First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.

I’m proud of the work the FTC did then, and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically powerful corporations in America.

Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is—or was—independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.

The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy—and corrupted the nation’s politics—during the First Gilded Age.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations. But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.

Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.

That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people—and not just the wealthiest an most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.

We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.

Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.

Hence, Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).

The ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Monday marked the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.

But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.

It’s a bonkers theory because the framers didn’t say anything like this. In fact, their biggest fear was that the executive branch would become too powerful.

In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the bureau—again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor—said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

In a 5-4 decision, the Roberts Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason.

Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued, “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”

Two justices—Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch—would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote: “The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what were then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”

That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in July of 2024 that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.

Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary—to check and constrain him.

Congress has by now established 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.

But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.

Monday’s ruling overturns the basic idea—part of the fabric of our government for well over a century—that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.

As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of our independence from a king, the Supreme Court and our current president are doing everything possible to resurrect a king in America.

Donald Trump is the biggest failure in recent US presidential history. With the nation’s 250th birthday coming up, here’s a quick comparison to other US leaders.

He single-handedly tanked the economy with high prices resulting from tariffs and the Iran War. Trump’s defunding government agencies and scientific research, along with hyperinflation, has created an impossible job market (the uptick of unemployment nearly one percentage point over the past few years obfuscates the real job market). He has also gone after a national core value, democracy, attacking free speech whether in libraries, education, or protesting on behalf of Palestinian rights. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a clear symbol of his failed leadership: Trump tried to turn it blue for July 4th, but instead it became green with algae.

While LBJ oversaw an immoral, ruthless, and ultimately failed war in Vietnam, at least he passed civil rights legislation and poverty-reducing Great Society policies.

George W. Bush undertook a reckless war against Iraq; although unjust, one of the main objectives—to overthrow Saddam Hussein—was met, even if afterwards creating a liberal democracy failed miserably and, ultimately, led to ISIS ruling across swathes of the Middle East. Domestically, Bush governed during a recession in his first term that resulted from the dot-com bubble bursting, but he did not fundamentally attack the democratic core of United States, although the Patriot Act presaged the Trump era.

Because of Donald Trump’s monumental failure as a wannabe dictator, MAGA is fracturing and progressives are rising.

Joe Biden oversaw the post-Covid period during which inflation costs, which rose under Trump I during the pandemic, continued to rise because of international supply chain bottlenecks and the Ukraine War. He also gave the green light to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a policy that Trump continued during his second term. However, Biden’s domestic policies and legislation included the forgiveness of student loan debt, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the latter of which included the largest investment in clean energy in US history.

Ronald Reagan conducted covert wars against Latin American governments and his neoliberal policies ultimately helped lead to Trump. However, his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty were instrumental in leading to the end of the Cold War.

Barack Obama, like Reagan, got into his own covert wars, through supporting Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War and expanding drone strikes. He also was responsible for creating chaos after his “leading from behind” regime change war against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Yet, domestically, he passed Obamacare, which led to an additional 17 million Americans having health insurance. He also helped pull the economy out of the Great Recession.

President Bill Clinton, a scandal-plagued presidency during the pre-9/11 era, oversaw a healthy economy, but represented the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberalism and “tough on crime,” “super predator” policies. While flawed and foreshadowing what was to come, he would not be considered a failed president.

Jimmy Carter, a leader during stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis, has been perceived as a failed president. While his handling of each problem could have been improved, he did not create stagflation, which came about from a mix of high oil prices and the Fed’s stimulative economic policies. His offering asylum and medical treatment for the last shah of Iran in the US was in line with US imperial policy. Despite his crimes against the Iranian people and the new Iranian government’s demand that he be returned to Iran to receive justice, Carter refused.

Lastly, Richard Nixon, the most corrupt recent American leader before Trump, authorized the burglary to increase his chances of winning reelection and, after a cove-rup, resigned in shame. He also expanded the failed Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos, though he had campaigned on ending the conflict. Yet, he created the Environmental Protection Agency and reestablished ties with China, though to do so turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s genocide against a nascent Bangladesh. Nixon did attempt to curtail democracy but nowhere near as systematically as Donald Trump has during his second term.

At every turn, Trump has tried to erode US democracy and the good of the people during his second term. While campaigning to end both inflation and the Ukraine War, he has not ended the war and caused prices to skyrocket thanks to his tariffs and his immoral and illegal war against Iran. He has redirected taxpayer money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the US Agency for International Development (predicted to cause the deaths of 4.5 million children under 5 years old), and scientific and medical research to fund tax cuts for billionaires, expand the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by a factor of nine, and now seeks $1.5 trillion in Department of Defense funding (that’s $10K a year per taxpayer if divided evenly).

His Iran War caused about 3,500 Iranian deaths and 4,300 Lebanese deaths. While the US and Iran have a ceasefire, Israel isn’t abiding by it. As of this writing, Trump is still threatening the complete destruction of Iran, which is not ideal if you are honestly negotiating for peace.

From a US imperial perspective, the war has failed on every front: The Iranian regime is more powerful than ever; the Iranian population has largely gotten behind its government during the war; Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz now; Iran acts as a check on Israeli use of force in Lebanon; and the US bases, from which American forces retreated from during the fighting, may be closed in the Gulf countries and move to Israel. For those who relish in military victories, it is a loss for America.

Donald Trump may be up there as the biggest loser in history, but for now, it’s safe to say that he is the biggest failure in recent American presidential history.

There is an upside to utter failure though. While establishment Democrats have offered tepid criticism against Trump’s authoritarianism and immoral wars, progressives have made headway whether it’s the Mamdani-backed progressives winning their primaries in New York, Graham Platner winning the primary in Maine, or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)'s use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza. Even Tucker Carlson has condemned his past Islamophobia and vociferously condemns the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the decimation of southern Lebanon and Beirut.

Because of Donald Trump’s monumental failure as a wannabe dictator, MAGA is fracturing and progressives are rising. Anti-Trump protests have broken record numbers and anti-ICE demonstrations at places like Delaney Hall are pushing back as strong as ever.

Surely, just before the 250th anniversary of the US, these are things worth celebrating.

Mari Rueda's favorite color is blue, as is, sometimes, her hair. She used to live with two cats, two rabbits, a dog, and her tween child. She was a casual gardener and an enthusiastic karaoke singer in training to be a doula. Des Sanchez Estrada is a tattoo artist, poet, and animal lover who sometimes fostered orphaned baby possums and liked experimenting with vegan cooking. Des and Mari are married. One year into the Trump administration's violent campaign of mass deportation and immigrant roundups, they are facing a combined century in federal prison: 70 years for Mari, 30 for Des. Their crimes? Mari went to a noise demonstration outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. Des moved a box of zines.

On July 4, 2025, Mari joined dozens of others at a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Noise demonstrations are a commonly used form of protest solidarity; I've been to a number of them outside metro Atlanta jails over the years. People gather outside carceral facilities and get loud, because the people inside have no other way of knowing that anyone outside is fighting for them. People bang pots and pans, play music, sometimes set off fireworks. The vibes are generally good, until police invariably show up.

Prairieland sits on the discordantly cheery-sounding Sunflower Lane, 40 miles southwest of Dallas. It's a private prison run for profit by LaSalle Corrections, designed to hold 707 people, although it usually cages more than a thousand. Like every ICE detention center, it has a documented record of inadequate medical care, suicide prevention failures, and deaths in custody.

When police showed up to interrupt the July 4 noise demo, things devolved into chaos quickly. One of the responding officers had a gun trained on an unarmed protester who was running away, and Benjamin Song, a former Marine and firearms trainer, acted in a split second: He fired a shot at the officer, who sustained an injury to his neck and was discharged from the hospital hours later. It's obviously a very good thing that this wasn't a fatal shot—but we didn't need to look much further into the future for what Song was fearful of to come to pass. In Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed two protesters within a three-week period this January.

The people who show up outside detention centers, who defend forests and animals, who organize bail funds and drive people to demonstrations, are not doing it because they expect it to be free.

So: one person, acting on their own, fired one shot. The federal government then used it to imprison people in the vicinity, and some who weren't even there at all.

Song received a sentence of 100 years. Mari's 70-year sentence came down after she was convicted of rioting, material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, use and carry of an explosive, and conspiracy to conceal documents for allegedly asking Des to move the box of political literature. Five others who were present received 50 years each for rioting, material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive (which, to be clear, were consumer fireworks, the kind you can buy on the side of the road in most states). For comparison: the longest sentence handed to any January 6 participant before the pardons was 22 years, given to the former leader of the Proud Boys a paramilitary organization that stormed the United States Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election.

I think it's important to name two things here: first, how exceptionally long these sentences are, even on a US-adjusted scale; and second, how this criminalization of protest is not unexpected, it’s just the next mutation of the sprawling policing and incarceration apparatus we've built over decades.

It's not even a unique strategy. In November 1919, in what became known as the Palmer Raids, the Department of Justice arrested more than 4,000 people across the country. Much like the Prairieland defendants, the vast majority were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time—guilty, in the eyes of the government, of possessing radical politics: being Russian, simply being present when others were arrested, attending meetings, holding the wrong beliefs. The government eventually deported 800 of them.

The legal tools on display today are the same ones, just tweaked a bit over the ensuing century. The felony murder doctrine has sent thousands of people to prison for life for deaths they didn't cause. (A notable example that garnered a lot of attention: Ryan Holle lent his car to a friend in Florida, went to sleep, and was convicted of first degree murder when his friend committed a robbery and killed someone). Conspiracy law has been used to prosecute the periphery of alleged drug networks, “gang” affiliations, and social movements for generations. Mandatory minimums have produced sentences that are wildly disproportionate to the underlying conduct for as long as they have existed. The terrorism enhancement applied to the Prairieland defendants—because they had fireworks—has been used to inflate sentences and justify mass surveillance against Muslim communities, environmental activists, and animal rights protesters for decades.

The brutality of these sentences is not particularly shocking to the communities that have been living with police violence and mass incarceration for generations. It is a confirmation of what they already knew—that this is a country willing to sentence an aspiring doula and mother of a 13-year-old to 70 years in a cage for fleeing a righteous protest, while pardoning everyone who stormed the Capitol.

The Prairieland prosecution was underwritten by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), the presidential memo issued in September 2025. President Donald Trump also cited the Prairieland case in an update to his memo designating “antifa”—which literally just means anti-fascist—as a terrorist organization. His memo defines the common threads of left wing terrorism, among other things, as anti-capitalism and opposition to immigration enforcement. It’s being used across the country: in Minneapolis, 15 organizers were indicted in June under NSPM-7 for “overt acts” which included sharing flyers. In Atlanta, two Stop Cop City protesters were federally indicted two weeks ago for conduct from 2022—four years ago!—explicitly as part of the NSPM-7 initiative. In Michigan, pro-Palestine student protesters face federal charges for conduct from 2023. People who carry zines, use Signal, defend land and animals, wear black, or show up outside detention centers are now, under NSPM-7, potential domestic terrorists.

Prairieland was a detention center—our country’s modern answer to a concentration camp—before it was a crime scene.

I watched the Stop Cop City movement—and the state’s violent response to the community’s dissent—unfold in Atlanta. In November 2023, I sat in a courtroom as 57 people churned through arraignment proceedings on a sweeping racketeering case; defendants held neon green numbers and were split into groups of five because the courtroom wasn't big enough to hold them all at once. The rambling, 110-page indictment had charged protesters with criminal conspiracy for things like transferring less than $20 in reimbursement for harm reduction supplies, refusing police commands to exit a tree house, and signing an arrest form with the acronym "ACAB." These, the state alleged, were overt acts in furtherance of a terrorist enterprise. That RICO case eventually collapsed.

Many of the new NSPM-7 cases are not over, so they too may eventually collapse. The Prairieland defendants have pending motions for acquittal and new trial. The Brennan Center has found NSPM-7 to be wholly unmoored, legally. But "eventually" is measured in years of people's lives spent in federal cages.

What happened in Fort Worth last week is a message. The federal government is betting that sentences of 30, 50, 70, 100 years will make the cost of showing up too high. But the people who show up outside detention centers, who defend forests and animals, who organize bail funds and drive people to demonstrations, are not doing it because they expect it to be free. They are doing it because the alternative—a world in which Prairieland and everything it represents goes unchallenged—is unbearable. NSPM-7 is the architecture of a system designed to make dissent unthinkable, but it won’t work. What it will do is hurt people, and the question every organizer now has to answer is: How do we build a movement sturdy enough to absorb that hurt and keep going?

As Marlon Kautz, an Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizer and Stop Cop City RICO defendant, has said: "A plan to avoid repression is a plan to lose." The only meaningful response is to build protest movement infrastructure that can withstand it—through legal defense funds, rapid response networks, the refusal to throw anyone under the bus, the refusal to cooperate with the government, and the sustained work of dismantling the infrastructure that made these sentences possible.

You certainly don't end people’s willingness to protest by making those same people angrier. Prairieland was a detention center—our country’s modern answer to a concentration camp—before it was a crime scene. That's why people were there, and that’s why they'll be back.

In a seminal article, entitled “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes,” Stephen Stedman writes that “peacemaking is a risky business.” The greatest source of risk “comes from spoilers—leaders and parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests, and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.”

Spoilers can be inside or outside a peace process. Those inside have signed an agreement but fail to fulfill key obligations; those outside are either excluded from it or have excluded themselves. In terms of managing spoilers, it is important to determine why a particular party is refusing to honor a peace agreement.

Spoilers are already causing problems for the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the US announced on June 14, after weeks of Pakistani mediators trading proposals back and forth between the parties. The 14-point MOU was officially signed by President Donald Trump on June 17 in Versailles and by President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran the next day.

The Process of the Negotiations Following the Signing of the MOU

To develop the MOU into a permanent peace agreement, face-to-face negotiations were scheduled for June 19 in Bürgenstock, Switzerland under the auspices of Pakistani and Qatari mediators. But because heavy fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah was violating the first clause of the MOU, which called for the termination of military operations “including in Lebanon,” the Iranians declared that they would not attend and threatened to reclose the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President JD Vance, who was to lead the US delegation, also canceled his flight to Switzerland.

Although the negotiations were successful, several parties—Israel, Hezbollah, Trump, and hardliners in Iran—almost derailed the process and are still attempting to do so.

Nonetheless, on June 20, after Iranian state TV announced that Iran’s delegation, led by the Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, had arrived in Switzerland, Vance departed the US to join Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had traveled there earlier.

