice Roberts defending the 6-3 decision to strike down a 91-year-old precedent that barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) other than for reasons of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” In writing for the majority, Roberts argued that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.”

It was upon hearing those exact words that my head exploded. Did Chief Justice Roberts actually write what the reporter just claimed he wrote? Could he really have allowed himself to frame the decision in terms of trust?!! The absurdity of the rationale blew my mind. The whole idea of creating multi-member commissions, such as the FTC, as independent agencies in the first place was to ensure that they could be trusted. It is their independence that actually allows the members of the commission to do their work without fear of reprisal. It’s what keeps them from becoming a board of lackeys subservient to the whims of whoever happens to be in power. In a word, the thing that the Supreme Court ruled out by this decision is the one thing that has always allowed us to trust these agencies. Without it, trust disappears.

According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.”

One of the biggest problems in states ruled by autocrats is precisely that: Trust goes missing, becoming a rare commodity desperately sought after, but rarely found. During the Hellenistic Period in ancient Greece, regional monarchs would invite Cynic philosophers into their courts so that they might have just one person to talk to who could be counted on to tell them the truth. As impoverished beggars, happy in that condition, the Cynics had nothing to gain by lying, nothing to lose by telling the truth. They were independent.

But Chief Justice Roberts would have us believe that he knows better about such things. He and the wiser minds of his Supreme Court treat their legal interpretations as a kind of parlor game played by experts for the sake of theoretical purity and one-upmanship. Like Medieval scholars arguing over how many thorns were in Christ’s crown, they don their robes, play their game, issue their rulings, and retire to their summer homes. Meanwhile, their decisions have consequences in the world outside the parlor that, somehow, aren’t really their concern. No. Their focus is on the intentions of the Constitution’s framers. They are the ones they want to make sure are happy and well cared for by their decisions. They, the long dead, ghosts of their own invention, are the ones that really matter.

In fact, the one non-dead person whom Chief Justice Roberts expressed a keen interest in helping with his decision was just that: one person. The president. Not the demos of our democracy, the voting citizens of this country, to the tune of several hundred million people who are still very much alive. He worried that that one man’s power might be unduly hampered if he were not allowed to fire whomever he wanted for whatever reason. His rationale amounts to a set of quotes from the rule book of a new game that he and his like-minded friends on the court have invented. They play it within his parlor while sipping brandy. It’s called “The Unitary Executive.”

This is a fantasy game, rather like Dungeons and Dragons. In it, the rules of reality outside the parlor, out in the real world, are called off in favor of the rules of the parlor and of the game itself. According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.” It’s all quite wonderful.

To make this game work, Justice Roberts and his parlor friends had to invent an equally fantastical person to do the trusting: a president who has our best interests in mind, one who can always be counted on to act in good faith. This, their game-piece president, is not a vindictive liar, greedy for power. He is a wonderful fiction, good to play with. And so it is that, by relying on the parlor fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power. But not to worry. They assure us that, according to the rules of the game, nothing bad can come of this.

My daddy used to tell me that when you get in a fist fight, you hit them first, and you keep hitting them until they can’t hit you back. It doesn’t go over well these days, in a world that likes its ideologies non-violent, and I’m not telling you to go hit anybody. But it was a good lesson, and it turns out to be good for a lot more than fist fights. It’s how you win in politics, and the Republican Party has understood that for most of my life.

Donald Trump embodies it, violence and all, and it bought him plenty. A trifecta that moves in lockstep behind him. A Supreme Court handing down rulings that anybody who’s read the Constitution can see run against the words and ideas in it. A House and a Senate run by cowards and opportunists unwilling to challenge Trump even on something as clear as who gets to take this country to war. Trump built real power, and he built it by hitting first and never stopping.

I’m not writing this with admiration for what he’s done with the power he accumulated. I’m writing these words because too many of us in this movement balk at building and using power. The fact is that to build a country that works for everyone in it, a country that’s more just and more moral, one that’s actually worth being proud of, we need power. We can’t be scared that our ideas won’t be popular. We can’t be scared our shared vision will be twisted and lied about. They will be. That isn’t a reason to quit pushing for a better country and a better world. To the contrary, that’s a reason to describe them better, to plan them better, to build a bigger coalition of people who can carry them. There’s never a reason to fold in a righteous fight.

When you start winning, you push harder. You don’t sit down and you don’t say thank you.

But folding is exactly what we keep doing. Last Tuesday, three candidates Zohran Mamdani backed won their House primaries in New York, an earthquake by any measure. And the same week Lander won big, he pledged his support for Hakeem Jeffries. Friday, AOC followed suit. She’s pledged her loyalty to Hakeem. Why? Jeffries is the establishment. He’s the status quo. He’s the leader that has presided over a party that’s failed to beat Trump. He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump. When you are trying to transform a party you can’t back down.

We can’t be scared that our ideas won’t be popular. We can’t be scared our shared vision will be twisted and lied about. They will be. That isn’t a reason to quit pushing for a better country and a better world.

Lander didn’t ask for a single thing. He could at least have borrowed Jeffries’ own lines, the ones Jeffries used when reporters asked whether he’d back Mamdani. “We’re going to have to have a conversation.” “We’ve had productive conversations.” Jeffries promised him nothing and meant to promise nothing, and Lander handed over his support for free anyway. That’s the saddest habit in our movement. Our people give up before the fight even starts.

Whoever wins the House and Senate will decide on the chamber’s leadership. If the Democrats win them both in November, there needs to be a fight over who leads us. If new progressives from around the country are elected they’ve gotta demand leadership that can meet the moment. This is a transformational moment. They can’t just roll over. We need more than strongly worded letters. We need a vision. A leadership that wants a Democratic supermajority not a “strong Republican Party”. When Platner, Kiros, Larkin, Vang, El-Sayed, and the rest win in November, neither they nor we can celebrate and sit back down. That is the precise time we stand up demanding new and competent leadership for this party of ours.

And we ought to be clear about what we’re demanding, not just that we’re done folding. A floor under our votes, in writing. Ban members of Congress from trading stocks, and shut the door between Congress and the lobbying shops that hire them the day they leave. Say out loud that justices who threw out the plain words of the Constitution should be impeached. Stop arming the IDF and stop paying for a genocide. Build the housing and the energy and the health care at a scale that brings the prices down to where people can actually afford to live. That’s the price of our support for the next leader. Not a letter. Not a hashtag. A list, and the spine to hold to it.

He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump.

People are calling this the Democrats’ Tea Party, and they mean it as an insult. They say the DSA is going to be the Tea Party of the left. Fine. Look at what the Tea Party ultimately created. It led straight to Donald Trump and MAGA, and built the power to take institutions apart, and put questions back on the table that the establishment thought were closed. It did all of that on sheer force of will, carried by a movement that started as the Tea Party and grew into MAGA. We can build that kind of power. The difference is what we use it for.

The Tea Party/MAGA folks are obsessed with tearing things down. Ours is focused on building and investing in the infrastructure that will raise us all up. The new breed of Democrats winning today are talking about creating enough energy and housing and electricity that we can actually afford them. We’re talking about opportunity, and fairness and accountability in the courts, here at home and out in the world. The socialists are talking about a country that stops taking part in genocides, stops arming the IDF, stops being a nation that ships bombs around the world. It’s a movement hell bent on building the future, not destroying the present.

But don’t mistake restorative for gentle. Some institutions are going to have to be rebuilt, and some are going to have to be torn down. The reason DOGE sounded reasonable to so many people is that the MAGA/Tea Party folks were willing to state the truth, that the SEC and the FDA and the FBI had all been captured and need to be transformed. They watched OxyContin pour into their towns. They watched Jeffrey Epstein glide through this country for years like the law didn’t apply to him, because it didn’t. They watched greedy Wall Streeters cheat and loot and destroy the wealth of millions and millions of Americans, and saw that the SEC and Department of Justice didn’t prosecute a single one of these criminals. They knew elections get bought and the FEC did nothing. So when the Democratic leadership tells us that these institutions are sacred and mustn’t be touched it doesn’t resonate. Voters assume you’re either a corrupted liar or a moron. Neither option inspires confidence.

When you start winning, you push harder. You don’t sit down and you don’t say thank you. You hit first, and you keep hitting, and you don’t stop until the people who broke this country can’t break it anymore.

More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.

Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?

The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.

Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.

The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.

In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.

After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.

In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”

After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."

By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.

In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.

In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:

In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own country­men, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).

The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected commu­nists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”

The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.

With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.

America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.

The Democratic National Committee's 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled "Build to Win. Build to Last," failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?

The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party's old guard. It calls for renewed focus on "Middle America," criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points, but these points alone is not what cost the party so dearly.

The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable if the interviews were of local party leaders, or general democratic voters? Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Did it account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020 but refused to support Harris in 2024? Where did they go and why?

There was no breakdown of Harris's collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This was not a methodological oversight. This is how the autopsy was engineered. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘Genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza, did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged that this question even existed.

Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris "was not well prepared"; Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab-American vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.

The autopsy's authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party's youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation—and the base at large—when it comes to Israel.

Recent primary results could not be clearer exposing the failure of the DNC autopsy. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters’ regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned, it is a whitewash.

The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”

This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When the contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that the finding is edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.

The autopsy's Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.

The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure, it smothered it. Fifty-thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voters they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.

Without an honest accounting of the party's failures in 2024, and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-genocide democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.

The following article was initially written at the request of Oleg Bodrov, a Russian physicist with commitments to peace and environmental sustainability and safety. I met Oleg about a decade ago during the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima, and today we both serve on the board of the International Peace Bureau, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient organization. In addition to serving on IPB’s board, Oleg is chairman of the Public Council of the South Coast of the Gulf of Finland. He lives outside of St. Petersburg and does what he can given the limits of the possible in Putin’s Russia. When he and I last spoke, Ukrainian drones had devastated a massive Russian oil refinery, spewing toxins into the Baltic Sea and across many Russian communities. With Ukrainian drones flying overhead he hadn’t slept the previous night, making Oleg one more innocent caught in that mutually disastrous war.

In our exchanges, Oleg came up with a proposal to take a small step toward bridging the divisions of the new US-Russian Cold War and building for the time when the missiles, drones, and guns of the Ukraine War have been silenced. His idea: I should write an article that shared US peace movement thinking and named actions that can reduce the increasingly perilous military tensions and serve as foundations for a future era of US-NATO-Russian Common security. Oleg would translate the article and arrange for its publication in a Russian scientific journal. As we corresponded about the article’s publication, it occurred to us that it might also prove helpful for US readers, hence its publication here in Common Dreams. Where this will lead, only time will tell. But the truth is that both the US and Russia are going to be around for a long time, and a just and peaceful Common Security order will be essential for this and future generations.

Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock report warns us that we face Cuban Missile Crisis level danger. Back then, in 1962, senior officials in the Kennedy administration thought the odds of the missile crisis leading to a nuclear war were 50-50. In the aftermath of the eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation, Daniel Ellsberg, a senior Kennedy nuclear adviser, became so pessimistic about humanity’s future that, not expecting to live to an old age, he ceased paying into his pension fund.

But both President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, along with their ruling circles, were sufficiently sobered by the specter of nuclear annihilation. They moved quickly to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Their successors built on this foundation, constructing the six-decade-old arms control regime. They negotiated treaties from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the SALT and START agreements. They limited, but failed to erase, the dangers of nuclear annihilation.

The Collapse of the Arms Control Architecture

That arms control regime is now history. First came the loss of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty almost 25 years ago. Then came the expiration of the New START Treaty. Now, President Donald Trump is obsessed with resuming nuclear-weapons testing, and both the US and Russia are moving to deploy new nuclear-capable missile systems.

Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal.

Adding to nuclear dangers, Beijing is increasing its nuclear arsenal in pursuit of parity with Moscow and Washington. We are becoming three nuclear-armed scorpions in a bottle. This, together with Russian concerns about the French and British nuclear arsenals, complicates any possible future arms reduction diplomacy. The inability of the US, Russia, and China to find common ground—or even to agree on a least common denominator consensus document—was a major factor that dictated the third consecutive failure of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference this past May.

The geopolitical landscape is further complicated by the US-Israeli-Iran war. During that conflict, President Trump speculated about possible low-yield nuclear attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal. Political pressures for nuclear-weapons proliferation are therefore building in threshold nations from Seoul to Stockholm, including Iran, Poland, and Japan, among others.

“Human Beings and Nuclear Weapons Cannot Coexist”

Political realism and the survival of our species point in two complementary directions. As the Japanese A-bomb survivors and their organization Nihon Hidankyo (awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize) warn, it should be obvious: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

We have already had too many close calls with extinction: false nuclear alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and geopolitical miscalculations. And as Nobel Peace Laureate Joseph Rotblat, the founder of the Pugwash Conferences and the only senior Manhattan Project scientist to quit for reasons of conscience, explained, humanity faces a stark choice. We can either completely eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, or we will see their proliferation and eventual use. Why? Because no nation will long tolerate what it perceives as an unjust and threatening imbalance of power—in this case, the imbalance of nuclear terror.

Even in the best of circumstances, it will take valuable time—possibly more time than we have—to build the trust and to conduct the negotiations needed for a nuclear-weapon-free world. This, in turn, forces us to learn another lesson from US-Russian history: the possibility of Common Security. In crisis, as our Chinese friends remind us, there is opportunity as well as danger.

The Lesson of Common Security and the Palme Commission

In the 1980s humanity faced a similar situation. The two great powers flirted with triggering a catastrophic war that could have caused a nuclear winter. The US and the Soviet Union brought the world to the nuclear brink with the planned deployments of SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II missiles.

The combination of popular movements calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race, and President Mikhail Gorbachev’s understanding that military spending had to be reduced if the Soviet economy were to be salvaged, led Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to convene the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families.

Georgi Arbatov, the most senior military adviser to Gorbachev, later wrote about the commission’s work and its world-changing recommendations. In meetings with former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and leaders from Austria, Germany, Norway, India, and elsewhere, “a new approach to nuclear arms emerged.” Its essence, in Arbatov’s words, was that “we cannot guarantee our own security at the expense or detriment of someone else’s, but only on the basis of mutual interests.”

To reverse the spiraling arms race, each side needed to name the other’s actions that were most threatening to it and then negotiate agreements that would remove those threats without weakening anyone’s security. Those difficult negotiations led in 1987 to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited the SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II deployments, and functionally ended the Cold War two years before the Berlin Wall fell.

Defining the Contexts of Today’s Crisis

Context is almost everything. Reflecting on the failure of the 2026 NPT Review Conference, Vietnamese Ambassador Do Hung Viet, the conference president, commented that it is a “fair judgment” to conclude that the US-Iran impasse, which “hung over our heads from the beginning,” together with the Ukraine War and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, made consensus impossible. “Political concerns,” he said—including the race for artificial intelligence supremacy—“were overwhelming.”

As generations succeed one another, knowledge and wisdom are inevitably lost as well as gained. After two calamitous world wars that claimed between 75 and 97 million lives, the surviving great powers sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” They attempted to do so while simultaneously securing their imperial powers and privileges. Thus Article 1 of the United Nations Charter committed governments “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace…”

For the most part, this first commitment was honored—with significant exceptions in Indochina, Afghanistan, and interventions in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families. Drunk with arrogance, the US Bush government boasted: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities… We’re history’s actors.”

Washington’s arrogance of power continued into the 1990s with the Bill Clinton Administration. Rather than respect Russian history, political culture, sensitivities, and ordinary Russians’ need for economic security, Clinton and his mandarins imposed another cataclysmic revolutionary change: neoliberal economic shock therapy. The result was massive dislocation, impoverishment, a rising death rate, and the restoration of an authoritarian government in Moscow.

Russia’s political and economic systems imploded during Boris Yeltsin’s rule. Despite George Kennan’s warning—Kennan was the architect of Cold War containment—that NATO expansion would lead to disastrous conflict; President Clinton did exactly that in 1999. He initiated NATO enlargement, bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. As “history’s actors,” Bush II added seven Central and Eastern European nations to NATO in 2004. Then, in 2008, against the advice of his senior adviser Fiona Hill and over the opposition of Germany and France, Bush the Lesser forced an invitation to Ukraine and Georgia through NATO’s summit.

Given Russia’s memories of invasions from the west—Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler—the Kremlin responded as Kennan and Hill had predicted. In an obvious breach of the UN Charter, the ostensibly defensive Russian invasion of Georgia followed. Meanwhile, even without Kiev becoming a formal NATO member, and in response to the alliance’s expanding military presence in Ukraine, President Putin reportedly began planning what became the disastrous “special military operation” as early as 2007. Even before, among the earliest and most egregious Bush-Cheney acts was the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, then a cornerstone of arms control.

The little remaining mutual trust between the West and Russia was among the first casualties of the war. The war also spurred further NATO expansion, with Finland and Sweden joining the alliance and thus doubling the line of contact between NATO and Russia. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties, US-Russian arms control agreements, including New START and Open Skies, became collateral damage. The new Cold War became even more dangerous as the US military-industrial complex and the Kremlin pressed to “modernize” their nuclear forces, and as European nations—fearing what Russian territorial ambitions might become—laid the foundations for a new European military superpower.

Nuclear Threats and the Arms Race

There is a mistaken but widespread belief that nuclear weapons have not been used since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This is wrong. As Daniel Ellsberg later wrote, during international crises and wars, US presidents have prepared to initiate nuclear war and have threatened to do so. They have done so in the same way that an armed robber points his gun at his victim’s head: Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. Not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but repeatedly during wars and interventions in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, the Taiwan Strait, and other crises, the United States has resorted to nuclear extortion. As former US Defense Secretary Harold Brown put it, with the US first-strike capacity and doctrine in place, our conventional forces become “meaningful instruments of military and political power.”

