I’ve written repeatedly about community resilience over the years; for example, I penned an article in 2017 for Bloomberg on rebuilding for resilience after the devastating wildfires in Sonoma County, California, where I live.

In this piece, I want to tackle an even tougher case. The city of New Orleans dramatically exemplifies all the paradoxes, problems, and opportunities of resilience building. It is also a second home to me and my wife Janet: She was born there, many of her relatives still live there, and we spend at least a week each year in the Big Easy. So, I know a bit about New Orleans, and I care about the place and its people.

New Orleans also happens to be a lot of fun to write about. So, let’s go!

Vulnerable, Precarious, Beautiful

Just 21 years ago, New Orleans was nearly wiped away. Hurricane Katrina brought high winds and drenching rain; after levees and pumping stations failed due to human error, much of the city was flooded. It took 43 days to pump the floodwater into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Nearly all the surviving residents had been evacuated. They returned after weeks or months to find buildings destroyed, possessions ruined or gone, entire neighborhoods devastated, and the city steeped in the stench of decay. Over a thousand fatalities were recorded. The hurricane quickly achieved a mythic status, and, today, every New Orleanian over age 30 has an emotion-charged story to tell about loss and survival.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned.

This wasn’t the first hurricane or flood for New Orleans. The city is geographically disaster prone, built on a subsiding river delta, mostly below sea level, with a bowl-like topography. The metropolis is squeezed between two major bodies of water, making it highly susceptible to catastrophic storm surges and flooding, which have taken a heavy toll on several occasions. One was Hurricane Betsy (September 9, 1965), a massive Category 3 storm that flooded eastern New Orleans. It was the first US hurricane to cause $1 billion in damages.

The Crescent City is kept habitable by a 90-mile system of canals and pumping stations, along with huge levees along the river and lakefront. The stations together can pump a staggering 24,300 cubic feet of water per second. Yet, during heavy rains, they sometimes struggle to keep up. That struggle is about to get harder in the context of more extreme temperatures, ongoing loss of coastal land, stronger hurricanes, and rising seas.

New Orleans also faces inherent economic challenges. Its revenues derive mostly from tourism, offshore oil and gas production, shipping, and fishing. Oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico oil is currently riding high, but oil is, after all, a depleting non-renewable resource. Tourism is sensitive to gasoline and jet fuel prices, and dependent on tourists having disposable income. Fishing is vulnerable to a host of environmental and economic issues, including overfishing, oil spills, runoff pollution from the Mississippi (which has created a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf), and rising ocean temperatures.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned. I’ll return to that.

Still, New Orleans residents are fiercely protective of their city. And lots of folks who live elsewhere love to visit the Big Easy. That’s because New Orleans has some things going for it.

Is New Orleans America’s Most Magnetic City?

A Maison Bourbon sign is shown. (Photo via Adobe Stock)

The Crescent City has a long, colorful cultural history; for a taste, I recommend Gary Krist’s book Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans. Today, the city’s culture persists in a unique dialect (“Yat,” derived from the common greeting, “Where y’at?”), as well as foods, architecture, and music that often make you feel you’re somewhere in the Caribbean rather than the United States.

Of all the city’s unique cultural achievements, its music is perhaps its greatest source of pride. Hundreds of full-time musicians carry on New Orleans-related traditions, somehow making a living alongside potential competitors. The fact that so many succeed is largely due to the city’s plethora of live music venues. WWOZ (a listener-supported radio station that plays New Orleans music of all varieties 24/7) publishes a daily online and radio-delivered summary of who’s playing where (the Livewire); even on a weekday, it usually takes the announcer several minutes to name all the performers and venues.

What does culture have to do with survival in the face of past and impending disasters? Plenty, it turns out.