The talks, dubbed the Lake Lucerne Summit, began on the morning of June 21 with separate meetings between the leaders of each delegation with the mediators, followed by quadrilateral talks in the afternoon between the two parties and two mediators.

Vance presented a promising opening statement, saying: “Never before has the Iranian and American leadership met at such a high level... What the President has asked us to do is turn over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand that says to the people of Iran that if your leadership is willing to give up being a driver of regional instability, if they are willing to give up nuclear weapons ambitions for the long term, then the United States is willing to fundamentally transform our relationship.”

But 80 minutes later, the Iranians got word that Trump (apparently annoyed by the threatened closure of the Strait of Hormuz) told Fox News in a phone call that unless the strait remained open, the negotiators talking to Vance will “never make it back to their country—in fact, they will have no f**king country to return to at all.”

In response, the Iranian delegation protested to the mediators, saying this was an unacceptable threat to their personal safety and then staged a walkout. Their absence was apparently temporary, because Vance, describing the talks as “messy,” later said: “Yes, they did threaten to walk out... but we were negotiating well past one in the morning... so they didn’t [permanently] walk out.” In all, there were about 18 hours of intensive talks and consultations.

The Outcome and Substance of the Negotiations

The talks produced a road map for a final deal within 60 days and created a High-Level Committee for Political Oversight to manage the process and coordinate the three working groups who will report to the committee weekly: a Nuclear Working Group, a Sanctions Tracking Group, and a Monitoring and Dispute-Resolution Group.

Two crisis management mechanisms were also agreed: a Strait of Hormuz Secure Communication Channel (i.e., a hotline) to provide communication links between maritime security forces to “avoid incidents and miscommunication” and guarantee safe passage for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz; and a Lebanon De-Confliction Cell to prevent further military escalation and ensure compliance with the cessation of hostilities.

In the end, the talks were more successful than the first round in April in Islamabad. Vance called them “a good foundation;” Araghchi said the mediators delivered “major progress.” A joint statement by the mediators described “encouraging progress” and cited a “positive and constructive atmosphere.” The Swiss Foreign Ministry also welcomed “constructive progress.” Technical talks between the working groups began the next day.

Spoiler Issues

Although the negotiations were successful, several parties—Israel, Hezbollah, Trump, and hardliners in Iran—almost derailed the process and are still attempting to do so.

The success of the process appears to be due to the mediators employing “the departing train strategy, which implies that the peace process is a train leaving the station at a preordained time: Once set in motion, anyone not on board will be left behind.” It is a determination that the peace process will go irrevocably forward regardless of spoiling efforts. Other strategies that Stedman proposes for managing spoilers include: inducement, socialization, deterrence-coercion, and withdrawal.

Although a comprehensive accounting of each spoiler’s motivation and strategies for dealing with them exceed the scope of this article, some general points can be made.

Israel and Hezbollah

Long-term enemies, Israel and Hezbollah, reengaged in fighting on March 2, when Hezbollah launched missiles against Israel to protest Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination, followed by intense hostilities between them. Since the first clause of the MOU calls for the termination of military operations, including in Lebanon, this presents a dilemma, since both Israel and Hezbollah were outside the US-Iranian peace process and didn’t agree. Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly stated that since it isn’t a party to the MOU, Israel will not withdraw from Lebanon.

In response, the US established a separate mediation process between Israel and Lebanon (with Hezbollah again outside the process) which agreed to ceasefires of varying lengths, subsequently violated by both Israel and Hezbollah. More recently, Lebanon and Israel have agreed to a lasting peace and security deal, whereby the Lebanese Armed Forces would gradually assume control over all Lebanese territory as Hezbollah is disarmed; in parallel, Israeli forces would engage in a staged withdrawal. Hezbollah, however, rejects this and says that it will not disarm until Israel withdraws totally.

When peace processes are scuttled by spoilers and war resumes, the results are often catastrophic, with the casualties being infinitely higher than those of the original conflict.

Netanyahu, his government, and much of the Israeli public are disappointed with the MOU since it doesn’t address many of their war aims, e.g., regime change, Iran’s ballistic missile program, and its support for proxies. They also oppose sanctions relief and other economic benefits.

Both Israel and Hezbollah fit the description of “total spoilers,” who are often “led by individuals who see the world in all-or-nothing terms” and are opposed to compromise. “Any commitment to peace by a total spoiler tends to be tactical—a move to gain advantage in a struggle to the death.”

The “departing train strategy,” used by the mediators at the Lake Lucerne Summit, is a good way to manage total spoilers. Another effective approach is for the spoiler’s patron to warn the spoiler of dire implications if it escalates attacks, which apparently Trump has done, much to Netanyahu’s annoyance.

It has also been argued that Hezbollah might moderate its actions for now by inducement, e.g., the promise of renewed assistance from Iran if economic benefits accrue from the peace process, but if this allows it to rearm later, that would merely postpone the problem.

Trump

Trump is, of course, inside the peace process and probably fits the description of a “greedy spoiler,” i.e., one who “holds goals that expand or contract based on calculations of cost and risk. A greedy spoiler may have limited goals that expand when faced with low costs and risks; alternatively, it may have total goals that contract when faced with high costs and risks.”

Although Trump reportedly wants out of the war, his firm belief that any provocation must be met with a response of greater intensity inevitably causes conflict escalation. When four days after the Lake Lucerne Summit, Iranian hardliners attacked a vessel trying to exit the strait, Trump ordered bombing of Iranian missile and drone sites.

Hardliners in Iran

Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has given his conditional approval to the MOU, with the qualification that he will not accept excessive demands by the US. He also praised the efforts of the Iranian negotiating team, which is seen as an attempt to silence opposition from hardliners. As well, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership, the Supreme National Security Council, and some members of parliament support it.

The hardline Paydari Front, however, which rejects engagement with the West and considers itself the guardian of revolutionary values, opposes it. There are also hardline members within the IRGC. As well, segments of the population oppose the MOU and demonstrations broke out when it was signed, with calls for death to the negotiating team.

The recent incidents in the Strait of Hormuz are an example of how this opposition can manifest itself. Like Trump, IRGC hardliners believe that every provocation must be met with a greater response, which accounts for their recent attacks on US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, following Trump’s bombing. These hardliners were also outside the peace process and fit the typology of total spoilers.

Conclusion

The four spoilers mentioned above are currently presenting significant challenges to the MOU and must be managed if the peace process is to go forward.

One problem is that the lack of specificity in the MOU allows for different interpretations that spoilers can exploit to disrupt the process. This relates to how the MOU was negotiated, i.e., through the long-distance exchange of each party’s preferred positions, as opposed to the mediators sitting with the parties to explore their underlying interests before developing options. The current dispute is apparently related to Iranian interests to have control of how clearing of the strait takes place, i.e., with vessels exiting on the Iranian side, rather than the Omani side, which the US is encouraging. If parties’ interests with regard to this issue had been thoroughly explored during negotiations, a more specific formulation could have been included which might have avoided this problem.

In order to keep the peace process on track, the international community needs to be aware of the role of spoilers and do everything in its power to manage any disruptions.

Another issue is the inclusion of conditions in the agreement (e.g., the termination of military operations in Lebanon) that must be fulfilled by parties who are outside the process and don’t agree (notably, Israel and Hezbollah). Attempts to overcome this through US mediation between Israel and Lebanon, but with Hezbollah still outside the process, are not addressing the interests of one of the major parties and are thus stalemated.

It also appears that the procedural mechanisms established at the Lake Lucerne Summit to deal with such problems are not being utilized. A Strait of Hormuz Secure Communication Channel is apparently non-operational. Presumably, the new Monitoring and Dispute-Resolution Group could also be engaged. Hopefully, the mediators will quickly assist the parties in resolving the current dispute and ensure that these mechanisms become operational.

Of particular concern, is Stedman’s warning that history has shown that when peace processes are scuttled by spoilers and war resumes, the results are often catastrophic, with the casualties being infinitely higher than those of the original conflict. Rwanda offers a horrifying example.

Such an ominous possibility is foreshadowed by Trump’s recent post on Truth Social: “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”

In order to keep the peace process on track, the international community needs to be aware of the role of spoilers and do everything in its power to manage any disruptions before the conflict escalates again, perhaps tragically.

For the past half century, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, largely held sway in elections in both political parties. They threatened and intimidated those who opposed them and, when a critic of Israel was defeated, they boasted of victory, holding it up for others as a lesson. Last week’s Democratic primary elections in New York City, in which three insurgent critics of Israeli policies defeated AIPAC-endorsed candidates, point to what may be the end of an era for the pro-Israel lobby.

AIPAC’s approach to politics and elections was smart. Formed by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, they were connected from the outset to an impressive national network of American Jewish leaders, activists, and, more importantly, donors—all of whom they used effectively to influence members of Congress and Senators to embrace pro-Israel positions.

They didn’t just go to elected officials in Washington asking them to endorse particular pieces of legislation; they had local leaders in a congressperson’s district make the pitch. When new candidates were running, they’d have local representatives offer to help write their Middle East policy positions. Implicit in the visit and the offers were both the promise of support if the elected official or candidates did what was asked of them and the threat of opposition if they did not.

To back up their efforts, AIPAC spawned a network of PACs—political action committees—that would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to distribute for or against candidates depending on their positions on Israel. AIPAC claimed they didn’t coordinate the work of the PACs (which would be a violation of election laws). But, as most of these PACs were headed by AIPAC board members or their families and their pattern of contributions were too obvious to have not been coordinated, it was clear that they were.

In this new era a real debate over US Middle East policy will take place.

AIPAC was also strategic in the their operations. Not everyone benefited from their largesse. Chairs of important congressional committees and very supportive members of Congress who faced tough reelections received bundled contributions. When elected officials repeatedly stepped out of line, their opponents would be the beneficiaries of large amounts of PAC monies and bundled contributions from individual pro-Israel donors with ties to AIPAC.

Overall, the amounts were not overwhelming but sufficient to send a message. Four decades ago, we found total amounts given by AIPAC’s PACs and their individual donors amounted to about $4 million in each election, with a handful of candidates receiving the bulk of this. When a few elected officials who’d been critical of Israel were defeated by opponents who’d been backed by AIPAC, the lobby would crow about their victory, whether or not their support had been a factor. Their goal was to spread the message to other electeds: “Fear us, or you too can be defeated.”

With the end of federal regulations limiting the oversight of independent expenditures in election campaigns, AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups took advantage by creating “super-PACs” that could raise and spend tens of millions of dollars in each election. Instead of the cumbersome job of stealthily coordinating dozens of federally regulated PACs limited in the amounts they could receive from individual donors and give to each candidate, these unregulated super-PACs could receive seven figure contributions from individuals and spend that same amount to help or hurt the candidates of their choosing. In 2022 and 2024 they effectively targeted a handful of candidates who were critical of Israel and spent millions to defeat each of them.

In the aftermath of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, we’ve witnessed a dramatic collapse of support for Israel in public opinion—especially among Democrats. In this new environment AIPAC can no longer pick and choose a few candidates to make examples. They now face new challenges weekly. Over 110 US representatives and senators have supported stopping military assistance to Israel because of its violations of Palestinian rights. Dozens of electeds have charged Israel with genocide and hundreds of congressmembers and candidates have pledged that their campaigns will reject any support from AIPAC. In fact, AIPAC has become so toxic that they’ve been forced to create new entities or rely on alternates as repositories for the funds they raise to distribute to candidates.

Despite these adjustments, the hurdles being confronted by pro-Israel forces are proving to be too much. Israel’s behaviors continue to alienate more voters. The more money AIPAC spends, the more toxic its brand has become—even when they win, they lose support for their heavy-handed tactics. Which brings us to last week’s New York primaries.

The defeat of two prominent pro-Israel members of Congress by challengers who were critical of Israeli policies and supporters of justice for Palestinians and the victory in an open race of a candidate who’d been a leader of pro-Palestinian campus protests in New York represents a turning point in US politics. It wasn’t just that AIPAC and its allies spent millions in these failed efforts—these elections were upfront about Israeli policies and Palestinian rights.

What had been the hallmark of pro-Israel groups’ past involvement in campaigns was the lengths to which they’d go to not make support for Israel a public issue. They would raise money from their supporters based on Israel, but that would not be the topic of their expenditures. They would spend money on ads criticizing a candidate’s age, their “radical agenda,” or some of their youthful improprieties. But they’d never mention that their involvement was because of the candidate’s position on Israel. This was the case in these New York contests. Many issues were important to voters, especially frustration with the tired failed policies of the Democratic Party establishment. But they were also about Israel, and voters knew it.

The reactions from the pro-Israel side have been predictable. Some have accused the targeting of AIPAC’s money and influence as unfair or even antisemitic—as if for decades AIPAC hadn’t boasted of its money and influence as the source of its power. Others have claimed that as a result of this election, “Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” ignoring the fact that in the most prominent of the three contests in which a pro-Israel Jewish member of Congress was defeated, the victor was also Jewish and a self-proclaimed progressive Zionist who strongly opposed Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. There’s also a bizarre effort to accuse pro-Palestinian candidates and voters of fracturing the Democratic Party when for decades AIPAC did its best to fracture the party and country by forcing politicians to toe the line or face defeat. Finally, there is the desperate effort to dismiss the entire election as being just about New York and having nothing to do with the rest of the US, ignoring the fact that the national political landscape has changed with these same types of contests taking place everywhere.

The bottom line is that after a half century AIPAC’s hold over politics has been weakened. It won’t go away anytime soon, but in this new era a real debate over US Middle East policy will take place. Thank you, New York voters.

JD Vance said on Friday that the U.S. wins “either way” in negotiations with Iran. “If we make the final deal, then great,” Vance told HBO’s Bill Maher. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country.”

Just hours after Vance’s appearance on HBO, Iran launched attack drones on Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

So much for Iran being much weaker.

Pressed by Maher on whether Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed, Vance shot back: “What part of it is not destroyed? The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”

In fact, Iran still has a stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which experts concede could be turned into a nuclear weapon.

Vance’s media appearance came two days after he visited the Richard Nixon presidential library and museum in California to talk about his new book on his journey from atheism to allegedly devout Catholicism.

During his visit he defended Nixon for the Watergate break-in scandal that ended his presidency. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so,” Vance said of Nixon. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” It was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon” — not Nixon’s serious crimes.

Hello? The only conceivable reason Watergate might not bring down a presidency tomorrow or be a 12-hour story is the gargantuan criminality and corruption of the Trump-Vance regime, which puts Watergate in the minor league by comparison.

I raise Vance’s recent bizarro comments because in a few months he’ll be actively campaigning to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028.