Noam Chomsky put it differently: “That means that under this umbrella of strategic nuclear weapons… we have succeeded in sufficiently intimidating anyone who might help protect people we are determined to attack.”

Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.

The United States is not the only nuclear power that has practiced nuclear blackmail. Every other nuclear-weapons state has done so at least once. As early as 1956, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin threatened London and Paris, hoping that the threat would force their withdrawal from Egypt during the Suez War. More recently, and to considerable effect, President Putin and former President and current Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev have engaged in nuclear saber-rattling.

Nuclear powers seek to legitimize their arsenals and “modernization” on the basis of deterrence theory—the idea that each new development is necessitated by the need to prevent a nuclear attack by a rival. In reality, the George H.W. Bush administration’s initial “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” gave the game away. As that document stated, “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US national interests” The same applies to all other nuclear-weapons states. And as the history of false alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and ill-conceived aggressions demonstrates, deterrence only works—until it doesn’t.

Even before the New START Treaty’s limit of 1,550 deployed strategic missiles expired, Washington and Moscow were arms racing. The US is spending $1.7 trillion to “modernize” and replace its entire nuclear triad—including its “use-them-or-lose-them” first-strike land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—and is racing to renew warhead pit production.

Seeking to maintain parity, Russia is also developing and moving to deploy a range of new strategic-range weapons. These include a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle carried by the Sarmat “super-heavy” ICBM; an air-launched hypersonic ballistic missile capable of evasive maneuvers; a nuclear-powered cruise missile of “unlimited range”; a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle of “unlimited range”; and a sea-launched hypersonic missile.

President Trump, committed to regaining nuclear and high-tech superiority and to prevailing in the artificial intelligence competition with China, also seeks to spend trillions of dollars on his “Golden Dome” missile defense system. It will never work, but it will be profoundly destabilizing and will bankrupt the United States.

Making matters still more dangerous, US-Russian military-to-military communications are at their nadir. Moscow has made clear that it is disinterested in renewed risk reduction and arms control diplomacy until it is satisfied with the outcome of the Ukraine War.

What Is to Be Done?

Rebuilding trust is essential for any risk and arms reductions, but it will require patience and steadfast commitments on all sides. It seems clear that negotiating a new European security system will only become possible when the post-Ukraine War dust settles over the European strategic landscape. Similarly, greater clarity about Washington’s commitment to NATO, and about the credibility of massive European rearmament, will be critically important factors in approaching any new risk-reduction and strategic-stability negotiations.

In approaching the urgent need to restore stability to US-Russian-European relations, we should reflect on the differences between Western and Chinese approaches to arms control diplomacy. We can learn from the Chinese.

The Western approach has been an exclusive focus on negotiations about particular nuclear-weapons systems and doctrines. Chinese diplomats and leaders, on the other hand, wisely think it necessary to identify and address the underlying causes that drive nuclear arms races and potential conflict.

Given that there is no military solution to the Ukraine War, it is past time for a ceasefire, for compromises, and for multidimensional peace negotiations—Ukraine-Russia, EU-Russia, US-Russia. Only then can we begin to address the existential US-Russian nuclear risks with Common Security diplomacy.

Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.

Resources for Rebuilding Trust

Among these resources is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). A post-Ukraine War 21st-century version of that conference could be a constructive way to begin building a new Common Security order. Although its 57 European, North American, and Asian member states have reduced their financial and other commitments to the OSCE—which is mandated to work for stability, peace, and democracy in Europe—it can still serve as a neutral forum for diplomatic engagement and negotiations for a new Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic order.

The OSCE grew out of the 1973 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), “a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation between East and West.” Among its initiatives was the Helsinki Process, involving 35 nations that agreed to the inviolability of post-World War II frontiers, reinforced commitments to human rights, and facilitated the institutionalization of the OSCE.

Track II and other discussions among Europeans, Russians, and Americans have continued despite the war, and they have identified numerous traditional paths to nuclear risk reduction and arms control possibilities. A laundry list of sometimes competing proposals has been developed and can be drawn on when the time is ripe.

We can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament.

Alexey Arbatov, of the Center for International Security at the Primakov Institute in Moscow, identified two conditions essential for arms control diplomacy during the Cold War: “a state of mutual nuclear deterrence” and “the emergence of approximate equality (parity) of strategic forces” of the dominant nuclear powers. A new conceptual approach, he argues, requires acknowledging the realities of multilateral deterrence, incorporating the security interests of all nuclear-armed states, and rebuilding strategic stability through inclusive frameworks rather than bilateral bargains. Chinese, French, and British nuclear arsenals, plus the nuclear four outside the NPT regime, must be factored into any negotiations. We are thus challenged by at least a four-dimensional diplomatic puzzle, and finding a solution is an urgent necessity.

There is a third requirement without which there can be no exit from a bellicose and mutually debilitating future: trust. It can only be developed over time, through patient confidence-building measures. These could include continuing to honor New START deployment limits and refraining from uploading additional warheads onto existing missiles. Wolfgang Richter, a former German colonel now associated with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, writes that overcoming the current vicious circle of distrust requires “renewed and credible mutual commitment confirming that the independence and territorial integrity of states will be respected.” This could be achieved by a settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War and by trust-building initiatives between Russia and its European neighbors.

Even before the Ukraine War ends and opens the way for risk reduction and arms control negotiations, many on both sides of the US-Russia divide agree that the first priority must be preventing a resumption of nuclear-weapons testing, which President Trump has threatened. Related, and possibly of equal importance, is to honor and sustain the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the wake of the recent failed review conference.

Another limited but encouraging proposal is to convene a US-Russia-China leadership summit, at which a version of the Reagan-Gorbachev warning—that nuclear war can never be won and must not be fought—is reiterated. This would open the way for officials and experts to explore jointly how to reduce nuclear risk.

Unhinged and dangerous as he is, we need to acknowledge that despite his recent nuclear threat to Iran, over the years Trump has been willing to talk with Russia, and he has repeatedly stated that he wants movement toward denuclearization. Not that he has done much to make that happen.

Given the political environment in most European countries, and with Germany and France now competing for European military leadership as confidence in NATO wanes, initiatives for risk reduction and greater strategic stability inevitably lie with Washington and Moscow. If progress can be made by the US and Russia, Europeans could then be brought in.

Military-to-military communication needs to be revitalized, perhaps beginning with crisis communications, especially as drone warfare and wayward Ukrainian and Russian drones increase the danger of miscalculation. Building on the tradition of the Vienna Document, communication could then be expanded regarding troop movements, military exercises, and more. Addressing the growing military competition for control of the Arctic could be one place to begin.

Even though Russia and the United States have functionally withdrawn from the Open Skies verification treaty, 32 member states continue to honor it. A return to Russian and US participation would be a comparatively easy means to signal intentions to improve relations, and an important step toward trust building.

Like cultural exchanges in the past, trust can be built in many ways by renewing cooperative commitments. Low-hanging fruit could include building on the decades-long International Space Station collaboration; renewed scientific cooperation across the Arctic, where thawing permafrost poses increasing climate and health dangers; and, always, people-to-people exchanges.

Magic wands are in short supply. As the biblical proverb advises, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Across the lines and structures that divide us, like the Hibakusha and the men and women who preserved human survival through the worst of the Cold War, we can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament. Naming, dialogue, and debate are essential building blocks to get there.

For months President Donald Trump has been funneling money and interest toward the semi-private Freedom 250, and away from America 250, the congressionally created nonpartisan commission that has spent years preparing for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026. As a result, staggering sums of money have been contributed to Freedom 250, much of it by private companies that do business with the government or are in heavily regulated industries. It’s unsurprising that large corporations might want to seek favor from the Trump administration by opening their checkbooks, and it’s unsurprising that President Trump would welcome these checks with minimal transparency.

What is surprising is that President Trump would be keen to celebrate the Declaration of Independence at all. This document expresses the people’s desire to be free from the rule of a king, a hunger for the rule of law, and respect for an independent judiciary. Nothing could be less Trumpy.

While the Declaration announces liberation from the tyranny of monarchy, Trump seems fairly obsessed with framing himself as a king. Examples abound. In lauding his own efforts to kill a congestion pricing plan in Manhattan, Trump ended his social media post with the self-congratulatory, “LONG LIVE THE KING.” In response to historic nationwide peaceful protests, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dumping excrement upon American demonstrators. During a recent official British state visit, the White House posted a picture of King Charles with President Trump, captioned “TWO KINGS.” And Trump’s fondness for monarchical trappings is no secret globally. For instance, while wearing a gold tie that reflected “President Trump’s taste for gold,” South Korean President Lee Jae Myung presented Trump with a golden crown that was a replica of an ancient artifact, and Trump responded by saying, “I’d like to wear it right now.”