He’s a more dangerous demagogue than Trump because he wraps his demagoguery in the apparent thoughtfulness of a graduate of Yale Law School and a serious best-selling author.

I’ve spent the last two days reading his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, a memoir focusing on his 2019 conversion to Catholicism, and can assure you of three things: First, it’s a serious book. Second, Vance’s mind is as vacuous and unprincipled as he is in person. Third, the book isn’t worth reading.

In one of the few mea culpas in the book, Vance writes that it was “boneheaded” of him — “one of the dumbest things I ever said” — to call Kamala Harris and several other prominent Democrats “childless cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” In the book Vance calls the insult, “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

What Vance doesn’t admit to is that, when his remark resurfaced during his early days as Trump’s running mate, he refused to apologize or express any regret for it. “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said then — sarcastically — adding that “if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” which in his view had made the entire Democratic Party “anti-family and anti-child.”

Vance’s intentionally provocative rather than illuminating demagoguery was in evidence again when he insisted during the 2024 campaign that the pets of upright Americans residing in Springfield, Ohio, were being “abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants “who shouldn’t be in this country.”

When confronted with irrefutable evidence that Haitian immigrants were not eating pets in Springfield, Vance admitted publicly that he was speaking, shall we say, metaphorically: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

It’s much the same with Vance’s recent response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa in the British city of Southampton. After Digwa was sentenced to life imprisonment, Vance declared that Nowak would still be alive had Europeans “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

Inconveniently for Vance, Digwa didn’t migrate to Britain. He was born and raised there.

Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s election — a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s Senate race.

Before running for the Senate, Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice president.

Why was Thiel such a devoted sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel saw in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the U.S. away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Bullshit. Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Thiel and Vance believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the U.S. is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the U.S. establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” — as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The next step is to foment so much division and bigotry inside the U.S. and within other major Western nations that people come to view those on the other side of the political divide as the source of everything that’s wrong with their lives — which Vance has been eagerly trying to do.

That way, they won’t look upward to see that the billionaire robber barons, plutocrats, and oligarchs of this second Gilded Age have grabbed most of the wealth and power for themselves. Hence, average people will trade in democracy for strongman autocracy.

Behind Vance’s demagoguery about the U.S. winning either way in Iran, Nixon being taken down by the deep state, childless cat ladies, the Democratic Party being anti-family and anti-child, Haitian-Americans eating pets, and immigrants threatening Western civilization is a deadly serious plan to unite the far-right of America and Europe and rid much of the world of democracy. If Vance becomes president, he’s intent on furthering the job.

Vance resembles Trump in every way — he lies effortlessly, he’s utterly without principle, and he’s intent on gaining power — except that he’s smarter and more ruthless than Trump.

Take note and beware.

July 4th, 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One of the foundational documents of the United States, the declaration has been taught many ways: as America’s break up letter, as a rallying cry for freedom and as an example of the legal assertion of a right to rebellion—derived from common law and biblical teaching. Influenced by the Protestant reformation, the Great Awakening and enlightenment thinking, the Declaration is an example of the complexity of our founding and a reminder of the important work of educating for democracy.

Yet, many teachers feel like it’s getting more difficult to teach today, on the eve of the 250th. Just like in the era that gave us the “Spirit of ‘76,” teachers, who are striving to keep the spirit alive, must both stay rooted in local life and draw inspiration from Europe.

In 1776, local life in the rebellious colonies was much more defined by geographic dispersion. It took time for word to travel between the population hubs. Reading was essential to revolutionary activity and democratic participation as the written word could travel with greater reliability to all corners of the colonies, including the backwoods of the likes of New Hampshire, my home state.

It was a sign of the times when far off places like New Hampshire joined the struggle for independence, just as it is a sign today that teachers in Granite State feel the string of modern issues that for so long have been more acutely felt closer to urban population centers. Consequently, it bears reporting that Hampshire was recently hit by a series of newly proposed legislation aimed at destroying the bedrock of our democracy, our public school system. These new developments trace their way back to 2021 when the state saw the start of a transfer of public resources to private and religious schools with the enactment of a voucher program. That program then expanded over several years, quickly eliminating a cap that limited participation based on income, becoming a universal and unregulated giveaway.

Those celebrating the special anniversary year of our state and country would be remiss to not also honor the legacy that binds education to our experiment in self governance. This can be found in the written text of New Hampshire’s constitution as a call to provide for the general diffusion of knowledge among of the citizenry (the link above from the Education Law Center identifies similar constitutional clauses in states across the country).

It is this constitutional text that the state Supreme Court relied on as it issued important rulings clarifying the state's obligation to provide adequate funding to all public school students—something the state had historically resisted. New Hampshire is consistently at the bottom of the list in terms of state contribution to public schools, forcing an overreliance on local property tax.

Determined to subvert the court's ruling, the legislature has opted instead to launch a full-on assault on the public school system. One proposed bill would push a rapid consolidation of local school districts—something that would cut against the very local control that New Hampshire has lauded since it created its own state government in 1776.

Another bill tried to replace the power of locally elected school boards by shifting decision making away to publicly unaccountable boards by converting local public schools to charter schools. Diminishing local democratic decision making through conversions also opens the door to Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), which are privately held profit motivated companies that have been notorious actors in other places, including New Orleans. The fast pace of the potential law has many concerned that the measure is truly meant to seed confusion and destabilize the existing school system.

Here, I should note that according to most measures New Hampshire's schools rank in the top quintile in the nation despite the destructive policies of several extreme legislatures.

Yet, the pressure has been especially palpable on schools that historically are already stretched thin. Administrators in these districts have tried to navigate rushed new regulations and the ensuing confusion, as well as changes to the already limited state funding formula. One district was forced to take out a $4 million private loan to cover its operating budget rather than face mass staff layoffs. The state has offered what some call predatory lending to financially distressed districts—all while threatening state takeovers of the very places that they have refused to provide adequate funding, despite the ruling of multiple courts over decades.

Most of this will sound familiar to those who have followed the broader privatization movement. Efforts to privatize the schools of New Hampshire are a collection of ideas recycled from failed “experiments” in defunding educational opportunities for students across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles (and many in between). Similar policies have been pursued nationwide, sadly. These policies based on a neoliberal theory, propose to slash taxes and reduce services, commodifying education to a good, another product to be bought and sold.

The thing is, education is more than a good, it's for the common good. By this, I mean, we all benefit when young people become better learners and it is fundamental to our continued self-governance to have the next generation experienced in the arts of democratic life. We need students to develop discernment, practice reasoning and decision making and learn to collaborate with peers from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Communities want quality public schools—and it’s time to rally around our community schools. Just as the founders of the country drew inspiration from European enlightenment thinkers, we too must now renew our own democracy by demanding our students and schools be supported.

To do so, we should redouble our investment in early childhood education, resource all schools to provide early interventions (a proven way to help students and a wise use of public funds over the long term as studies have shown the students who receive personalized support early in life are less likely to require intensive needs later in their educational lives). We must raise the status of the teaching profession; a career as a kindergarten teacher should be seen as equally as important as a doctor or lawyer. The professional status of teachers can vest us with classroom autonomy and respect for professional judgement. This contributes to school cultures of collective respect and responsibility and wellbeing.

Celebrating the 250th is about uplifting our democratic institutions—especially schools. While the private interests of a few have used dark money to fuel campaigns to defund our shared schools and shrink schools as common gathering places, too many well meaning folks have missed the point that the big money backers of school privatization grasp: providing proven policy examples at a small scale initially can be enough to grow the momentum needed to scale up and grow policy.

That’s why we need to be in touch with local educators, to support them, and to find ways to share what’s working at scale. It is that kind of resolve that makes democracy actionable and not just a wish. Don’t close your eyes to make a wish on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, recommit to protecting our schools, the cradles of our democracy, with policies inspired to help all flourish.

Governance is how we hold power responsibly and equitably. Government is just one way we organize it—and what is abundantly clear is that good governance is not always done by a government.

Since congressional Republicans passed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” 3.5 million people have lost benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That includes more than 800,000 children who are now at risk of going hungry.

It is just one of many ways in which the current administration has either actively harmed or abdicated responsibility for families and communities. This is a precarious moment, but it is not a moment for despair. In communities long abandoned by the public sector, mutual aid networks have emerged as models of resilience that show how people can govern effectively when love and care, rather than hate and scarcity, are placed at the center of how community members care for each other.

A Long Southern Lineage of Necessity and Ingenuity

Mutual aid is a term to describe people helping each other when they cannot depend on the government. More fundamentally, it’s about reciprocal care and collective responsibility, whether or not the government shows up. It can begin as informal acts of kindness and gratitude, and grow to become enduring, formalized systems that support entire communities. The practice has long existed in the United States, especially in the South, where Black communities created their own institutions and parallel infrastructure to serve the people when dominant systems turned them away or caused them harm. From immigrants, to trans folks, to members of Indigenous communities, many marginalized groups have similar histories of using mutual aid as an organizing tool to create systems of self-governance that actually serve them.

The power of mutual aid exists in recognizing that people cannot reach liberated futures while their present needs remain unmet.

Mutual aid is not only a crisis response. It can be a vehicle to facilitate civic engagement in ways big and small, and it is a way for communities to organize to sustain one another and show up as daily stewards of each other’s well-being. Just as governance is not limited to a government, civic engagement isn’t limited to voting or holding elections. Mutual aid is intertwined with social justice movements. It brings people together to meet immediate needs through shared resources, trust, and collective responsibility—work that sustains daily life while building the relationships and political consciousness needed for long-term power.

Governance Is Already in Motion

The power of mutual aid exists in recognizing that people cannot reach liberated futures while their present needs remain unmet, and that those present needs have become politicized by a government that has made it acceptable to deny certain people care, dignity, and respect. Mutual aid is not charity, which maintains a top-down hierarchy of giver and receiver. Mutual aid when done responsibly is horizontal, and undergirded by an implicit politic that we must care for and provide for one another. Mutual aid is about shared struggle, interdependence, and collective well-being

Engaging in care as a political act is how we build collective power.

For example, Project South’s Mutual Aid Liberation Center in Atlanta, Georgia stands as a living testament to the potential of mutual aid networks. The center meets community members’ basic needs while cultivating political consciousness, leadership, and collective power in the local community and for movement work across the US South. Mutual aid doesn’t separate services from organizing. In one instance, when community members came to the Liberation Center for clothes and food, they learned about a plan to install surveillance cameras in places that would disproportionately harm Black and brown folks. The same neighbors who met at the Liberation Center organized, banded together, and spoke out against the proposal at a community meeting, preventing it from becoming law.

Southerners on New Ground (SONG), an LGBTQ-led community organizing group and mutual aid network that functions across the South, is another powerful example of how mutual aid can bring folks from across the political spectrum together. The organization aims to foster real relationships between people by connecting those who need food with those who can offer it. When extreme weather events occur, those same people serve as solidarity squads who keep each other prepared and safe. The work demonstrates how relationships between people are fundamentally more important than political divisions, which become meaningless when the immediate need is a hot meal, a generator, or a safe place to sleep.

Supporting Future Governance

Mutual aid as a component of community organizing shows us that governance begins with people: those who know their needs best, build trust with one another, and create systems capable of meeting immediate and long-term challenges. Yet mutual aid is the work of community organizing that often goes unseen and unfunded.

Mutual aid networks have the ability to become the pathways of just transition toward a more just world. When we put mutual care and concern at that center of how we structure our society, then we can reimagine how we govern our resources, how we provide safety for one another, how we support each other in meeting our material needs, and how we must govern ourselves with the goal of mutual aid at the center. And, as we begin to practice this way of living on a day-to-day basis, then we can begin to establish the practices, principles and values, agreements, and social contracts that are essential for justice and liberation for all.

In this way, mutual aid is the foundation for future governance that is built on relationships between people, not politics.

Maybe you’ve heard the phrase means of production and maybe you haven’t. It basically means the tools, land, factories, machines, infrastructure, and systems a society uses to make the material stuff of life. Who owns those means, who controls them, and who benefits from them is one of the oldest fights in politics.

The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.

We fought about this hard in the early 1900s. There was a big movement around labor and organizers and workers, and a lot of those folks were actual communists. The communists were fighting for the means of production and the capitalists were fighting for it too, and they fought tooth and nail. The workers were unionizing and fighting for better rights and better conditions, and these were actual fights, with guns and sticks and knives, and people got killed, mostly workers. They fought for more rights. They fought for the 40-hour week. They fought for overtime. They fought for working conditions that were safe and not deadly, and in a lot of cases they won. They won those fights with blood. They won those fights with effort. They won those fights by putting things on the line.

You might have heard of something called the weekend. Not the singer, though I love him. The idea that Monday through Friday is the work week and the weekend is for your life. You might have heard of the eight-hour day, that anything over eight hours is overtime. Both of those were brought to you by the labor movement, a labor movement that at one point was empowered not to fight for the members of its own labor union but empowered to fight for people who worked for a living. That was their mantra. That was their goal.

Then came the New Deal in the 30s, the people injecting themselves into the production of the things we needed to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. We did it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. We trained workers, we provided health care, and during the war we even created daycare centers so women could go into the factories. It was a real rebalancing of our economy between capital and labor, with the state taking part of the means of production, engineers and scientists doing the work for the people, paid for by the people, and then used by the people. Corporations got brought to heel for a while.

Then we beat the fascists, the Nazis in Germany and Italy and the imperialists in Japan, and right after that the Americans decided the biggest scourge, the biggest fear they had, was communism and socialism. Because we’d gotten a taste through the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy of what it was like to share in the growth, to share in the fruits of our own labor, and there was a fear that if we kept tasting it we’d decide we too deserved more, and that would mean the Vanderbilts and the railroad tycoons and the shipping barons and the oilmen would have less and the people who did the work would have more. So we fought it. We fought it through the McCarthy era, with propaganda, with all sorts of ideological battles. The idea of socialism and the idea of communism both lost. And the Democratic Party started moving away from its socialist roots and its socialist ideas toward what would ultimately become neoliberalism, the system we’ve got now.

We went through all of those fights, the prisons, the violations of the Constitution. We perverted ourselves in order to fight off socialism, to keep the means of production in the hands of the capitalists, because they alone were able to properly guide our system. And then what did they do with our productive capacity? What did they do with it through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and right up to today? They shipped it off to Mexico and China and Brazil. They gave away the very thing we fought over. And why? Because it was cheaper, more profitable, and they figured they could do it with impunity.

But when you take away people’s means of production, you also take away their means of making a living, their power and their value in life, economically and socially and every other way, and then you’ve got people fighting over what little is left, and it turns ugly and it turns dirty. Look at January 6th. Look at the riots and the protests during the Black Lives Matter movement. What you end up with is a police force that has to oppress, and private prisons that have to fill up, and a military-industrial complex that doesn’t care whether it’s participating in a genocide or not, because it’s about money and power. And ultimately what you end up with is a country that can’t defend itself or provide for itself, a giant welfare state leaning on the Chinese to make our goods and to buy our debt. A nation that no longer holds its own means of production, no longer holds its own means of making a living, no longer holds its independence, not in energy production, not in the ability to build housing or infrastructure or the things that make our lives better. We import all of it, because all we need is money, we can just make more money.

And that only works as long as the money stays in the hands of a few. All that money creation, all that expansion of wealth, would lead to massive inflation if it weren’t held by a few, and you can already see what it does, because it’s caused massive inflation in indexes and in asset prices. Bitcoin and Apple and the stock market have risen to unreasonable heights, heights that are detached from any reality. Tesla is worth more than the next 30 car companies combined, even though it doesn’t produce as much as any of the top ten and doesn’t make more profit than any of the top ten, and yet somehow it’s worth more. Why? Because the money that’s been created has caused that inflation, and the inflation stays at the top. It makes trillionaires and centibillionaires. If that same money had been shared with the rest of America without creating more productive capacity, without the ability to build more housing or train more doctors or build more hospitals, it would create massive inflation everywhere, because you’d have more money chasing fewer goods in a system that can’t produce the things anymore and just imports them. The inflation is real. It just stays at the top, in asset prices, instead of showing up at the grocery store.

So the means of production was a fight that working people lost and the capitalists won. And then the winners gave away the spoils of their own victory to other nations, because they aren’t patriots and they aren’t citizens of this country. They’re citizens of the world. They’re detached and untethered, private jets and private islands and private security forces, and at that level of wealth they don’t need this country to succeed.

But here’s the thing. The elite, for now, do need us more than we need them. We’re the ones propping them up right now.

The question with AI and robotics is not whether the machines will be powerful. They will be. The question is whether they become another offshore factory, another private island, another asset owned by people who do not need us, or whether they become part of a shared American capacity again.

We lost the last fight over the means of production, and then the winners gave it away. We should not let them do it twice.

The red emergency light is flashing on America’s democracy dashboard, like a damaged aircraft teetering toward a mountain. Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should make us tremble for the future of self-governing republics. It’s as if we’re bringing back modern pharaohs to dominate our societies.

Musk’s SpaceX company recently went public with a (probably inflated) market capitalization of $2 trillion. SpaceX’s IPO increased Musk’s net worth by an estimated $188 billion, and the stock’s first-day surge subsequently pushed his fortune to roughly $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.

The concern here isn’t with wealth per se. It’s the tremendous power of concentrated wealth to distort markets, politics, and society. When you have Musk’s level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet (of which he already has several). You’re buying a media outlet, a senator, and maybe, in the case of Musk, elevating a president.

Musk has no inhibitions about deploying the power of his considerable wealth. He bought Twitter, one of the public squares of our time, and transformed it into X, a partisan and disinformation platform rife with hate speech and extremism.

We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.

In the 2024 election cycle, he donated $291 million to President Donald Trump and Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Mother Jones, “Musk expended 0.1% of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.” Mechanic notes “The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies.”

Musk was rewarded with a rogue government agency—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), named for a crypto meme coin Musk invested in—to advance a self-interested data grab and chainsawing away at government capacity. Public Citizen found that 70% of the agencies that were targeted by DOGE had conflicts of interest for Musk’s businesses. For example, Musk directed DOGE to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would have overseen X’s move to become a payment processor.

More dire still, DOGE cuts to USAID and other humanitarian aid programs have contributed to an estimated 750,000 lost lives. The projected deaths from these cuts run into the millions.

Musk was further rewarded with lucrative government contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other Musk-companies. In early 2025, The New York Times reported on a boost in multi-billion-dollar contracts for Musk’s companies as the Trump administration took power.

That was Musk as a “mere” centi-billionaire. What other power might Musk be able to wield as the world’s first trillionaire?

But it’s not just Musk. America’s 16 centi-billionaires (including Musk) have a combined wealth of $4 trillion. And the 977 billionaires on the Forbes US wealth list now own a combined $9.24 trillion, according to analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.

This isn’t a partisan concern. Whether it’s liberals like George Soros and Tom Steyer or right-wingers like Musk and Peter Thiel, this concentration of power and influence should trigger the flashing red light. It’s never a good thing for anyone to have the power of modern-day pharaohs. Musk was the top political donor in 2024, but five other billionaire households gave over $100 million to candidates.

Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare. It’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected. We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.

Oxfam observes Musk could give $100 to every person on Earth and remain one of the 10 richest people on the planet. A 10% wealth tax on Musk’s fortune alone, they estimate, could end global extreme poverty and lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line. Imagine the revenue and investment possibilities of a global wealth tax on all billionaires.

The planet’s first trillionaire is not a sign of economic health. It’s an indicator of extreme inequality and the dangers of concentrated power.

One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the Inflation Reduction Act.

At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the US; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to.

But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.

The politics of climate begins with… climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heatwave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that:

The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.

Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.

Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing.” She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.

Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes:

Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.

The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital,” creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.

The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”

But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to The Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.

Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm:

Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.

In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News:

“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”

I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.

Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.

But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the right-wing Reform Party, which, according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK.

The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said:

Jobs in Britain are important. We need someone in that role [chancellor] who understands that, and at the moment that isn’t Ed Miliband… It’s been floated that Ed Miliband would be chancellor, that would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs.

Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: Nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage:

News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures—for example, 3 in 5 stories during the May heatwave did not—while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.

I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:

The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come.

And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: At a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term:

Experts told The Guardian that the new investment data, as well as previous findings by the Confederation of British Industry that the UK’s net zero economy had grown faster than the rest of the economy and generated higher-paying jobs… [contradicted the claims of union leaders]

Miliband said: “I’m proud to have led a pro-business, pro-growth department in these last two years. This achievement didn’t happen by accident, but because of clarity of mission, government investment, and building not blocking. As we have shown in energy, progressive government in hard times requires partnership with business to secure economic growth, built on an active industrial strategy.”

Indeed, 40 progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero:

There is no alternative to the green transition. The effects of climate change are with us now. Miliband is right to oppose further expansion of North Sea oil and gas.

If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the 60% of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took right-wing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t.

And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week:

The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools, and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.

My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: Recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis:

Hedge fund Moreton Capital Partners is targeting $500 million for a special-purpose vehicle to trade multiple commodities that stand to be impacted by the weather phenomenon, including South African corn, Malaysian palm oil, and Australian wheat. The markets are underestimating risks, according to Moreton’s co-founder Les Finemore.

“We think it’s going to be a dramatic reshaping of the global food situation,” Finemore said in a video interview from Mexico City. “We feel like today the market is seriously mis-pricing that risk.”

American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make.

That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted.

It starts now.

During an election season, it’s natural to take sides—that’s what elections are for. But taking sides doesn’t have to mean dividing the Jewish community, or isolating Jews from the broader community around us.

As the Executive Director of Jews United for Justice and the JUFJ Campaign Fund in Washington, DC and Maryland, I lead a group that has worked for more than a quarter century to ensure that everyone in our region—no matter our religion, where we come from, how much money we have, or what we look like—can live with freedom, safety, and belonging. Unfortunately, in DC, we just witnessed primary elections that saw national political polarization impacting us locally. Disagreements and concerns within the Jewish community are intersecting with local electoral politics—in ways that I fear could leave us more divided and less safe. But there is another path forward.

The JUFJ Campaign Fund endorses candidates who we believe will use their voices and their offices to build a more just region for all of us, including Jews. In this month’s DC Primary election, all seven of the progressive candidates that we endorsed won. That includes Janeese Lewis George, the winner of the Democratic Primary for Mayor, and soon-to-be Councilmember Aparna Raj, both of whom have also been endorsed by local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Given DSA’s anti-Zionist positions, for some Jews, DSA’s backing is enough to warrant labeling these politicians as a threat to our community. Yet for myself and our organization, our personal experiences of these candidates could not be more contrary to that image.

When we feel alone and misunderstood, every disagreement can seem like a threat. Yet I know, from these past 20 years, that the way through this anxiety is relationships.

All of our endorsees, including Lewis George, Raj, and others endorsed by DSA, have shown up for my colleagues and me individually, our organizations, and their own Jewish constituents. They’ve cited our community’s needs and concerns as important to them, and recognized our community as part of their winning coalitions on election night. Even—and especially—when we have had disagreements, we have remained in relationships that allow us to recognize each other’s humanity and to build a strong Jewish presence in our shared political work.

At JUFJ’s community seders this spring, we hosted a dozen candidates for local and statewide office in DC, Montgomery County, and Baltimore. These candidates were Jewish and non-Jewish, ones who had received our endorsements and ones who hadn’t, DSA members and not, of many races and ethnicities—and they all came together to retell the Passover story and connect it to the struggles we face here in our region. I’ve seen these candidates build relationships and create space for conversation with our Jewish community over many years, and throughout this campaign season. And these relationships bear fruit during hard times.

After the terrorist attack against Temple Israel in Michigan this March, a non-Jewish, DSA-endorsed candidate wrote to one of my colleagues: “I saw the news coming out of Detroit and just wanted to say I’m thinking of you. It means a lot to be able to organize alongside you and others in the Jewish community to create a vision for a multiracial democracy where we’re all safe together. Hope you're doing ok.” Another non-Jewish DSA-endorsed elected official called all the senior rabbis in their jurisdiction on October 8, 2023, and has since worked to arrange additional security for Jewish institutions after antisemitic violence. In DC and Montgomery County, our endorsed candidates in elected office have voted time and time again to support funding for Jewish nonprofits and providing security grants for places of worship.

When I started at JUFJ in 2008, I didn’t see antisemitism as one of the pivotal challenges to address in our region. Today, that has changed. We’ve made dismantling antisemitism a key piece of our ongoing work, including working with candidates and elected officials to help them gain a better understanding of antisemitism, how it affects us, and what they can do. Unfortunately, we are living through a time when some politicians and community leaders attempt to build their own power by fueling antisemitism and exploiting divisions within our communities. They want Jews to feel isolated and alone. But isolation is not a path to safety. Anger and resentment is not a strategy.

When we feel alone and misunderstood, every disagreement can seem like a threat. Yet I know, from these past 20 years, that the way through this anxiety is relationships. Building and maintaining relationships with people who are different from me means that I have people to reach out to for a better understanding of our differences. As the great Black activist and musician Bernice Johnson Reagon put it, “Coalition work is not work done in your home.” To build coalitions with people who are different from us, we must resist the urge to isolate—despite fears and disagreements.

As DC’s next mayor and other progressive and democratic socialist candidates across the country take office, we in the Jewish community have a choice ahead of us. We can treat them as potential threats—even as they say they are working to build a city where everyone can thrive. Or, we can consider them to be potential partners and allies, despite any differences—and engage openly and honestly with them on that basis.

History has taught us that Jews are safest in societies and political systems that pursue true safety for everyone who faces marginalization and hate. That is why our movement here in the DMV has endorsed candidates who are committed to tackling antisemitism, and who are also looking out for my Black, brown, immigrant, and low-income neighbors. When we look out for and talk to each other, only then can our society be a place where all of us can live with respect and dignity.

"We have nothing to do with that." An American Medical Association staff member said this to me with a look of disdain on her face. I was at the AMA's annual conference in Chicago, urging the doctors in attendance to speak up for their imprisoned Palestinian colleague, pediatrician and neonatologist Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. My group posted up outside conference rooms and handed out informational flyers uplifting his story. Dr. Abu Safiya has been held in brutal Israeli detention for over 500 days without charge; you would think these details would trigger some sympathy or at least curiosity in his American counterparts, but the opposite happened. We were flocked by security guards, verbally harassed, and treated as if we were doing something much more nefarious than handing out harmless pieces of paper.

A male security guard was threatening to get physical with me when the AMA staffer walked past — but instead of intervening, she joined in with him, egging him on. I asked her, "Do you know why we're here, though? You guys need to speak up for your colleagues in a genocide." She shook her head snidely, showcasing an apathy that was almost laughable considering the irony of the situation: A staff member for the country's leading medical institution — one that prides itself on its ethics — couldn't even pretend to care about a Palestinian doctor being tortured by Israel.

It's quite maddening when you think of how much support the AMA gave Ukraine when the Russian invasion began. They quickly put out statements of condemnation that the healthcare sector was being impacted, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid were given almost instantly. It has been three years since Gaza's healthcare sector was completely reduced to rubble, and the AMA has yet to say a single word about it. A year and a half has passed since Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was abducted from the hospital that Israel besieged.

Dr. Abu Safiya before Israeli priso.

Coincidentally, the same week the AMA was meeting in Chicago, new photos of Dr. Abu Safiya emerged, the first in many months. He's shown handcuffed and alone in a sterile white room, apparently on a video call with the Israeli courts.

Dr. Abu Safiya after 1.5 years in Israeli prison

The new image of Dr. Abu Safiya breaks my heart. He's lost so much weight, and there's scarring and scabbing on his arms that weren't there before, obvious signs of torture. Israeli prisons are vile and dangerous; they are places where military personnel can go rogue with no fear of punishment and enact their most atrocious desires. After all, these prisons are run by the likes of Ben Gvir, a racist, sadist, and war criminal. I just don't understand how physicians in the AMA can consciously look at this photo of Dr. Abu Safiya and have nothing to say.

When Israelis are permitted to commit war crime after war crime, including holding medical professionals hostage, it sets a precedent. They're not only killing and kidnapping healthcare workers in Gaza, but in Lebanon and Iran, too. Is it just because these are brown Muslim people that the AMA refuses to speak out? For an organization that claims a commitment to human rights and dignity, its racism is loud, and its participation in the white supremacist attitudes of Western imperialism is staggering.

This conference was a place for the AMA to discuss policy, especially around advocacy. CODEPINK staff, volunteers, and coalition partners were outside and inside the conference every single day. Our presence sparked awareness and conversation among the members, and we learned that there were debates inside on an issue the organization could no longer ignore: Palestinian healthcare workers.