Notably, the Declaration’s first grievance against King George III of Great Britain was his refusal to “Assent to Laws,” conveying the belief that no one—not even a nation’s highest leader—is above the law. Yet President Trump seems offended by such a notion, and he contests it regularly. Trump implies that the law does not apply to him when he posts messages like “[h]e who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who declared himself emperor of France in the 1800s. And Trump has proclaimed that Article II of the Constitution grants him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” a statement that not only misreads Article II, but ignores the way presidential power operates with, and is checked by, Article I congressional power and Article III judicial power.

Thankfully, we need not look to President Trump for inspiration on how to mark the Declaration’s 250th anniversary.

Numerous high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Solicitor General John Sauer, have declined to commit to obeying court orders and the administration’s track record reflects this defiance: In just the first six months of the administration, courts in more than 12 cases determined that the administration violated court orders. More recently, a study cited hundreds of instances of administration non-compliance with court orders. The situation has become so dire that many judges have lost confidence in this administration’s representations and are reducing the deference customarily given to federal government lawyers.

Finally, further down in the Declaration’s list of grievances against King George III is that “[h]e has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.” Today, this could describe Trump’s aspirations. He has railed against judges—even those whom he appointed in his first presidential term—when they dare to rule against his administration’s policies. Trump is infuriated when judges honor their oaths of office and follow the facts and the law regardless of where this leads them. After immigration-related rulings halted Trump administration policies, US District Judge James Boasberg found himself the target of President Trump’s call for Congress to remove him from the bench. Trump railed about Boasberg on social media, calling the judge a “troublemaker and agitator,” and suggested that many other judges should be impeached as well.

Trump’s harsh rhetoric even prompted a rare statement from Chief Justice John Roberts, who explained that “[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” And it’s not just lower court judges who find themselves targeted by Trump’s invective. After the Supreme Court struck down his administration’s tariff scheme by a 6-3 margin, Trump criticized the court and justices in strikingly personal terms, saying, “I’m ashamed of certain members of the court,” and in reference to Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, you wanna know the truth, the two of them.”

President Trump has long seemed fascinated by notions of “central casting.” Well, Donald Trump seems a more natural fit for the role of King George III than that of a framer of the Declaration of Independence.

Thankfully, we need not look to President Trump for inspiration on how to mark the Declaration’s 250th anniversary. Inspiration can be found in the broad array of Americans who gathered nationwide to protest autocracy in peaceful No Kings demonstrations; the March 28, 2026 No Kings mobilizations drew an estimated 8 million participants in over 3,000 sites, arguably the largest single-day of protests in United States history.

We can be inspired by the bravery of Minnesotans killed while protesting the mistreatment of immigrant community members, and Minnesotan community-based efforts to help neighbors too frightened to leave their homes in the face of brutal abuses by immigration enforcement officers, ones that call to mind the Declaration’s complaint that King George had “sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” And who isn’t inspired by countless Americans who joined interfaith vigils to protest the inhumane and lawless detention of people at facilities like Florida’s infamous “Alligator Alcatraz”?

These members of the American family, true patriots, honor a Declaration that ends with the promise to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” They understand that embedded within our Declaration of Independence lies a Declaration of Interdependence. Now that’s something to celebrate.

July 4 is the big occasion for Americans to express patriotism, none more so than this year, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. But the ways we do so are as diverse as the country. People and groups from right to left celebrate in conflicting ways and with conflicting views—from “love it or leave it” to “love it and fix it.”

This year, at a time when democracy itself is under serious threat, progressives are seeking ways to claim their patriotism and recapture the flag.

“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” wrote Zohran Mamdani last July 4 before he had been elected mayor of New York City. “I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.”

Since the American Revolution, each generation of progressives has expressed an American patriotism rooted in democratic values that challenged jingoism and “my country—right or wrong” thinking, rejecting blind nationalism, militaristic drum beating, and sheep-like conformism. Democratic movements—abolition of slavery, farmers’ populism, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and others—sought to overturn the established order while claiming to fulfill America’s promise. They believed that America’s core claims—fairness, equality, freedom, justice—were their own.

Even the founders would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state.

As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”

Donald Trump consciously and cynically has been re-enacting the long tradition of patriotism as jingoism, nationalism, flag waving, and “America first” sloganeering. What seems new is his systematic drive to debase major symbols of national identity—such as the White House, the reflecting pool, and Arlington Cemetery—while wrecking the entire national plan to celebrate America at 250.

Although they disagreed on many issues, the founders were adamant that they didn’t want the country to be run by an all-powerful king. Yet here we are 250 year later, governed by a president publicly claiming such power, with a Supreme Court majority acting as his enablers.

Of course, many of the founders were skeptical of a robust democracy. They created institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, that were never intended to completely reflect the voice of the people.

Even the founders, however, would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state, exploiting the opportunities provided by the Constitution’s elitist features.

The Gallup poll regularly asks Americans what the founders would think of America today. This year, only 19% think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased with how the country has turned out. Over three quarters (77%) now say the founders would be disappointed. This compares with 42% in 2001.

Americans’ disappointment with the country is obviously tied to Trump’s performance and his low favorability ratings in the polls. We expect our nation’s leaders, especially our president, to express a deep loyalty to a vision bigger than one person. But Trump has no overarching vision. Besides grabbing power and wealth for himself, his major commitment appears to white nationalism—turning America into a country for the uber rich and white people only. In contrast to the patriotism expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), Trump wants, to rid the nation of immigrants of color, whom, in his eugenicist view, he thinks “pollute” the country with bad genes.

Trump and his coterie have systematically acted to undermine the spirit and letter of the Constitution. One of America’s core beliefs since its founding has been that elections should determine who becomes president and that it is important to ensure the orderly transfer of power. But insurrectionists at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021—urged on by and loyal to Trump— attempted to stop that process, while. carrying American flags. Many of these were convicted and sentenced for insurrectionary crimes. Trump’s blanket pardon and embrace of the convicted was an announcement of his autocratic hopes and plans.

As the 250th anniversary approaches, Trump is intensifying his campaign to end the right to vote—the fundamental idea of the American Revolution. Abetted by the Supreme Court majority’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act (a key victory of the 1960s), and building on the ongoing GOP campaign to maintain power as they lose their capacity to win the national popular vote, Trump is trying to undermine states’ control over the electoral process.

He’s used his powers to eviscerate other cherished rights, including free speech, a free press, and freedom of assembly and dissent. He has used the tools of government—including the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS—to unleash his revenge on protesters, the media, immigrants, Democrats, and all others he considers his opponents.

Right wingers have always wrapped themselves in the flag under the guise of being the true patriots. ‘”Americanism” campaigns in the early 20th century were designed to undermine the labor movement and limit immigration. Congressional and state legislative “Unamerican Activities” committees collaborated with the FBI beginning in the 1930s, to build blacklists against leftwing activists and artists,

Even American Nazis sought to be seen as patriots. On Feb. 20, 1939, 20,000 of them filled Madison Square Garden for a "Pro-America Rally." They erected a massive 30-foot banner of George Washington (it was timed to celebrate his birthday) surrounded by American flags and swastika banners.

Trump’s own MAGA rallies feel like modern-day versions of that Nazi event. He fetishizes the American flag and other patriotic symbols, even while displaying a shallow, ahistorical, and bizarre understanding of what they meant.

Once, at a campaign rally in Tampa, as his cult followers chanted, “Build that wall,” Trump interrupted his speech to give a bear hug to an American flag on the stage behind him.

“We want to make sure that anyone who seeks to join our country, shares our values and has the capacity to love our people,” Trump said at a rally at the Kennedy Center in 2017.

“We all salute the same great American flag,” Trump said in his 2017 inauguration address—a line he has repeated in many speeches since then.

To Trump and his followers, the flag is synonymous with “America First.” It was a slogan used to unite isolationists and Nazi sympathizers against involvement in the European war in 1939. For Trump, it means reporting undocumented immigrants and caging their children in detention centers, restricting visitors from Muslim countries, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and other international agreements, and engaging in friendships with like-minded dictators.

Trump’s faux patriotism and its clownish griftiness has been providing a wide space for coalitions of resistance. The “No Kings” protests and the slogan itself help provide a very fitting frame for revitalizing a progressive, democratic, populist patriotism. Many participants waved American flags.

America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance.

President Barack Obama said: “I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.” He observed that, “loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.”

President Joe Biden said that “we’re all part of a chain of patriots” who fought for democracy, freedom, fair play, peace, security, and opportunity. Patriots, he explained, seek “the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come; the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given talent can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”

In the Sixties, as hundreds of thousands of American youth were radicalized by the senseless Vietnam war, resistance included acts of defiance of patriotic symbols and rhetoric. Flag burnings would sometimes combine with the burning of draft cards. But other radicals took a different stance. In 1968, in a famous speech against the Vietnam war, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the rather moribund Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”

"It was as a Socialist, and because I was a Socialist, that I fell in love with America,” wrote Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, in his 1973 book, Fragments of a Century. “In saying that, I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a Socialist is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.”