Although they didn't mention Dr. Abu Safiya by name, it's clear that the AMA heard our collective message and that the friends of the movement inside the AMA were emboldened by our consistent energy. During the conference's scheduled time to amend, remove, and propose new policies, a handful of resolutions were introduced about Palestine and the blatant attacks on its healthcare workers and infrastructure. There was one resolution in particular that was proof that our work was changing hearts and minds. It reads as follows:

RESOLVED, that our AMA supports efforts to protect, release, and provide restitution to detained noncombatant healthcare workers in all areas of conflict, including Gaza.

Ultimately, this specific resolution was not passed. But the mere inclusion and debate of the topic means that our persistence illuminated the issue of Palestine to every single person at the conference. And, because of that, the AMA delegates managed to pass 2 resolutions about the general "protection of healthcare workers and facilities in conflict areas."

The AMA staff member and security guards knew what we were talking about; they knew the story of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Whether they feel a moral obligation to do anything about it is beyond me, but we got confirmation that they knew exactly what we are organizing for. And even if the people in positions of power at the AMA don't feel inclined to do anything about genocide, it is very clear that the general body does care.

The AMA was founded, in part, to lay out a strict code of ethics for medical professionals in the United States. These principles explicitly highlight the responsibility of physicians to advocate for human dignity, human rights, public health, and medical access for all. What has happened in Gaza over the past three years has been nothing short of an abomination of human dignity and rights. Israel and the U.S. have bombed Gaza's public health system to the ground, and now the one million Palestinians in Gaza have been left without access to proper medical care for three years. If the AMA were run by individuals who actually practiced their own code, they would have been the first to advocate against medicide in Gaza. Unfortunately, the organization seems to favor quiet comfort over the actual embodiment of its values.

I am reminded of the photo that came out of Gaza just a few weeks after the genocide began. At a press conference outside an exhausted hospital, dead bodies of children in bags surrounded the podium, traumatized men stared at the camera, and some of the most courageous healthcare workers I have ever seen spoke out, pleading for the world to do something.

Press conference outside of Al-Ahli Hospital on October 18th, 2023.

I see the photo above, and the photo of Dr. Abu Safiya — these are just a handful of Palestinian healthcare workers making tremendous sacrifices to protect human life and dignity. They physically put themselves in the line of fire; meanwhile, the AMA doctors can't even put out a statement. It is well past time that they break their silence. If the AMA chooses to advocate for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, they very well might save his life.

Jimmy Carter’s campaign motto in 1976 was “Why Not the Best!” declaring everywhere he went: “I want to see us once again have a nation that’s as good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people.”

Dictator Donald Trump wants the opposite and is bringing the worst out of America. Here are a few of his metastasizing initiatives:

1. Championed the worst forms of energy – coal, oil, and gas – and depressing solar energy and wind power with restrictive policies, and even paying ongoing wind project companies nearly a billion dollars in your tax dollars to stop construction! Also, he is using many billions of your tax dollars to subsidize the failing nuclear power companies to build more expensive, unneeded, uninsurable, un-investable (by Wall Street), unsafe, boondoggles while his GOP takes large campaign contributions from fossil fuel and nuclear power corporate welfarists.

2. Encouraged the worst corruption of the Pentagon—more waste, contractor fraud and abuse—led by a foul-mouthed buffoon pushing illegal wars, mass deaths, and racism. Hegseth is despised by many high-ranking officers for his misogynistic firings and incompetence.

3. Brought out the worst from his toady Attorney Generals at the Justice Department—firing prosecutors and other lawyers for perceived vengeance. Trump gives orders directly to DOJ officials, thus ending any traditional arms-length independence at that Department. Trump has gotten his Attorney Generals to dismiss over 100 corporate crime cases, to decline enforcement of laws holding polluters and corporate criminals accountable, and made DOJ his personal law firm.

4. Encouraged the worst from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose puppet director believes that more methane, other greenhouse gases, motor vehicle gases, auto factories, and coal pollution are permissible for America’s children to breathe. EPA Director Lee Zeldin should rename his shattered agency and fired scientists “The Trump Anti-Environment Protection Agency.”

5. Suppressed or cancelled programs of scientific truth-seeking while publicizing pseudo-scientists who go far beyond healthy skepticism to peddle quackery about climate violence, pandemics, and vaccines that lead to distrust and disarray among vulnerable people wanting to protect their families. For Trump, climate catastrophes are “a hoax, a scam” and he is giving corporations the green light on dangerous pesticides (especially deadly to little children) which increase the risk of cancer and other lethal diseases. When you lie every talking hour of the day, as Trump does, the truth and facts have no relevance.

6. Trump is self-servingly wrecking the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Further cutting its tight budget via the GOP in Congress, the IRS has a grossly inadequate number of experts skilled in detecting complex corporate tax schemes and evasions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in TAX ESCAPES per year.

One of those Escapes is the coerced deal Trump imposed on the IRS to give him and his avaricious family immunity from past and contemporary audits and enforcement, worth a gold mine to the bragging tax dodger-in-chief. He has wrecked public trust in his politicized IRS, on which voluntary compliance by American taxpayers is based.

7. Trump has grievously brought out the worst from the Congress, finishing off what is left of the separation of powers, turning Speaker Mike Johnson into a panting lap dog and Senate Majority Leader John Thune into a more staid but ready heel-clicker. Trump has opposed any public hearings and investigative oversight of the Executive Branch, including an inquiry into his illegal firing of 17 inspector generals required to root out waste and fraud from their departments.

In his first term, Trump defied over 125 Congressional subpoenas – an impeachable offense if ever there was one.

8. Trump brings out the worst from major corporations. His dictates—allowing corporations to cheat, steal, harm, pollute, and violate with impunity almost any federal laws, most of which Trump has shelved by taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat—could fill a large book.. This is especially the case in lifting controls over poisonous corporate pollution and letting large companies decide for themselves how little or no tax they pay to Uncle Sam from their massive profits. Why not? He preaches what he practices as he amasses an ever-greater personal wealth using the White House as a profiteering office for profiteering.

9. Worsening the architecture of the White House and nearby Washington, D.C., are major preoccupations of this egomaniacal dilettante. He illegally tore down the East Wing and is building, without Congressional permission, a huge, garish ballroom to go along with other planned desecrations, such as the 250-foot-high arch. As architect critic Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post writes, he has turned “the reflecting pool from a serene oasis to a police zone,” bungling millions of dollars.

Day after day, thousands of National Guard soldiers are wondering what they’re doing aimlessly patrolling downtown Washington to fill the whims of Trump’s false claims about their ending street crimes in the national capital.

10. The Trumpeteer has brought out the worst in the mainstream media, giving preferential access to uncritical reporters, and restricting or prohibiting access to reporters who are steadfast and straightforward. Trump maliciously sues to extort money from networks like CBS and ABC, while approving mergers and acquisitions of media properties by Trump funders and flatterers expected to censor in his favor.

11. From the people, he has celebrated vice over virtue, greed over charity, obscenity over decency, violence over peace, police and ICE brutality over more effective standards of prudence and restraint by law enforcers. As an open, brazen liar, a delusionary braggart, and peddler of empty promises, Trump has troubled parents who see their youngsters mimic his abuses and foul talk.

12. He pardons hundreds of convicted violent criminals and other fraudsters and says he will pardon more crooks, even urging them to continue their lawless ways because he will pardon them if they are caught. As a convicted felon himself, he knows a criminal when he sees one. .

13. Trump has violated seven of the Ten Commandments and is almost never seen in Church, yet Trump manages to bring out the most extreme hypocrites from the leadership of organized religion, who support his violent, aggressive wars and alliances of mass murder, larger military budgets, and his waiver of prosecuting corporate crooks, because they like his anti-abortion stance.

Twice, he has assailed Pope Leo, who is insisting that Christianity be a religion of love, compassion, and peace.

14. His most fervent mission is to provoke biases and bigotry against recent immigrants and asylum seekers among millions of his voters who believed his lies about these desperate people, fleeing with their children from oppressive regimes and oligarchies long supported by the U.S. government in Central and South America.

Using words like “invasion,” “rapists,” “criminals,” he succeeded in defaming the overwhelming law-abiding and hard-working people harvesting our crops, caring for our little children and elderly, and cleaning up after us every day to feed their families.

Largely unrebutted by a cowardly Democratic Party, Trump’s fabrications threw his MAGA supporters into a frenzy, which he fed daily, obscuring his own employment of hundreds of low-paid, undocumented construction workers in New York and his servants in New Jersey.

Every society has its cruel, greedy, and bigoted inhabitants. Trump grossly exaggerated troubled conditions in the US to embolden these miscreants, then heralded them, gave them access to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, helped them get media coverage, and sell their books. Trump then intimidated or prosecuted those who exercised their freedom of speech rights to criticize or counter Trump’s depraved and baleful lackeys.

He has regaled Silicon Valley’s corporate digital child molesters, taken their campaign donations, flattery, and investments at the expense of curtailing the daily harm they are directly marketing to tens of millions of vulnerable children.

Presidents of our country, with their “bully pulpit” and vast media coverage, set examples in many ways for families. They can bring out the kindness and idealism of many Americans, as did President John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he and Congress launched the Peace Corps. Or they can exhibit to the world the cruelty and viciousness of the Trump/Musk illegal rampage that started with closing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). With the rupture of the flow of critical medicines, food, medical supplies, and clean water to those in need, the Trump/Musk Axis sealed the fate abroad of millions, mostly infants, children, and mothers, over the next several years, according to expert estimates. (See USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.)

Long after Trump is impeached and removed from office, his hateful, vengeful drive to bring out the worst from our country will linger and fester. Until, that is, the forces behind expanded goodwill and fair play, peace and justice manifest themselves at the polls, the civic and political arenas, and the civic education and experiences within our repurposed elementary and secondary schools.

History repeatedly teaches us that principles of peace, justice, and opportunity always enjoy overwhelming public support when polled compared to ideologies of corruption, violence, and greed.

So, it is entirely in our hands to bring these preferences into the daily reality of the people, their children and grandchildren, and future generations who deserve better.

Separating the meaning of Jewish identity and learning, distinct from the Israeli state and its underlying doctrine, is worthwhile work.

It's also urgent work, overdue. This is a maniacal, genocidal post from Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir:

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Repulsion from Israel's actions naturally affects how Jews are seen in the world, how we walk among others in the world—and ironically, for Zionists, validates their conception of the gentile world as forever hostile to Jews.

The existence of the State of Israel, the merger of Judaism with Jewish nationalism, has unavoidably changed what being a Jew is.

Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.

Zionist theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 of the way that the Jewish state would have to be constructed, that “it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”

Colonization would have to continue “only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

When Jabotinsky wrote this, Jews were immigrating to Palestine under British protection to fulfill the League of Nations Mandate promise of a yet-to-be defined “Jewish homeland” there.

Population "transfer" to create a Jewish majority state was envisioned by Zionist leadership, from founder Theodor Herzl onwards.

The United Nations Palestine partition plan of 1947 and resulting civil conflict provided the opportunity for Jewish militias and then the Israeli army to target and empty communities—to become sites for Jewish settlements with Hebrew names.

Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 was accomplished by dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine—the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs from what would become Israel. This is called the Nakba (catastrophe) in Arabic.

Those Palestinians remain exiled despite a pledge from Israel to the United Nations in 1949 to accept returning refugees, as part of their admission as a member state.

The “restoration” of our sovereignty inflicted a catastrophe on Palestinians which will be part of Jewish history forever.

The creation of the State of Israel is presented as necessary Jewish self-assertion.

In September 1948, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban wrote that in a “just world” consultation and agreement would have been preferred. “But the world is more realistic than just. The doctrine of ‘accomplished fact’ has been entirely vindicated against that of ‘prior consent.’”

That doctrine forces for Jews a necessity of either identifying with Israel, or maintaining the identity of “Jewish-not Zionist,” an awkward thing to maintain while well-provisioned Jewish organizations present Zionism as Judaism.

That doctrine also destroyed Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, and as far as India. Exercising naked power to force Arabs from their homes to privilege Jews in Palestine poisoned the place of Jews who lived for many centuries as citizens in neighboring societies.

Thinking of the vulnerability and degradation of Jews in the past, I struggle to reconcile those moments with this moment of Jews as a menace—and Jewish nationalism as a personal imprisonment.

The Zionist movement which descended on Palestine to “ingather the exiles” is now a state dedicated to a philosophy of Jewish redemption by violence, “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority,” as described by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others in a 1948 letter to The New York Times, of the faction that is now in control of Israel’s psyche.

Israel operates with a logic in which opponents to the Jewish state intend a Holocaust—mindless, causeless enemies as in the Passover or Purim or Hanukkah stories.

While most Jews in the diaspora live in accommodation and cooperation with gentile co-nationals, Israel has sacralized and militarized the “they always turn on us” belief.

We live in two models of Jewishness—the Jew living in civil cooperation with gentiles, and the militant Jewish supremacist in Palestine.

The contradiction of those two models of Jewishness makes us a problem to ourselves and others, with no clarity.

Complicating this is our belief in the grandeur of our own culture and learning.

As a child, I was buoyed by stories of Jewish learning and achievement—unlikely persistence through the ages—uniqueness.

I felt I was one of a fine, special group.

I also absorbed the other, paired, narrative of Jewish history. In the ritual reading of the Haggadah text each Pesach, I was reminded that we were enslaved in Egypt, and that in every generation They rise up to destroy us. And we survive, achieve, and show our high quality.

The theme of Jewish life is that we were chosen for a great mission, and have been persecuted since.

In these narratives, living a Jewish life is fulfilling the endowment of Torah and generations of scholarship, earnest and humane— targeted by malice, by jealousy from peoples less… fortunate? Not Jewish.

It may be that feelings Jews have about gentiles are as problematic as prejudices gentiles have against Jews. We suffer from not only how gentiles may see us, but limitations on how we see non-Jews.

Mitch Abidor, in the magazine Jewish Currents, describes a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint about a non-Jewish girl who tosses a flaming baton and catches it, and and its significance to the “nice Jewish boys in the stands." Portnoy observes that:

there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.

Legendary Forverts newspaper editor Abraham Cahan wrote in his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, of Talmudic education (an experience Cahan had shared with his character during his youth in Lithuania). The process of extended reasoning and disputation in religious study seemed the acme of human ratiocination:

"Can you fathom the sea? Neither can you fathom the depths of the Talmud," as we would put it. We were sure that the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child's play as compared to the Talmud.

This feeling of higher thought as a specifically Jewish achievement is useful to surface in discussion of how we see our not-Jewish fellows.