Harrington was identifying with the many radicals and progressive reformers who proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America promised democratic fulfillment—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech, and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and people of color, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

It is largely underrecognized that some of the most important and popular ways all Americans experience and express patriotism were the creation of radical writers and artists. What they created continues to inspire.

Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist who lived from 1855 to 1931, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 to express his outrage at the Gilded Age’s widening economic divide. He had been ousted from his Boston church for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist, and for his work among the poor in Boston's slums. The Gilded Age was marked by major political, economic, and social conflicts. Progressive reformers were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers were joining forces in the Populist movement to rein in the power of banks, railroads, and utility companies. Reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing, and in favor of women’s suffrage. Socialists and other leftist radicals were gaining new converts.

In foreign affairs, Americans were battling over the nation’s role in the world. America was beginning to act like an imperial power, justifying its expansion with a combination of white supremacy, manifest destiny, and the argument that it was spreading democracy. At the time, nativist groups across the country were pushing for restrictions on immigrants—Catholics, Jews, and Asians—who were cast as polluting Protestant America. In the South, the outcome of the Civil War still inflamed regional passions. Many Southerners, including Civil War veterans, swore allegiance not to the American but to the Confederate flag.

Bellamy, a cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of two bestselling socialistic books, Looking Backward and Equality, believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism, and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped that the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he argued was undermining the nation.

When composing the Pledge, Bellamy had initially intended to use the phrase “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” but concluded that the radical rhetoric of the French Revolution wouldn’t sit well with many Americans. So he coined the phrase, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” to express his more egalitarian vision of America, and a secular patriotism aimed at helping unite a divided nation.

In 1891, Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000, hired Bellamy to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ so-called discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools.

Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program’s flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age.

In 1923, over the objections of the aging Bellamy, the National Flag Conference, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the opening, “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” to “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” Ostensibly, it was revised to make sure that immigrant children—who might have thought that “my flag” referred to their native countries—knew that they were pledging allegiance to the American flag.

In 1954, at the height of the Cold War—when many political leaders believed that the nation was threatened by godless communism—the Knights of Columbus led a successful campaign to lobby Congress to add the words “under God.”

A year after Bellamy composed the pledge, Kathryn Lee Bates wrote the poem “America the Beautiful,” which was later set to music by Samuel Ward, the organist at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey

Like Bellamy, Bates was a Christian socialist. A well-respected poet and professor of English at Wellesley College, Bates (1859-1929) was also a lesbian who lived with Katharine Coman, an economics professor. They belonged to progressive circles in the Boston area that supported labor unions, advocated for immigrants, and fought for women’s suffrage. She was an ardent foe of American imperialism.

“America the Beautiful” was initially published in 1895 to commemorate the Fourth of July. The poem is usually heard as an unalloyed paean to American virtue. But a close reading of her words makes it clear that she had something more in mind. She wrote:

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free!

Bates hoped that a progressive movement could overcome the Gilded Age’s greed. And when sung by Ray Charles and other African American artists, listeners can’t help but be inspired by the song’s plea for brotherhood – or, as the left calls it, solidarity.

Lazarus, author of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, was a Jewish poet of considerable reputation in her day, who was a strong supporter of Henry George and his “socialistic” single-tax program, and a friend of William Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the “wretched refuse” of the Earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American Dream.

In the Depression years and during World War II, the fusion of populist, egalitarian, and anti-racist values with patriotic expression reached full flower. The rise of fascism was countered in the US with efforts to build a center-left coalition in critical support of the New Deal and a parallel cultural upsurge.

Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1936, contrasted the nation’s promise with its mistreatment of his fellow African-Americans, the poor, Native Americans, workers, farmers, and immigrants:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath
But opportunity is real, and life is free
Equality is in the air we breathe.

It’s a poem that encapsulates the anger and the hope integral to the American experience.

In 1939, composer Earl Robinson teamed with lyricist John La Touche to write “Ballad for Americans,” which was performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. This 11-minute cantata provided a musical review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the “nobody who’s everybody” and an elite that fails to understand the real, democratic essence of America.

Broadcasts and recordings of “Ballad for Americans,” (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, “Ballad for Americans” has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV. This might be the year to revive and revise it.

Earl Robinson wrote the melody for another important patriotic song of the World War 2 era -- “The House I Live In.” The lyric was written by Lewis Allen, the pen-name of a New York teacher, activist and poet named Abel Meeropol, who had, a few years earlier, written the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit” for Billie Holiday.

The song was the centerpiece of an Oscar winning short film starring Frank Sinatra in 1945. In the film, Sinatra uses the song to instruct a group of kids who were bullying a Jewish classmate. Sinatra made the song a hit. Other versions were recorded by Robeson and by Josh White. Sinatra kept it in his repertoire for his whole career, even though he later abandoned his left-wing sympathies and associated with the Republican right. In 1985, Sinatra performed the song as the finale to a nationally broadcast celebration of the Statue of Liberty centenary, addressing it to Ronald and Nancy Reagan on the platform with him. Only a few watching were aware of the song’s origins.

Composer Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “A Lincoln Portrait,” both written in 1942, are now patriotic musical standards, regularly performed at major civic events. Copland was a member of a radical composers’ group as well as a gay man.

Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie, a radical, was inspired to write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin’s popular “God Bless America,” which he thought failed to recognize that it was the “people” to whom America belonged.

The song reflects Guthrie’s belief that patriotism and support for the underdog were interconnected. He celebrated America’s natural beauty and bounty, but criticized the country for its failure to share its riches. This is revealed in the song’s last and least-known verse, which Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed at Obama’s pre-inaugural concert in 2009 in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with Obama in the audience:

One bright sunny morning;
In the shadow of the steeple;
By the relief office;
I saw my people.
As they stood hungry;
I stood there wondering;
If this land was made for you and me.

You can find Spanish and Native American versions of the song. Guthrie would have approved. Both he and Seeger, who were part of Communist circles, helped popularize socially conscious music reflecting the country’s diversity. They are now viewed as American icons.

During the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to fuse their love of country with their opposition to the government’s policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King famously quoted the words to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring” 11 times. That 19th century song seems politically neutral, but it was a defiantly anti-monarchy anthem, written as a kind of parody of “God Save the King.” An abolitionist version soon followed its initial release. Marian Anderson, the great African American contralto, sang the song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 because the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform at its Constitution Hall due to her race.

Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the 1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, “The Power and the Glory,” that coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality. The words to the chorus echo the sentiments of the anti-Vietnam War movement:

Here is a land full of power and glory;
Beauty that words cannot recall;
Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom;
Her glory shall rest on us all.

One of its stanzas updated Guthrie’s combination of outrage and patriotism:

Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor;
Only as free as the padlocked prison door;
Only as strong as our love for this land;
Only as tall as we stand.

This song later became part of the repertoire of the U.S. Army band.

In recent decades, Springsteen has closely followed in the Guthrie tradition. From “Born in the USA” to his songs about Tom Joad (the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), to his anthem about the 9/11 tragedy (“Empty Sky”), to his album Wrecking Ball (including its opening song, “We Take Care of Our Own”), Springsteen has championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its ideals. In January, Springsteen wrote “Streets of Minneapolis,” which describe how "a city aflame fought fire and ice 'neath an occupier's boots," which Springsteen calls "King Trump's private army." He wrote it in response to the second deadly shooting by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and dedicated it to the people of that city. At the June opening of Obama’s new presidential center in Chicago, Springsteen sang his song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which includes lines adopted from Guthrie’s song, “This Train is Bound for Glory.” The train – a metaphor for America -- carries “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” and “fools and kings.”

America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance. Americans are upset by the unbridled selfishness and political influence-peddling demonstrated by banks, oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, and other large corporations. They are angry at the growing power of American-based global firms who show no loyalty to their country, outsource jobs to low-wage countries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the environment.

During the ICE raids in Minnesota a group called “Singing Resistance” emerged to encourage singing during protests. Troubadours of multiple generations sang new and classic songs of protest on stage and via You Tube.

One fascinating moment happened at this year’s Super Bowl when Coco Jones sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” For 100 years that song has been the African American national anthem. It lyrics include these lines:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.

To have it performed at the Super Bowl, alongside the “Star Spangled Banner,” may have been an affront to right-wingers, , but it was an inspiring moment for many other Americans. Cong. James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) has sponsored a bill to make “Life Every Voice” the national hymn.

Throughout American history, progressive movements had won major victories and also experienced setbacks. When those setbacks occur, it is understandable that people sometimes lose hope, and even give up the fight. But our history also teaches us that we can’t give up, because we must keep the struggle alive for a new generation.

A democracy that makes citizenship harder to reach should not pretend it is merely managing paperwork. It is deciding who gets full political voice.