Torah study may be mostly a treasure of the observant now, but the habits and outlook of study and productive disputation persist. Might the assumption of superlative Jewish quality also?

To accept the World-Against-the-Jew construct, one must accept the idea that there is a unique quality to Jews.

Our religion revolves around identity, descent from tribes in a substantive relationship with the true God. When we pray, we are praying to a god that particularly cares that we are Jews doing the praying.

The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

The Yiddish phrase "pintele yid," Jewish spark or kernel, expresses the belief that there is an irreducible, distinct core of Jewishness that is in a born Jew, observant or secular or ignorant.

The story told about converts is that their nefesh (soul, spirit) was there at Sinai to hear Moses tell God’s covenant with his people..

This resolves Judaism as an embrace of Torah—fudges the membership story, in truth.

Is “Jew” a coherent national category, as we include Indians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Poles, and Romanians?

When devotion to Torah is the center of this identity, it does not require ruling from imagined supremacy.

The poison brewed when mixed with a colonial enterprise designed at a time Britain could design a plan “natives” had to accept.

The Israeli government recognizes Israeli citizenship for Jews, Arabs, and others, but then records the “nationality” of the citizen separately, so that I, an American citizen, in their system share the same “nationality”—“Jewish”—as an Israeli Jew.

Ultimately the identity is based on magic, superstition, folkways, and spiritual truth. Am I required to believe in the existence of "The Jewish Nation" as the term is meant in the Zionist state?

The Zionist proposition for the world’s relationship with Jews is, “Love us, love our land.” This is articulated in their claim, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

In 1906, Jewish educator Solomon Schechter said that he feared assimilation of Jews, loss of identity, “even more than pogroms.” He wrote that in the Jewish “exile,” the Zionist project could form “the great bulwark against assimilation… an opposing force.”

As we Jews "fight for our existence," is it because diminishment of our self-held special place in the world feels like death?

American Jewish organizations promote connection with the State of Israel to nurture Jewish identity of the young.

Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.

A popular 1970s Israeli song had the refrain, "The Whole World is Against Us.” It concluded,

The whole world is against us...
This song was taught to us
By our old fathers,
And we too shall sing it,
And after us—the sons.
And great-grandchildren of great-grandchildren will sing
Here in the Land of Israel,
And anyone who is against us
Can go to hell!
The whole world is against us…

It’s not clear how we wish to be regarded.

At the Enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation of Jews, converting from toleration to equal citizenship, there was a loss of community autonomy, statutory difference—the loss of definition as members of a nation within the nation.

Even stigmatized, community autonomy had its advantages. Jewish communities had their own recognized governance, internal taxation, regulation of their own personal affairs, and laws, courts.

That concept of modern citizenship as individual equality conflicts with Jews residing as their own self-governing polity with representatives to the larger society, as was often the practice. This is sacrificed with equal citizenship, where all live under the same law.

Max Nordau, speaking to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, made interesting comments that when Jews lived isolated in ghettos, they had society of their own. He says that while Emancipation had its intoxication, it left Jews in Western Europe in “misery” because they could not thrive as Jews among Jews.

We are people; people do evil.

Acceptance becomes a stressor; the more we become like our fellow nationals, the more desperate to maintain a difference.

By the logic of Nordau, the most salutary circumstance for Jewish happiness is isolation from the larger society—or living as the majority the Jewish state achieved in 1948.

UK Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in a 2016 address on antisemitism, presents the existence of Israel as a Jewish human right. “Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.” (Emphasis added.)

Now, we've acquired the belief we're only meant to be happy if we rule our own “Jewish” land? Or only be safe if we do? The rationale toggles between the two, that Israel represents Jewish safety or Jewish fulfillment.

Jewish history treasures—curates—narratives of persecution. The meaning of that must be considered. If we have grievance, contempt, or pity for those outside our circle, are we healthy?

For me, there has been not just a feeling of kinship but a higher expectation of Jews, expecting less of gentiles as a rule. Prejudice absorbed growing up is painful to examine.

The origin story of our people—chosen by God to a special mission of glorifying Him and his laws—may instill confidence, a sense of identity, but I think is “worth another think” as a problem when, as Peter Beinart points out, it is empowered as a state.

He writes, “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”

Beinart's comment suggests that many Jews now have Zionism as their faith—and faiths are based on taking certain premises as fact. It may be a creator of a particular sort, or in this case a belief in the Jewish people as a reconstituted modern nation-state. In any case, faiths can't be debated.

Beinart, religiously observant and well-grounded in Jewish study, called his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and gave it the subtitle, A Reckoning. The necessary reckoning he forecasts for Jews I think will be ugly and with false starts and detours, and will necessitate re-evaluations of how we prejudge gentiles.

We number perhaps 16 million worldwide, and we Jews are at the pivot point of the USA’s wars on Iran, Iraq, and all sorts of involvement in bolstering Israel’s impunity in its neighborhood. Things at pivot points can get caught and mangled.

Dr. Michael A. Meyer wrote of American Jews: “For them the state is the flagship of the people to which they belong. Their Jewish identity is as much ethnic as religious, and their religious expression of that identity as much as affirmation of their peoplehood and the importance they attribute to preserving it…”

Polling shows this identification with Israel is less true than when written in 1994.

The American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded in 1943, is reviving the struggle within the Jewish community for Jewish life "free from the Zionist idea of Judaism as a nationality or the elevation of one nation above others…grounded in justice, solidarity, and humility."

We maybe are preserving ourselves without attention to what we become. An organized project to dispossess Arabs from their homes leaves us as what sort of people, declaring populations "human animals," and promising a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”?

Israel is now again attempting a land grab of south Lebanon, methodically blowing up evacuated villages so that Lebanese have no homes to return to.

Israel has no declared borders, only armistice lines after various wars since 1948. It has claimed and settled part of Syria, and in a de facto manner acquired all of mandate Palestine, settled it with Jews, but without recognizing citizenship of non-Jews living there. Gaza, populated in majority by refugees from the 1948 Nakba, it tried to settle, and strangled it at the best of times.

Israel has, since 1948, and especially since the 1967 occupation, arbitrarily detained 1 million Palestinians, and subjected them to routine beatings, humiliation, and abuse, reaching new depths since October 7, 2023.

This abuse is enabled by indifference to the humanity of a classification of people—in this case non-Jews.

Having known abuse from both pogromists and cruel soldiers, we—we?—unleash them on Arab civilians.

Israel is a significant producer in the international arms trade, especially in mechanisms of surveillance and control of civilian populations.

One thing is taboo: anything other than seeing innocence in the actions of Jews in the world.

Cruelty, persecution, crimes against humanity are in a blind spot when it's “our own people” as perpetrators. Exceptions to a virtuous rule.

There is anger at Israel's blockade, bombing, and occupation of Gaza, and West Bank state terrorism, and the reaction of Israel defenders is often that the charged offenses match historic antisemitic canards—thus are invalid.

The problem with enumerating the package of common antisemitic slurs is that they always seem to create a kind of immunity: If something has been falsely charged of Jews, one needn't avoid the crime charged?

Is it a matter of seeing ourselves as others see us? Is it a matter of the struggle for some objectivity? Is every ethnic or tribal identity a devaluing of those outside it?

For me to see the Jewish story with objectivity is as impractical as performing a non-trivial surgical operation on myself.

Do I touch on something unmentionable, “feed antisemitism,” by separating our human value from our outsize mythologizing?

I defend myself: It cannot be betrayal to think of Hillel's teaching, the universal "What is hateful to you, do not do to another," with an eye to truths we thought established in the Nuremberg trials, not to mention learned from the object lesson of the Nuremberg rallies.

Zionist Israel is Chelm. The legendary town of Chelm (not the real Polish city) in Yiddish stories is inhabited by remarkably foolish people who begin from foolish premises and build on them to ridiculous solutions.

The first stupid premise—that “Israel” can be taken from “Palestine”—is compounded by more and more technological excellence in killing and surveillance.

For believers that the Jewish story must include a modern nation-state in Palestine, it’s a certainty that I am “betraying my people” by writing out these thoughts. Or, naive to the innate antisemitism of the world.

In the Passover ritual meal, the “wicked son” asks, “What does this mean to you?” By not asking what the Exodus story means to “us,” he separates himself from The Jewish People, showing his wickedness.

I think the only irredeemable sin, among Jews, is faithlessness to “Our People”—aligning with gentiles. As a comment posted on a Zionist website stated, “True Jewish morality begins with loyalty to our own people.”

If all Jews compose a Jewish nation in a literal rather than spiritual, figurative sense, the weight of treason comes into play for faithlessness.

Danish expatriate Israeli Jonathan Ofir wrote in an online essay titled “I Am Freed from Zionism”:

It's hard to define the line where people sense you're not loyal. But it is a kind of social control with cult characteristics. It’s like people have the understanding that you’ve gone too far and now you’re not with "us" but against "us."

Ofir's provocative suggestion that Zionism is cultish makes me ask if there is some vulnerability that Zionism exploits in Jewish hyper-fixation on identity. Are we prone to the cultish division of the world into members and outsider "enemies" that installs an inner policeman to monitor for betrayal?

Certainly there is the cult characteristic of devaluing views from outside of the cult as worthless, ill-intentioned.

Intrinsic to Zionist belief is that Jews are historically vulnerable and non-Jews are unreliable, and that Israeli security is achieved by "realism”—relying on military superiority, "teaching" non-Jews lessons by massive retaliation and iron control.

Zionism began as a secular movement. The secular seamlessly slid to the sanctified, as the words of the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah,” with no mention of the deity, evoke the “Jewish soul,” necessarily implicating a God that made Jewish souls.

Considered with a step back, it has impressive gravity, being a selected people of God. Add the patina of antiquity and who can match the distinction?

The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.

When arms and sovereignty are grafted to this identity, we have Jewish identity transmogrified to something new—Jewish religious-nationalist power.

With Jews’ role of noble victim is the gentiles’ role of ignoble victimizers. In practice, we may view non-Jews as defective, lacking, having morally-vacant animality.

There is a witticism of uncertain origin, “Jews are like everyone else, only moreso.” I’d leave off the last part, and just say we’re human, with all the human prides and failings.

We are people; people do evil.

Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov has concluded that Zionism “became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent, and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective.”

Bartov continues that in Israel there was “a radical transformation of Judaism itself into a political religion, intertwined with a certain translation of Zionism... In Israel the specific version has, in effect, produced divine or rabbinic legitimation for genocide.”

Zionism becomes revenge, for correction of every humbled moment of Jews in history, and glorification of the god that selected us—to wreak on Palestinians reversal of centuries of obstruction of God’s promise of Jews being mighty and numerous in our land.

Fatally, omitted in the fury is remembering the promise of the land is conditioned on faithful following of God's mitzvot.

The “eternal Jewish vulnerability” narrative is available in Jewish learning to be turned to Zionist purposes. In February, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu laid out concisely the mental landscape of Zionism grafted to Judaism—eternal world antisemitism:

If you look at the course of Jewish history, then what you see is this was a fairly constant phenomenon:

I mean, once we lost our land, once we were scattered among the Nations, we were ready prey. We were ready prey. And eventually, when there was societal change the Jews always were blamed… And these attacks on the Jews were always preceded by vilification. Horrible vilifications that even so-called civilized and educated people adhered to: “The Jews poisoned the wells. The Jews spread vermin. The Jews slaughtered Christian children to use their blood for baking matzos.”

And this goes into modern times. The Nazis basically said the same thing. And all these vituperations, all these slanders were always accompanied, eventually, by exile or pogroms or mass murder.

That's what happened to the Jews one country after another into modern times.

PM Netanyahu then defines the rationale for whatever violence is necessary to preserve the Jewish state in Palestine:

The great change in Jewish history which [Theodor] Herzl saw very clearly is that when the Jews have their own independent state they will have the independent power to roll back the physical attacks against us.

Functionally, it is the strategy of a paranoid person holed up with weapons. As in any religion’s foundational literature, justifications can be found. In the Talmud is the imperative, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”

In territories under Israeli control, it has fostered land stealing and ongoing terrorizing of Arab residents by Jewish “settlers” drunk on ethnic self-assertion, protected by the army of the Israeli state.

When we live among others, the paradox of this outlook on Jewish history, and its "solution" by territorial Zionism, is the abandonment of Jews' right to be French, American, Indian, Syrian, Irani. In harmony with the Nazi legislation that German Jews were not German.

Zionist founding father, secular Theodor Herzl, in Der Judenstaat, summarized the basis of Zionism—that Jews carry antisemitism with them. He said we go where there is no antisemitism and there generate antisemitism:

The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.

Herzl describes an irredeemable gentile world: “In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the [French] Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace... But I think we shall not be left in peace.”

Herzl's and Netanyahu's formulation is degrading of gentiles—that Jews cannot live among others. That there is something profoundly wrong with everyone but Jews.

This approach disregards the success story of a tribal cult from Judea maintaining and building culture over millennia, integrating converts wherever they’ve settled, up to our present.

Jewish pride can be consciousness of heritage, or be a sort of implicit contempt of gentiles.

The Zionist outlook, expressed by Maurice Samuel in 1924—talking of Jews' "wretched fate"—has Jews living in a trap which alienates us from humanity. One may be proud or lament the identity, but with no escaping it:

A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish radicals are beginning to understand it dimly...

The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome rôle upon us.

Do we demand safety, protection, because we share common humanity with rights to be respected, or because of our rare qualities—making us a special case?

Whether we think of ourselves as “ready prey” (Netanyahu) or precious unicorns of advanced civilization—or both—the point is we may think of ourselves as a different ilk than run-of-the-mill-humanity.

In America, the claim of being an extraordinary case makes a sisterly blend with Christians Zionist eschatology and “American exceptionalism” in Israel advocacy.

We are whatever we think we are. It isn’t a lament but a boast, that we are “a people that dwells apart.”

The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.

In 1938, a Polish leader of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund forecast:

Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history and on this law has based its perspective on Jewish life…

If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…

With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a worldwide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability— as all other groups—to vice. Trauma has not ennobled us.

The whole of Torah revolves around the proposition of singular essential Jewish peoplehood.

Herzl’s proposition that we have “our right to exist as a separate people, according us our rightful place among the nations of the world” is built on it.

The inner policeman tries to stop critical examination of the identity—Disloyalty to faithful ancestors! Betrayal of my people!—to question Zionist corollaries of the statement, “I am a Jew.”

For one day in late June, it looked as though the Constitution had won. For the first time in the 53-year life of the War Powers Resolution, both chambers of Congress voted to order a president to remove US forces from a war he had never asked them to authorize. The House carried the measure on June 3. The Senate followed on June 23. After more than half a century of the legislature flinching from its own authority, here at last was a majority in both houses saying, on the record, that the war in Iran was not theirs and would not be waged in their name.

It lasted about 24 hours.

The resolution that passed was a concurrent resolution—a vehicle that, by design, never reaches the president’s desk and carries no force of law. The measure with teeth, the one that would have required his signature, reached the Senate floor the very next day, June 24. By then the president had summoned Senate Republicans to a closed-door lunch, turned it into a confrontation over the war, and sent at least one wavering senator to a same-day White House briefing. When the binding resolution was called, it failed. Two senators who had voted to constrain the war on Tuesday declined to do so on Wednesday. A war-powers majority had been assembled and dismantled inside a single news cycle—not by argument on the merits, but by a luncheon and a briefing.

Set aside, for a moment, the conduct of any one senator. The deeper fact is structural, and it should trouble anyone who believes the decision to go to war belongs to the people through their representatives. If Congress can pass a war-powers resolution and then refuse to enforce it within a day, the question is no longer whether Congress will check this president. The question is whether it can—and what is supposed to happen when it cannot.

A Congress that can be moved from a war-powers majority to a war-powers minority overnight is not a Congress that is merely choosing not to act. It is a Congress that has shown it cannot make its own action stick.

The administration has not been coy about its view. The war in Iran began in late February without a congressional vote. The Resolution’s 60-day clock expired on May 1, and the president answered with a letter declaring the hostilities “terminated” even as a naval blockade remained in force. His secretary of state told a White House briefing that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional, 100%,” adding that the administration honors it only as a courtesy, to preserve good relations with Congress. The vice president had earlier dismissed the statute as “a fake and unconstitutional law.” Strip away the “show,” and one proposition remains: that a duly enacted federal law binds the executive only when, and only so far as, the executive cares to be bound. That is not a war-powers position. It is a position about whether laws are laws.

Nor did the threats subside. Even after a memorandum of understanding was signed in mid-June to extend the ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the president warned that he would “bomb the hell out of” Iran if it failed to comply—a threat of force in open tension with the very agreement he had just concluded. Days earlier, discussing Iran’s nuclear stockpile, he reached for “the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again,” the unmistakable register of nuclear menace from the leader of the only nation ever to have used such weapons against a civilian population. As I have argued previously in these pages, language like this is not loose talk. It is the rhetorical scaffolding of a war the public was never asked to approve.

Here is where the courts enter—or rather, where they have declined to. For 50 years, whenever members of Congress have asked federal judges to enforce the war-powers framework, the judiciary has turned them away, most often by invoking the “political question” doctrine: the notion that disputes between the political branches over war are committed to those branches to resolve, not to courts. That doctrine has always rested on an empirical assumption—that the political process can correct itself, that Congress has tools enough to defend its own prerogatives if only it chooses to use them.

June 23 and 24 are the clearest refutation of that assumption in a generation. The political branches did not resolve this. They demonstrated, in real time and on camera, that the institutional machinery the doctrine relies upon no longer holds under pressure. A Congress that can be moved from a war-powers majority to a war-powers minority overnight is not a Congress that is merely choosing not to act. It is a Congress that has shown it cannot make its own action stick. When the premise of a doctrine collapses, the doctrine built upon it should not survive untouched.

So whose job is it now? The answer the Constitution supplies, once the political branches have failed, points to the one branch that has spent half a century looking away: the judiciary. The Supreme Court has never squarely decided whether a president may wage sustained, unauthorized hostilities past the 60-day deadline in defiance of an explicit statute. It has had reasons, prudential and real, to avoid the question. Those reasons weaken by the week. When an administration pronounces a federal statute void from the podium, complies only as “good relations,” and a Congress that votes to end the war cannot keep the vote alive for a day, the case for judicial abstention has run out. The framework Justice Robert Jackson set down in Youngstown—that a president acts at the “lowest ebb” of his power when he moves against the expressed will of Congress—was written for precisely this situation. It is waiting to be applied.

None of this is simple. Standing is a genuine hurdle; the path to the court runs most plausibly through members of Congress, or a chamber, suing in their institutional capacity rather than through any single citizen. The political-question doctrine will be raised again. But “political question” was always a choice the courts made, not a command the Constitution issued—and the conditions that once made the choice defensible no longer hold. A controversy is ripe for decision when it is concrete and when withholding review inflicts real harm. A war waged in the country’s name without its consent; a statute openly nullified; a legislature unable to enforce its own majority: If that is not ripe, nothing is. And Iran, for all its starkness, is not the only theater in which force has lately preceded authorization rather than followed it.

The Framers placed the war power in Article I—the first article, the people’s article—for a reason that does not age. They had watched kings march nations into war on their own word, and they meant to make that impossible here. The power “to declare War” was given to Congress alone. The War Powers Act did not invent that allocation; it merely tried to make it work in an age of undeclared wars. If Congress can no longer make it work, and the courts will not look, then the war power has quietly migrated to wherever the president happens to be standing when he decides to use it. That is the exact outcome the Constitution was written to prevent.

The stalemate is not an accident of partisanship; it has hardened into a feature of the system, and this president has learned to exploit it with unusual skill. Breaking stalemates between the political branches is what a court of last resort exists to do. It is time for the Supreme Court to take up the question it has avoided for 50 years—and to say, before the next war begins without a vote, who in this country actually holds the power to start one.

Now that the United States and Iran have signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding ending their war—at least for now—the general public and pundits have been weighing in on who won.

A CBS-YouGov survey released Sunday found that 37% of Americans think the memorandum of understanding (MOU) favors Iran, while 22% believe the United States got the better deal. Nearly half—47%—say both sides broke even.

Newsweek, meanwhile, queried 10 military experts ranging from a former US Navy admiral and a former Pentagon official to five think tank scholars and two professors of international relations. Seven said Iran won the war. Two said “no one.” Only one thought the United States came out on top, but added, “Neither side will gain a complete victory.”

It remains to be seen how things ultimately shake out with the US-Iranian negotiations, but at this point it is clear that two industries won hands down: defense contractors and oil companies. Both profited enormously from the war.

About 20% of the world’s oil and gas is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, and after Iran shut it down, oil companies roughly doubled the price per barrel.

It’s also clear that the war’s biggest losers in the United States were motorists, frequent flyers, farmers, and grocery shoppers. In other words, just about everybody besides oil and defense companies and their shareholders.

The Big Winners

Defense contractors: There are various estimates of how much the conflict has cost the Defense Department thus far. On May 12, the Pentagon comptroller told Congress that the Pentagon had spent $29 billion in operational costs, but he conceded that the estimate did not include the cost to repair US bases in the Middle East that Iran damaged. According to a more recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, the war has cost closer to $40 billion, including the cost of munitions, destroyed equipment, and base damage. Recently the White House asked Congress for $87.6 billion in supplemental spending, mainly to pay for the Iran war.

Munitions have been the Pentagon’s largest expenditure, and defense contractors, notably Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, are cashing in.

In late March, The Washington Post reported that the US Navy launched more than 850 Tomahawk missiles in the first four weeks of the conflict. The Pentagon paid Raytheon (a division of RTX) about $2.2 million for each, or a total of roughly $1.87 billion. In April, the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request asked Congress for $3 billion for 785 additional Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, a more than 1,200% increase from the 55 TLAMs Congress funded for $258 million in FY 2026.

The Post also reported that US military fired more than 1,000 air-defense interceptors, including Lockheed Martin’s Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, in response to Iranian counterattacks across the region. Each THAAD interceptor missile costs about $12.7 million, while each Patriot interceptor costs about $3.7 million.

This week, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $35.3 billion contract to produce THAAD interceptors through June 2032 and asked the company to triple its production of Patriot interceptors. It also inked a $398.7 million contract with Raytheon for Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles.

Oil companies: The war has been a bonanza for oil companies. About 20% of the world’s oil and gas is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, and after Iran shut it down, oil companies roughly doubled the price per barrel.

ConocoPhillips posted $2.2 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2026, up 84% from the $1.4 billion the previous quarter. BP, meanwhile, reported a $3.8 billion profit for the first quarter compared with a $3.4 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2025.

ExxonMobil and Chevron had lower profits during the first three months of the year than in the previous quarter, but analysts expect a quick turnaround if higher prices persist. The bets are on ExxonMobil’s second-quarter earnings to more than double last year’s level and for full-year earnings to jump 46%, while Chevron’s full-year profits are predicted to rise by 56%.

The Big Losers

Inflation jumped in May for a third consecutive month as the Iran war continued to drive up prices, surpassing 4% for the first time in three years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this month. Higher prices hit everyone, but especially low- and middle-income Americans. The biggest domestic losers include:

Motorists: Moody’s Analytics, a global financial research firm, estimates that the war has thus far cost Americans $132 billion, and a big chunk of that was due to inflated prices at the pump. Gasoline prices, which averaged just under $3 a gallon when the war began in late February, jumped as high as $4.56 a gallon after Iran cut off the Strait of Hormuz, according to AAA. A gallon of regular gasoline averaged $3.999 last Thursday, the first time since late March that prices were that low. This week, the average price per gallon dipped to $3.928, but gas is 25% more expensive than it was last year at this time and motorists are paying about $1 more per gallon for regular than before the war.

In 2025, US motorists consumed about 374.05 million gallons of gasoline daily, according to the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration. So, at the peak during the war, they paid more than half a billion dollars a day in higher prices. Although prices have dropped since then, that $1 more per gallon for regular motorists are now paying translates into $374 million a day in higher costs.

Likewise, diesel fuel prices increased from $3.76 a gallon just before the war to a peak of $5.69 in early April, according to AAA, raising costs for all goods shipped by train or truck.

Frequent flyers: News of the US-Iran peace deal drove jet fuel spot prices down sharply, from $4.88 a gallon to $2.85. That drop could cut the US airline industry’s annual fuel bill by more than $40 billion, according to the trade publication Oil Price, but “unlike previous oil price downcycles, airlines are unlikely to pass on these cost savings to passengers in the form of lower air fares.” Jet fuel prices jumped three times faster than ticket prices between January and May, Oil Price explained, which cost airlines $100 billion when oil prices spiked during the war, so they likely will apply the windfall to shore up their balance sheets. Lack of competition and tight airport capacity will also be factors.

In other words, airfares are not going to come down to Earth anytime soon. According to Kayak, the average cost of a domestic ticket was $290 in January. That same fare has since climbed to $370.

Farmers: American farmers, still reeling from Donald Trump’s tariffs, have been particularly hurt by the war. Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz drove up the price of farm diesel 46% by mid-April, raising expenses at nearly every stage of farm production. And because a significant percentage of nitrogen-based fertilizers urea and ammonia is produced in the Persian Gulf region, the blockade also disrupted the global fertilizer market, boosting fertilizer prices in the United States by as much as 47%. A nationwide survey conducted in early April by the American Farm Bureau found that roughly 70% of farmers reported that they could not afford to buy all the fertilizer they needed for spring planting. Although fertilizer prices are now lower than they were in April, they are still higher than they were a year ago. Urea, for example, is 16% higher, while anhydrous ammonia is 41% higher.

Grocery shoppers: Higher costs for farmers, as well as higher fuel costs for truckers, mean higher prices at the grocery store. The Independent Grocers Alliance, a coalition of 7,500 supermarkets around the world, calculates that for some food products “fuel-related costs can account for roughly 15-30% of the total cost,” which, on a sustained basis, “can result in a 2-4% increase in retail food prices.” Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture expects grocery prices to rise 3.2% this year, more than the historical average of 2.6%.

High Prices Aren’t Going Away Anytime Soon

Experts warn that high prices will continue long after the war is finally over.

“Product prices across the United States are projected to keep climbing for the rest of 2026,” Pat Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University, told The Associated Press.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, is equally pessimistic. “I think under the most likely scenarios for how things unfold,” he told ABC News, “I’d buckle up.” Inflation worsened by the Iran war will likely linger for the next six to 12 months.

Wasn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the panacea? When he ran for president for a second term, he promised voters he would curb inflation, bring down prices, and end wars, not start them. He has failed on all counts.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens to traffic soon, Zandi said prices will not come down immediately. “It takes time for the higher costs [manufacturers and suppliers] are facing to be incorporated into the prices they charge and actually pass along to their customers, to you and I as consumers,” he said, adding that high energy prices due to the war have cost the typical US household nearly $600 in additional expenditures since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

“The cost, particularly for lower-middle-income households, is real money; it matters,” Zandi said. “For many of these households, there’s no easy solution here. There’s no panacea.”

But wasn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the panacea? When he ran for president for a second term, he promised voters he would curb inflation, bring down prices, and end wars, not start them. He has failed on all counts.

Trump likes to think of himself as historically consequential as Napoleon. He even wants to construct an arch modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. But his “little excursion” in Iran just may prove to be his Waterloo, and Napoleon didn’t build an arch celebrating that.

This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.

The Memorandum of Understanding signed on June 17 by President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian provides a road map toward peace between the two countries. Peace advocates should support it. The journey to this point has been tortuous, the interim agreement contains numerous ambiguities, and the Trump administration as the agent of change from the US side is so deeply compromised that implementation of the steps will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, the MOU deserves our support.

Unfortunately, Massachusetts Democratic members of Congress have not welcomed the MOU. They rightly point out that Trump started the war, that it was foolish, it was illegal, unconstitutional, it was costly, it damaged the world economy, and it accomplished nothing. That is all true—but they generally have not spoken to its substance unless to criticize it.

If starting the war was wrong, ending it is right. The MOU is a reasonable framework for ending the current conflict and taking steps toward peace with Iran. It calls for opening the Hormuz strait; winding down US sanctions (and the US has already suspended sanctions on Iranian oil sales); reduction of the US military footprint in Iran’s neighborhood; curbs on Iran’s nuclear program with details to be negotiated; Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon; and a reconstruction investment fund for Iran, which would not involve any US funds.

US policy towards Iran has been predicated on hostility to the Islamic Republic since 1979. The US political elite and media have long based their policy on the thesis that Iran is a threat to the region and the United States. US leaders claim that Iran’s nuclear program may lead to its arming itself with nuclear weapons; that Iran’s ballistic missile program threatens its neighbors, especially Israel; that it funds terrorist proxies, naming Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) as dangerous sources of instability; that it seeks to destroy Israel and attack the United States; that its repressive internal regime is of a piece with its regional troublemaking.