I have attended naturalization ceremonies for more than three decades. I have watched courtrooms fill with nurses, engineers, truck drivers, scientists, caregivers, parents holding young children, and older immigrants who waited years to hear one sentence that would change their lives.

Before administering the Oath of Allegiance, judges often remind new citizens that American citizenship is about more than receiving a certificate or passport. It is about responsibility — to vote, serve on juries, obey the law, participate in civic life, defend the Constitution, and leave America stronger than they found it.

That reminder captures something we too often forget. Citizenship is not just a collection of rights. It is freedom joined to duty, opportunity joined to service, and belonging joined to responsibility.

A door that only the wealthy, the fluent, the well-connected, or the legally sophisticated can navigate is not truly open.

Unlike those of us fortunate enough to be born here, every person in that courtroom made a conscious decision.

They chose America.

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, we should ask whether we still understand the power of that choice. One of America’s greatest accomplishments has not simply been welcoming immigrants. It has been making Americans.

Those are not the same thing.

The earliest naturalization laws reflected the exclusions and prejudices of their time. But America also preserved a revolutionary idea: a person born somewhere else could become fully American through allegiance to the Constitution and commitment to the Republic.

Naturalization was never just an immigration process. It was a democracy-building process.

Today, more than 9 million lawful permanent residents are already eligible to become American citizens. They are nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, factory workers, researchers, caregivers, veterans, farmworkers, small-business owners, and neighbors. They pay taxes, raise families, volunteer, worship, organize, serve, and build communities.

They have already invested in America. Now they are asking to invest even more deeply.

But at the very moment America should be inviting eligible immigrants into full civic membership, the government is moving in the opposite direction.

The Department of Homeland Security has proposed raising the naturalization application fee from $760 to $1,330 for paper filings and from $710 to $1,280 for online filings — roughly a 75% to 80% increase. The proposal would also eliminate the reduced filing fee option and the availability of fee waivers for Form N-400.

That is not a small administrative adjustment. For many working families, it is the difference between applying now and postponing citizenship for years.

The real cost of naturalization is not just the government filing fee. It is lost wages, transportation, child care, English classes, document costs, legal help, and the anxiety of navigating a system that too often feels designed for the fluent, the wealthy, and the legally sophisticated.

For a nurse working double shifts, a home health aide caring for elders, a farmworker, a refugee parent, an elderly green-card holder, or a veteran’s spouse, the path to citizenship can become a gauntlet: higher fees, longer waits, more forms, more documentation, more scrutiny, and more fear that one mistake could derail everything.

A democracy should not celebrate citizenship in speeches while making it harder to obtain in practice.

The way we talk about naturalization matters.

For much of our history, becoming a citizen was understood as the successful completion of the immigrant journey. Today, the language too often sounds like it came from a risk-management manual: cost recovery, fraud prevention, compliance, security screening, background review, discretion.

Each of those concerns has its place. But when they become the only language we use, the future citizen slowly becomes a file, a cost, a risk, or a problem to manage instead of what he or she truly is: a future American.

A confident nation can protect the integrity of citizenship while still encouraging qualified immigrants to become citizens. A fearful nation raises costs, increases complexity, lengthens delays, narrows relief, expands suspicion, and then pretends the door is still open because it has not been formally locked.

But a door that only the wealthy, the fluent, the well-connected, or the legally sophisticated can navigate is not truly open.

When we make citizenship harder to reach, we do not just burden immigrants. We weaken democracy.

Every new citizen is a potential voter, juror, volunteer, parent advocate, union member, school-board participant, taxpayer, entrepreneur, caregiver, and community leader. Naturalization does not dilute the Republic. It strengthens it.

We should not reduce citizenship to a user fee. We should not treat qualified future citizens as customers purchasing a private benefit from government. Citizenship is different. It is the mechanism by which a democracy renews itself.

This does not mean abandoning standards. It means remembering the purpose of the standards. The goal is not to make citizenship feel like a privilege reserved for those who can survive an expensive bureaucratic maze. The goal is to welcome qualified immigrants into full participation in American civic life.

Congress and the administration should treat naturalization as civic infrastructure: protect fee waivers, invest in timely processing, expand language access, support community-based citizenship programs, simplify forms and procedures, and celebrate naturalization as one of the most important acts of democratic renewal this country performs.

At a time when Americans worry about democracy, it is remarkable that millions of people are still waiting for the chance to raise their hands, take the oath, and accept the responsibilities of American citizenship. We should not make that harder. We should honor it.

Over the years, I have watched refugees become election poll workers, veterans become citizens of the country they served, and parents beam with pride as they introduced themselves — for the very first time — as Americans.

I have walked into naturalization ceremonies with immigrants. I have always walked out with Americans.

As America turns 250, Congress should ask a larger question than how much a citizenship application should cost.

It should ask: What is a new American worth?

Every generation inherits the American experiment. Every generation decides whether to strengthen it or merely administer it. Our generation has a quieter but urgent responsibility: to remember that citizenship is not merely something government processes. It is something a great democracy cultivates.

I have never left a naturalization ceremony believing America had become less American.

I have only left believing America had become stronger.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for the people to dissolve the bands which have subjected them to a government which has burdened and oppressed them, and to restore the powers and rights to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among the people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation upon such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to seem to them most likely to them to effect their future safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shown that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under an absolute despotism it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient suffering of the American people, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their present government.

The history of the government of the United States in this century, especially under this president, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all tending to the establishment of a corporate despotism over the American people. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

On repeated occasions, the current government has manipulated elections from which officials have assumed their offices.

A government whose character is thus marked by actions that exhibit such arrogance is unfit to be the government of a free people.

Its current president has allowed his subordinates to suggest a postponement of the constitutionally required date of a presidential election, a step unprecedented in United States history, even in times of war and civil rebellion. While doing so, he has suggested that no further national elections will be necessary.

The current government has repeatedly undermined access to equal voting rights, and has promoted the power of the dollar to replace the voice of the people in elections.

It has compromised the security of the people in their persons, homes, workplaces, schools, travels, papers, and effects by sponsoring actions that harass the people with both open and clandestine searches and surveillance.

It has denied immigrants their rights under asylum law and the Constitution, subjecting them to arbitrary arrest and cruel and unusual punishment.

It has refused detainees under its authority access to counsel and security from physical mistreatment, in violation of international covenant, the supreme law of the land, and the English-speaking tradition of law dating from Magna Carta.

As has been the case for nearly two generations, it has failed to erect adequate safeguards against domestic terrorism and the massacre of children and young people in our schools and colleges.

It has long evaded international covenants for the protection of the environment, the humane treatment of prisoners of war, the security of nations from invasion, and the prevention of war crimes, thereby subverting the law of nations and the supreme law of the land. The current president’s actions in this respect are especially cruel and malign.

It has acted to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.

It has weakened enforcement of environmental laws most wholesome and necessary to the public good, has compromised others, and has allowed corporations to poison the environment on which the public’s health, prosperity, and well-being depend.

It has hollowed out the nation’s civil service and established bribery as standard government practice.

It has further endangered public health by weakening legislation that would remedy the people’s woefully inadequate access to essential medical care.

It has reduced benefits and medical care to veterans of current and previous wars and their families.

It has created a population that lags behind the rest of the developed world in educational attainment, life expectancy, access to decent housing, and prevention of infant and maternal mortality.

It has eaten away at the substance of ordinary people by denying them a living wage, and initiated class warfare in our nation by promulgating laws and taxes that favor the already wealthy at the expense of the people at large.

It has failed to protect the people’s hard-won savings from obscure and deceptive investments, and usurious mortgages on their homes, thereby undermining their material security and driving hard-working citizens into the street.

It has lavished financial support on failed investment banks and corporations while denying the working class, the poor, and the jobless minimal support for their existence.

It has at times deprived federal workers pledged to protect the nation’s security the right to bargain collectively to secure fair compensation for their labors.

It has promoted international trade regulations that deprive laborers of rights protected by international agreement.

Through economic policies that have extended over a generation, it has plunged one-eighth of its population and one-fourth of its children into a permanent state of poverty and hunger.

It has undermined the security of future generations and burdened them with debt by turning record federal surpluses into unprecedented deficits.

It has on occasion neglected to provide its troops at war personal equipment that is necessary to their safety and comfort in the field, and violated the terms of their original enlistments.

It has promoted the development of weapons systems beyond any rational military requirement, and equipped its armed forces with weapons dangerous to their users.

In like manner, it has evaded the obligations of international law and common decency by holding all humanity hostage to an existentially perilous nuclear arms race.

It has distracted the nation from the necessary struggle against terrorism and arms proliferation by initiating offensive war abroad without sufficient cause and has subjected civilians abroad to the horrors of combat, in violation of international covenant, its own rules of engagement, and the supreme law of the land.

In defiance of international law, it has threatened neighboring and allied nations with invasion and annexation, and misused our tax money to finance and abet genocide directed against a foreign people.

It has replaced the world’s respect for the United States of America with apprehension, contempt, and fear.

In every stage of these oppressions, which our current president has encouraged and promoted, the American people have petitioned for redress in most humble terms; our repeated petitions and supplications have been answered chiefly by repeated delays and indifference. A government whose character is thus marked by actions that exhibit such arrogance is unfit to be the government of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in our attentions to its individual members. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts to extend an unwarranted jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our common heritage here. We have appealed to their sense of decency; and we have conjured them, by the ties of common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. More often than not, they, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and common citizenship.

We, therefore, the people of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do solemnly publish and declare, that all political connection between ourselves and the present federal administration is hereby abandoned. And for the support of this declaration and the restoration of our liberty, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

United States politicians, even Democratic ones, no longer mention climate change, according to a recent report by Grist. Evidently, after their 2024 election losses Democrats concluded that global warming isn’t a winning issue. Their calculus is somewhat confirmed by a recent Pew poll that ranks climate change only ninth among Americans’ top concerns.

Meanwhile, hard-won US national climate data, scenarios, and analyses are quietly disappearing from official government websites. A prime example is the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a county-by-county description of likely risks from 1.5°C and 2°C of warming over preindustrial levels. This preeminent report on climate impacts and responses is a congressionally mandated, interagency effort to provide “the scientific foundation to support informed decision-making across the nation.” A clone of the government website is being hosted by Climate.us; the Trump administration has taken down the official site, which was here.

Those seeking to downplay climate change did a victory dance in May, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced it was retiring its RCP8.5 scenario—the worst-case trajectory in which humanity continues increasing its greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century. We at Post Carbon Institute have been saying for a decade or more that this scenario was unrealistic and should be dropped, since it assumes the burning of more fossil fuels than the Earth can reasonably supply. However, axing RCP8.5 at this politically fraught moment has simply fed a predictable gloat-fest on the part of climate deniers. For example, the New York Post editorial board proclaimed that the revision showed climate warnings had done “untold damage” to the public, the economy, and “the average man’s pocketbook.” Fox News host Sean Hannity asserted that a “top UN-backed climate change panel is now waving the white flag of surrender” and “quietly admitting that the Earth will not in fact be destroyed by climate change.” President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social that the United Nations had just admitted that its own climate projections were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” and called global warming research a “Green New Scam.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s becoming clearer that Earth is breaching the 1.5°C limit to which world leaders pledged, in 2015, to limit global warming in their effort to avert a catastrophic future. Earth first exceeded the 1.5°C threshold in 2024; however, in 2025, the global average surface temperature cooled to 1.44°C above baseline (2025 was still the third-warmest year on record). The 1.5°C limit is defined in the Paris Agreement by a multiyear average temperature; by that standard, many climate scientists expect the limit to be breached before 2030. Overall, Earth’s march toward 2°C of warming is accelerating. The question climate experts are now asking: Will it still be possible to keep warming below 3°C by the end of the century? The difference in impacts between 1.5, 2, and 3°C would be monumental: at 3°C, 3.25 billion people would be exposed to deadly heat-humidity conditions at least annually.

The US has always been a conflicted if not crazy country (after all, it tolerated slavery for decades and elected Donald Trump as president twice). Maybe now, with the nation at age 250, the extra CO2 that it’s breathing is starting to erode whatever remains of its collective rationality.

As I write this, Europe is emerging from an unprecedented heatwave in which over 1,300 people died from causes linked to high temperatures. Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating at twice the global average—but its people are unaccustomed to, and unprepared for, sustained searing heat. According to research associate Theo Keeping at Imperial College, London, “This heat wave would have been virtually impossible even 50 years ago without human-caused climate change.” On the other side of the pond, as the US is celebrating its 250th Independence Day, a heat dome has settled over the eastern half of the country, with more than 160 million Americans under extreme heat warnings.

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Also, an unusually strong El Niño is developing in the eastern Pacific. Expected impacts of this “super” El Niño include increased flood risks in the southern US, drier and hotter weather in South America, and prolonged drought and reduced agricultural output in southern Asia. Climate change is a contributor to the unusual strength of this El Niño: Due to continued global heating, ocean temperatures are now at the highest level ever recorded. While El Niño is a naturally occurring climate cycle, hotter ocean waters are driving that cycle to extremes.

One more result of climate change: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), a global deep-ocean current that, among other things, keeps Europe warm, is slowing. Cold meltwater from Greenland and Arctic sea ice is diluting the dense, salty ocean water that drives the current. The complete halting of the current before the end of this century, once considered a remote possibility, is now being given higher odds by climate scientists and oceanographers. See the recent Crazy Town podcast episode featuring Emily Schoerning for a fascinating discussion of this globe-changing development.

Collectively, we seem to have wandered into a peculiar new psychological-political terrain: As we approach the collapse of Earth systems and therefore of civilizational support pillars, rational worries are being replaced with delusions. The reasons are no doubt complex and include the rise of social media, the consolidation of media companies, the politicizing of climate discourse by fossil fuel companies, and the emergence of right-wing centi-billionaires intent on shaping the attitudes of entire nations.

But I’ll add one more possible explanation in half-jest. In his science blog, Ugo Bardi suggests that rising carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere, in addition to warming the planet, will also gradually degrade human intelligence. As evidence, he cites a 2024 paper by neuroscientist Richard Buxton of the University of California San Diego showing that “the oxygen-to-CO2 balance in brain tissue is crucial. As CO2 rises, the energy available to sustain neural activity falls.” The US has always been a conflicted if not crazy country (after all, it tolerated slavery for decades and elected Donald Trump as president twice). Maybe now, with the nation at age 250, the extra CO2 that it’s breathing is starting to erode whatever remains of its collective rationality.

If you want to buck that trend, don’t lose sight of the big picture (Earth is a system of systems, nature must be at the center of human concerns, and energy is the true currency). Adjust your views as needed to incorporate new data and events. Don’t succumb to political doom scrolling. And surround yourself with green plants producing lots of oxygen.

Thank you for your Attention to this Matter.

This Fourth of July marks the 250th birthday of a new kind of nation state — based not on ancestral ties to a land or on the territorial reach of monarchs, but on shared principles about the rights of citizens and the purpose of the state.

The Founding Fathers set forth those principles in the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal” and have “unalienable Rights [to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” To “secure these rights,” Jefferson wrote, the government must “derive just powers from the consent of the governed.”

America has come a long way over two and a half centuries, but today we face a grave challenge from within — and especially from our own leaders.

Of course, those founding ideas have always been more aspiration than reality. In a sense the Declaration of Independence was an invitation to struggle over the inequalities that marred the new nation: slavery and white supremacy, the subjugation of Native peoples, the legal subordination of women, the limitation of voting rights to the well-off.

In the course of 250 years, those struggles have achieved tremendous progress.

A bloody Civil War won what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.” Slavery was abolished and the Constitution amended to strengthen the government’s ability to safeguard the rights of African Americans and other people.

Women were eventually enfranchised and achieved formal legal equality. The lawless subordination and genocides of Native Americans were eventually recognized as the evils they are. The Civil Rights Movement repealed American apartheid and restored rights that had been stripped away.

But equality and democracy are openly contested today in a manner not seen in a century. Those who oppose the Founding Fathers’ fundamental values are using our government to attack equality and democracy. The good news is that tens of millions of Americans are fighting back.

America is and always has been a nation of diverse peoples — a multi-ethnic, multi-racial mix — and that is what the Framers and their successors had in mind.

Indeed, the Declaration of Independence complained that the King obstructed the “Naturalization of Foreigners” and failed to “encourage migration hither.” Enslavers brought millions of Africans to our shores, and America became their land as well. National expansion westward incorporated French, Spanish, and Mexican peoples into America, too.

But today the Trump regime seeks to erase the diversity essential to our national character. White supremacy and white nationalism are threads running through nearly every policy — from ending civil rights enforcement to discriminating against African-American military leaders, terminating refugee programs for nonwhites, slandering Haitians, and calling Hispanic migrants “the worst of the worst.”

Free elections, majority rule, and democracy itself are Trump’s targets — from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election to his unrelenting assault on voting rights and representation today.

Today, gerrymanders demanded by Trump are likely to eliminate one third of African-American members of Congress. The Supreme Court has erased the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Evidence-free voter suppression laws are making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots, while Trump seeks to outlaw voting by mail and his backers threaten to deploy ICE to intimidate midterm voters.

On this 250th anniversary of our first struggle for American freedom and democracy, Americans are fighting back against this war on what makes America America — in the voting booth, in the courts, in the streets, and in our hearts.

The lesson of 250 years: Democracy is hard won and may be easily lost unless we are vigilant in protecting it. The vision of our Founding Fathers depends on you, me, and all of us to safeguard it.