We can in no way count on Trump and Vice President JD Vance to get this negotiation over the finish line—but we can and should push them to do so.

These premises are profoundly flawed. Iran’s supreme leader has rightly ruled that nuclear weapons violate religious morality, much as Popes Francis and Leo have done. After 47 years it should be clear that Iran has never really sought to build a nuclear weapon, as it surely would have done so by now had that been its intention. Rather, its nuclear program is evidently designed to force the US to the table and get it to end US sanctions and negotiate with Iran on a respectful basis. It is the US and Israel, not Iran, that are armed with nuclear weapons—and Trump who explicitly threatened to use them on Iran. Does Iran arm terrorists? Maybe sometimes, but it is Israel, armed by the US, that has laid waste to the Middle East, attacking Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Yemen, killing tens or hundreds of thousands, over just the past three years—although Iran has certainly done what it could to hit back in response to those constant provocations.

Within the anti-Iran consensus among US elites, one wing calls for diplomacy to obtain concessions from Iran, and for economic sanctions to force Iran to follow US wishes. President Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was based on this strategy. Obama first imposed sanctions, then promised sanctions relief in exchange for strict limits on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program—although little sanctions relief was actually delivered by the US before President Trump ended the JCPOA in 2018.

The other wing of the US elite, joined by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, calls for war to destroy Iran’s military capacity, its nuclear program, cripple its economy, ensure it could not threaten its neighbors or Israel, and if possible, overthrow its government. President Trump took up this approach when he joined Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in June last year and then resumed full-scale war with Iran on February 28.

But after Iran struck back at Israel and at US bases and economic infrastructure in the Gulf states, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, everyone understood that the US military campaign to subdue Iran had failed. The MOU that Trump and Iran’s president Pezeshkian signed on June 17 reflects this reality and sets forward a direction that, if implemented, would not only end the US-Iran war, but would begin to reverse the long anti-Iran campaign waged by the US It could be a historic step toward reconciliation between the US and Iran.

It is ironic that the reactionary, racist, ultra-imperialist administration of Donald Trump could be the one to reverse decades of bipartisan US hostile policy. But just as President Richard Nixon went to China, such shifts can happen, and can be led from the right side of US politics. Another example is Trump’s two-year rapprochement with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in his first term, in which he met Kim three times and signed peace framework agreements—though he ultimately dropped the project and reverted to a posture of hostility. Because Trump has no firm ideology, he sometimes can read the situation more clearly than politicians whose policies are anchored in an ossified world view. We can in no way count on Trump and Vice President JD Vance to get this negotiation over the finish line—but we can and should push them to do so.

Indeed, the situation today calls for peace with Iran and a completely new Middle East policy. Israel has become a liability for the United States more clearly than ever before, and US support for Israel’s constant wars on its neighbors and genocide directed at its occupied Palestinian population, its invasion of Lebanon, and its attack on Iran, are now very unpopular in the US. Iran has successfully asserted its ability to defend itself. And as Trump said on June 18, the world economy is teetering as it runs short of oil.

Vice President Vance held out the possibility that Iran can receive a $300 billion reconstruction fund based on the Gulf states, provided a final agreement is reached. In Switzerland on June 21, he asked: “How much more can we accomplish together? Can we turn over a new leaf? Can we change relations in the Middle East permanently, or do we go back to doing things the old way?”

The point, though, is that the wealthy elite of the Gulf are evidently ready to invest in Iran’s reconstruction from the destruction the US has caused. Why? To make money on the investments, to get their foot in the door for future business deals in the potentially lucrative Iranian market, and in the hope that economic ties will reduce the likelihood of a future war.

A diplomatic resolution of the US-Iran hostility would be positive for the US, Iran, and the region. Massachusetts’ Democratic members of Congress should speak in favor of diplomacy and seek to implement them.

This June, some Republican-led states are rebranding Pride Month with staid-sounding faux morality.

Instead of celebrating the rights and dignity of its LGBTQ+ communities, Utah and Arkansas are choosing to label this month “Fidelity Month.” They may as well come out and say queer people are “infidels.”

Tennessee and Alabama Republicans—supporters of President Donald Trump, a father of five children from three different marriages—have dubbed June as “nuclear family month.”

Alabama’s Republican Gov., Kay Ivey, wants the month of June to be known as “Strong Families Month.” Ivey, who is also a strong Trump ally, has been married and divorced twice and has no children.

It’s rich for Republicans to uphold so-called family values in an economy that is hardly suitable for building and raising families of any sort.

The hypocrisy is off the charts. And it’s dangerous.

For much of human history, Western civilizations have sought to shame and criminalize gender and sexual diversity. For LGBTQ+ communities, recent GOP-led political attacks and cultural erasure are matters of life-and-death. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people have surged. Debating the rights of queer people to exist has fueled suicide within that community.

Pride has been an antidote to the outdated taboos and dangerous stigmas that have hurt innumerable people. The history of Pride month goes back to the first Pride March in New York City on June 28, 1970 commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Today most major cities in the US, along with many smaller towns, mark Pride Month with marches and parades throughout June. They are joyful occasions celebrating marriage equality, bodily autonomy, gender affirming care, and the freedom of people to be themselves without fear or judgement.

Although not without flaws, Pride has aspired to be a life-affirming tradition, even spreading all over the world. The rainbow Pride flag encourages people to break out of heterodoxy and binary thinking—puns definitely intended.

The Republican attacks on LGBTQ+ people serve a similar purpose to their racist attacks on immigrants. Both groups are vulnerable communities, scapegoated to distract people from their own economic hardships.

As the United States mints the world’s very first trillionaire, Elon Musk, about half the nation—which amounts to hundreds of millions of Americans—is struggling to get by. The prices of oil, groceries, and commercial flights remain high as a result of Trump’s war on Iran. Skyrocketing health insurance costs are crushing Americans. Higher education has become out of reach for a majority of people. Childcare costs are ridiculous. And housing costs continue to soar.

The rebranding of Pride Month not only feeds the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ communities but obscures the very real economic injustices facing most Americans.

It’s rich for Republicans to uphold so-called family values in an economy that is hardly suitable for building and raising families of any sort. How can people consider having children when it might force them to choose between paying for childcare versus rent?

While conservative politicians are busy erasing queer families, they are enriching the already rich while shrugging off the struggles of working Americans. Notably, the GOP is happy to be the near-exclusive recipient of political contributions from Musk’s Super PAC.

Pride can and should go hand-in-hand with economic justice for all. Transgender youth are almost 10 times more likely to be unhoused than the general population. LGBTQ+ workers earn lower wages on average than their straight cisgender counterparts.

The freedoms to live and thrive in a safe environment, to be educated and healthy without falling into debt, and to simply be able to put food on the table are all consistent with the freedom to marry or not, to procreate or not, to affirm one’s gender, and to love anyone one chooses.

The conservative answer to inequality is to worsen it through division and scapegoating. Our response must be grounded in collective liberation.

On June 25, the Supreme Court drastically expanded the Trump administration’s ability to shape the nation’s immigration system. In two separate 6-3 decisions, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants, as well as physically block asylum-seekers from entering the country and applying for legal protections.

Both rulings are as cruel as they are nonsensical.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has sought to end TPS for over 1 million migrants from 13 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Somalia, and Syria. These termination orders have been challenged in court and, to date, seven of them remain paused.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, puts all of them in jeopardy. While it allows DHS to remove legal protections for Haitians and Syrians specifically, it paves the way for the department to terminate TPS for any group with little to no oversight.

if Trump’s gross fearmongering about Haitians eating cats and dogs is not “overtly racial,” then it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court acknowledging any of this administration’s blatant racism and xenophobia.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito claims that the courts are prohibited from reviewing whether DHS’ decision to terminate TPS complied with the legally required procedures needed to cancel the status. For example, whether former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “inadequately consulted the State Department about conditions in Syria” or, more broadly, whether “her decision that country conditions in Syria and Haiti justified termination of their TPS designations” are exempt from any form of judicial review.

Importantly, the Supreme Court did not rule that DHS followed the proper protocols when ending TPS. Nor did it determine that conditions in those countries were safe—and, in fact, the Trump administration knows they are not. The State Department has active travel advisories warning Americans against traveling to Syria and Haiti “for any reason” due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, limited healthcare, hostage taking, and armed conflict. It is also worth noting that the present conditions in those countries are the direct result of America’s actions in Syria through decades of sanctions and military intervention; and in Haiti, through years of colonial occupation and repeatedly undermining their democratic process.

For the conservative justices, none of this matters. These issues are, in their view, beyond the scope of the courts.

This is a ridiculous assessment. The relevant statute (8 U.S.C. 1254a) reads: “There is no judicial review of any determination […] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection.” The court’s conservatives read the word “determination” here to refer to (i) the final decision, (ii) the entire decision-making process, and (iii) every sub-decision within that process. Based on that definition, they conclude that this statute “squarely bars” the courts from assessing the legality of any aspect of DHS’ decision to end TPS.

As Justice Elena Kagan puts it, this interpretation is not only “very broad,” but “very strange.” In her dissenting opinion, she correctly notes that the statute only applies to the final “determination” with regards to whether TPS is actually granted, terminated, or extended. It “does nothing to stop courts from reviewing […] other things” such as “the procedural steps the Secretary must undertake prior to making any determination about country conditions.”

This is not only more consistent with the relevant text but reflects a basic presumption inherent to our system of checks and balances—namely, that “Congress intends the executive to obey its statutory commands and, accordingly, that it expects the courts to grant relief when an executive agency violates such a command.”

After all, if Congress intended DHS to have broad authority to revoke TPS at its sole discretion, then why would it create a multi-step protocol that the department must follow to lawfully end those protections? That fact alone entails that it always intended how DHS reached its “determination” to be subject to judicial and external review.

The conservative majority ignores such considerations. Instead of proper judicial interpretation, they offer a politically motivated and disingenuous rationale designed to give the Trump administration complete control over the humanitarian program.

To this end, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration one more gift: sanitizing its racism.

The court rejected the plaintiff’s claim that terminating TPS for Haitians was racially motivated and thus violated the equal protection clause. For the court’s conservatives, none of President Trump’s past remarks—which include that Haitians are “eating the dogs,” “probably have AIDS,” and that Haiti is a “shithole country”—“were overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” Whatever these “race-neutral justifications” are, the court conveniently fails to elaborate.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas goes even further. He posits that the plaintiff’s suit would fail simply because “aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.” Constitutionally, this is painfully wrong. Morally, this is utterly disgusting.

In one fell swoop, the Supreme Court effectively cleared all legal obstacles against the Trump administration’s efforts to end TPS for anyone at any time for any reason. Their ruling renders non-constitutional challenges regarding policy adherence moot from the outset. And if Trump’s gross fearmongering about Haitians eating cats and dogs is not “overtly racial,” then it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court acknowledging any of this administration’s blatant racism and xenophobia. Their willful ignorance renders the equal protection clause similarly moot.

Asylum Entries

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court was not done. In a separate decision, the court’s conservatives upheld the Trump administration’s “turn-back policy” (also known as “metering”) that allows federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from crossing into the US.

Currently, federal law permits any migrant “who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival […])” to apply for asylum. In Mulin v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration argued that their policy does not violate this law since, insofar as those migrants never step foot onto US soil, they never become entitled to apply for asylum in the first place.

The Supreme Court agreed. Writing again for the court’s majority, Alito claims that this case is “straightforward.” He writes, “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters the place.”

The Trump administration does not cherish life. The Supreme Court does not value justice. Congress is now the last line of governmental defense against full-on fascism.

Yet, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in her dissenting opinion, the majority’s fixation with the word “in” overlooks the broader context of the statute. Federal law dictates that any migrant “arriving” and “seeking admission” into the country “shall be inspected by immigration officers.” If they are ineligible for admission, they shall be removed unless they indicate “an intention to apply for asylum […] or a fear of persecution.” In that case, “the officer shall refer the alien for an interview.” That clause clearly applies to migrants who haven’t physically entered the US.

This also explains the language Congress uses in that statute. Under the majority’s reading, to “arrive in” the US is synonymous with being “physically present in” the US. But, if this is true, then why would Congress include both phrases if they were so obviously redundant? It’s because, in addition to being physically present, those who have arrived before an immigration official also have the right to apply for asylum even if they are not physically present in the US.

As Sotomayor bleakly remarks, “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.”

This point not only underlines the cruelty of the policy, but also its sheer stupidity. Asylum-seekers brave horrible conditions, traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their homes in search of a better life. Sotomayor is obviously correct that some will take the extra steps to enter the country by any means necessary. This is especially true if they believe that doing so is their only means of acquiring asylum. Trump’s policy undermines a system that would allow federal officials to screen migrants at the border, review their case, and provide them proper guidance for one that openly encourages the very kinds of “illegal entries” that his administration consistently bemoans as an existential threat to the nation.

Trump’s Humanitarian Crisis

With these decisions, the Supreme Court once again bends the knee to Trump’s vile agenda of violence and death. Eliminating humanitarian protections and denying asylum to those who need them most betray every value that makes this nation great.

What’s more, the court further exacerbates a humanitarian crisis that Trump is either intentionally or indifferently manufacturing. In his second term alone, he has either threatened or attacked 15 countries including Greenland, Venezuela, Somalia, and Syria; launched over 60 military strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed over 200 people; eliminated the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—an act that could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030; launched an illegal war that has killed more than 7,300 people in Iran and Lebanon; a war that has also wrecked the global economy and caused fuel and food shortages in the world’s poorest and most remote areas; has consistently aided and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza; imposed a total oil blockade that is economically asphyxiating Cuba; and has made refugee status in the US a privilege nearly-exclusive to white South Africans (who he claims—without evidence—are facing “racially motivated violence”), among many other similarly insidious and corrupted acts.

Our best option is to empower Congress to stand up against both the Trump administration and his Supreme Court by working to elect as many progressive candidates in November.

In short, the Trump administration does not cherish life. The Supreme Court does not value justice. Congress is now the last line of governmental defense against full-on fascism.

Fortunately, even Republicans understand the gravity of this situation. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), for instance, has already called for Congress to extend TPS for Haitians. For all of Trump’s bigotry, migrants remain an indispensable part of the US economy.

Ultimately, we need extensions for every group under threat from the Supreme Court’s reckless decisions as well as new protections for those who have already lost their TPS designations. For now, our best option is to empower Congress to stand up against both the Trump administration and his Supreme Court by working to elect as many progressive candidates in November. Before things get worse, we need fighters in Congress that will serve the people’s interest and stand up to Trump and his cronies.