In one of its final decisions of the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court of the United States solidified its place in the onslaught of eradicating trans rights, in a ruling that revolved largely around whether state bans of transgender athletes violated Title IX and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In response to the question placed before the court of whether states could implement bans on transgender athlete participation in girls’ and women’s sports, 6 of the 9 justices said, “Yes.”

Outside of patchy citations and contradicting interpretations of legal precedents, the rationale behind the majority opinion of the court, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, echoed three key premises in the “sports context.” First, female bodies are inherently physiologically different from male bodies, which map onto sex-based athletic advantages for males. Second, regardless of these differences, girls and women should have equal opportunities to boys and men. And third, because of these differences and because of equal guarantees between the sexes, “competitive fairness” and “safety” look different for the female category as compared with the male category. Consequently, the only way to ensure equal sporting opportunities for girls and women is to keep transgender girls and women, or “biological males,” out of the female category.

Anti-transgender advocates in the broader “save women’s sports” movement frequently draw from these rationales, but also ignore the underlying deeply problematic and troubling considerations. On an ethical level, this approach undermines inclusive efforts and further stigmatizes transgender individuals. On a public health level, this reasoning deprives an exceptionally vulnerable population from enjoying the social, mental, and physical benefits from physical activity that should be enjoyed by all. And on a pragmatic level, these declarations overlook the minimal number of out transgender youth, of which even fewer participate in high school level sports.

Notably, of all the documented issues in and across women’s sports, there is no evidence demonstrating that transgender athletes, in any way, contribute to these inequalities.

Beyond parroting this tired transphobic logic, the majority opinion also points to other sports governing bodies, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, who have “drawn a biological line” to ensure safe and fair competition by banning transgender athletes. What Justice Kavanaugh omits, however, is that both organizations abruptly changed their policies following President Donald Trump’s Executive Order No. 14201, rather than in response to any scientific evidence or domination of transgender athletes (in response to a Senate hearing question about how many transgender athletes compete in the NCAA, NCAA President Charlie Baker infamously responded that of the more than 500,000 athletes competing, he knew of “only 10”).

While this ruling itself does not necessarily come as a surprise to those who have followed along with the US’ steady rollback of transgender rights, perhaps the most shocking element of the SCOTUS’ majority opinion is the brazen use of transphobic and misogynistic language in their ruling. “Biological males” and “biological females,” which are used 64 and 31 times respectively in Justice Kavanaugh’s 29-page majority opinion, are not rooted in medical terminology. Instead, these are terms that have become popularized and mobilized by anti-transgender advocates to reinforce a binary model of sex difference. This type of sex segregation is premised on patriarchal beliefs of male athletic superiority and female athletic inferiority, and has historically led to harmful body policing, racial discrimination, and erasure of intersex persons.

There is also reference to an “ongoing medical and scientific debate” surrounding whether transgender athletes maintain athletic and performative advantages after transitioning. What is absent from this brief discussion of science, however, is the concrete evidence that has shown the abundant health disparities experienced by the transgender community, particularly transgender youth. In 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, compared with their cisgender counterparts, transgender youth are more likely to report violence, victimization, unstable housing, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Similarly, a 2024 study in Nature Human Behavior found that anti-transgender state laws, including transgender sport participation bans, directly increased incidents of suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth by as much as 72%.

The (mis)direction of attention to abstract ideas of “competitive fairness” and unsettled science also disregards the rampant incompliance of institutions with Title IX. In 2023, Florida State University (FSU) agreed to add women’s lacrosse as a varsity sport after threats of a sexual discrimination lawsuit from its women’s club lacrosse team. The threat came on the heels of an 18-month USA TODAY investigation, which revealed that the university was egregiously out of Title IX compliance. FSU was far from the exception, however, as the investigation exposed how hundreds of colleges and universities manipulated their roster numbers for women’s sports to create a mirage of compliance. These Title IX transgressions emerged under the backdrop of several systemic issues in women’s sports, such as the decline in the number of women coaches for women’s sports, consistent underfunding, disproportionate rates of harassment and abuse experienced by girls and women, and media underrepresentation. Notably, of all the documented issues in and across women’s sports, there is no evidence demonstrating that transgender athletes, in any way, contribute to these inequalities.

Despite these relevant considerations, and as Justice Sonia Sotomayer wrote in her dissent, “to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.”

In addition to the immediate impact on transgender athletes, this decision prompts questions around how girls’ and women’s sports will now be policed to “catch” athletes who do not fit within normative assumptions or understandings of female bodies. International sports governing organizations, such as World Athletics and the International Olympic Committee, have recently paired bans on transgender athlete participation with implementations of sex testing via chromosome tests, which has long been established as a fraught, unethical, and discriminatory practice.

The impacts on youth and high school sports are, and will be, more pronounced. Organizations at these levels lack the same resources and financial capacities, meaning that, for high school athletic associations, sex testing would most likely involve some type of genital or physical examination. While these might be conducted by medical personnel (though the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal is evidence that this does not guarantee safeguarding minors), depending on access or finances, these could also be conducted by coaches, other parents, or officials, which prompts further questions and justified concerns surrounding training, confidentiality, consent, and protections of minors. These practices not only impact transgender athletes, but all athletes, regardless of gender identity or, to borrow from Justice Kavanaugh, “biological sex.”

The ruling closes with a half-hearted remark that “no student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.” What the SCOTUS fails to recognize, however, is that their ruling is predicated on the misguided vilification of transgender athletes, with impacts that will continue to ostracize transgender people in sports and broader society.

There are more billionaires in my district and the surrounding area than almost any other Member of Congress. Within fifty miles of my district sits nearly a third of the entire American stock market—over $20 trillion in value—and five companies worth more than a trillion dollars each. For years, I have fought for fairness in our tax policy. If America has been good to you, you must do good for America.

There are 938 billionaires in America. Together they are worth $8.2 trillion. The bill I wrote with Bernie Sanders asks them for 5 percent every year.

This is a simple tax on wealth. Every year, this tax evaluates the total value of a billionaire’s holdings, their stock, their companies, their real estate, and taxes 5 percent of it. Not their income, which they have arranged to be almost nothing. The wealth itself. The same way a family pays property tax on a house whether or not they sell it. We conduct this assessment on individual’s estates already when they die.

This billionaire wealth tax will raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. This is enough to establish a $60,000 salary floor for every public school teacher in America, cap child care at 7 percent of a family’s income, and restore the $1 trillion stripped from Medicaid and the ACA, with a $3,000 check left over for every household under $150,000.

The California Fight

California legislators have proposed a state tax to target similar excessive wealth. A proposition on the November ballot would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s 250 billionaires. Accrued over 5 years, it would raise $100 billion to save health care for 3 million Californians. I am backing it.

Opposing these landmark taxes, Governor Newsom has suggested a “minimum income tax”. The focus of this tax is billionaires’ reported income, as well as the loans they take out to live on. An income tax, not a wealth tax. That is the problem. Newsom goes after that income, but billionaires have very little. Most take no salary at all. They borrow against their stock, live on the loans, and pass the fortune to their children without ever selling a share. The wealth underneath goes untouched.

Bernie and I tax the wealth itself, and our bill raises $4.4 trillion. Newsom’s tax on these borrowed assets only raises 1/44th of that. That’s why the tech oligarchs support Newsom’s proposal. They hope they can trick folks into making the issue go away.

Same billionaires, forty-four times the revenue from Bernie and I’s proposal compared to Newsom’s.

Tax what they own, not what they report.

No Capital Flight

I was criticized for the bill, as well as my support of California’s proposed Billionaire Tax. Many said that the wealth flight from California would devastate our economy. They were wrong. In Q1 of 2026, California received more venture capital investment than the rest of the country combined. Then the billionaires spent millions propping up my primary challenger. He received 6 percent of the vote.

Tax over $50 million

And the tax should not stop at billionaires, it must reach centimillionaires. The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up, and one already does. Every year it has been introduced, I have cosponsored the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. It starts at $50 million: 2 percent a year on wealth above that line, And it reaches the money inside irrevocable trusts, taxed to the grantor who set them up. Moving a fortune into a trust should not take it off the books from a wealth tax.

Wealth Taxes are the Moral Test of Our Time

Supporters are right to call the fight in California the reverse Proposition 13 of our generation. In 1978, California voted for Prop 13 to cap property taxes, and that anti-tax revolt carried Ronald Reagan to the presidency two years later. This is that revolt in reverse: instead of capping taxes on property, we are taxing the extreme wealth at the top. This is a philosophical fight, and California is the test case for the nation.

So the question is not complicated. Are we going to stand with the three million Californians about to lose their health care, or with the billionaire class that would rather we looked away? Are we the party of working people, or just the party of the donor class? Are we going to return to the party of FDR, or keep telling ourselves we need to do what the donors want?

Are we willing to tax extreme wealth, or only willing to talk about it?

I know my answer. We cannot have a nation where 938 people grow $1.5 trillion richer in a year while a teacher in my district takes a second job to cover rent.