To illustrate the degree to which New Orleans’s music culture has gotten under my own skin, permit me to divulge a little personal info. When I first started visiting the Crescent City, I was a semi-professional classical violinist. Most of the music I listened to consisted of Bach, Brahms, and Paganini. Gradually I added a little Louis Armstrong to my sonic diet. Then, in 2021, a fingertip injury forced me to abandon the violin altogether. I decided to learn piano instead (its flat keys don’t trigger the same nerve pains that metal strings did). I started with a few easy pieces by Bach and Scarlatti but soon found myself gravitating to the New Orleans sound.

New Orleans boasts a long tradition of jazz and blues piano playing, stretching from Jelly Roll Morton in the early years of the 20th century to Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Dr. John in the rock era; to Jon Batiste, Tom McDermott, Jon Cleary, Harry Connick, Jr., and many others today. There are currently so many great New Orleans pianists that WWOZ hosts an annual “Piano Night” of live performances, during which each of the invited piano pros is given 10 minutes to shine; the quality of their playing ranges from terrific to phenomenal, and the event typically lasts five to six hours. That’s plenty of inspiration for an aspiring keyboard novice like me. These days, I’m working on learning several songs by Jelly Roll Morton and one by Dr. John.

It’s a common story: Many of the “New Orleans musicians” I’ve talked to were born elsewhere, but then became so enraptured by the relaxed, bluesy style of the city’s music that they decided to move to the Big Easy and devote their lives to its culture. One example is a band of 40-somethings called Tuba Skinny, whose eight-or-so members formerly played in grunge bands around the US (its leader, cornetist Shaye Cohn, had a legit musical education on piano). They individually moved to New Orleans after Katrina, then gradually coalesced into a street band with a shared interest in the collective improvisation of 1920s and ’30s jazz and blues. There are plenty of other trad jazz (and so-called Dixieland) groups in New Orleans, but Tuba Skinny has brought an admirable commerciality-be-damned dedication to their art. They can still be heard on the streets of the French Quarter playing for tips, but they also perform at many of the city’s music clubs, and they’ve recorded numerous CDs and toured North America and Europe.

Okay, so New Orleans has plenty of unique culture. What does culture have to do with survival in the face of past and impending disasters? Plenty, it turns out.

Community Resilience, New Orleans Style

Political scientist Daniel Aldrich, who was living in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached, later decided to conduct a sociological study centered on the question, “Why do some communities recover more quickly and successfully than others in the wake of disaster?” He reported his findings in a book, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery.

Aldrich’s research suggested that an important factor in determining how well communities recover from crisis is social capital (specifically, the balance of three different kinds of social capital; see my interview with Aldrich). Social capital is essentially the relationships that people in a community have with one another, manifested in trusting neighborly relations, local gatherings and celebrations, formal and informal community “institutions” (e.g., a convivial neighborhood cafe, a quirky local tradition, a long-standing religious community), and participation in civic life, etc.

New Orleans has a lot of social capital, including not only thriving community organizations but also identifiable local traditions in food, architecture, and music. People talk to one another on the street and ask about their families. Still, as Aldrich found, this fabric of social connections does vary from one neighborhood to the next.

After Katrina, Aldrich studied two neighborhoods, both with approximately equal per capita pre-Katrina incomes: the Lower Ninth Ward, and the largely Vietnamese Village de l’Este in the northeast corner of the city. The Ninth Ward was still devastated years after the disaster, whereas Village de l’Este was 90% repopulated within two years. The difference: While there was plenty of one-on-one social bonding in the Ninth Ward, the neighborhood had poor bridging with government at all levels. Social capital isn’t just about the richness of direct contact between people (though that’s vital), but also the functionality of connections between different ethnic and religious groups within the community, and between ordinary people and the holders of resources and decision-making power both within the community and in the larger society.

Tragically, social capital is undervalued in modern society: Globalization undermines it, and usually only deep cultural traditions and activist efforts can preserve it against the onslaught of atomizing trends. We stare at our screens rather than talking to our neighbors.

The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce lists 66 community and civic organizations currently active in the city—but this is a fraction of the institutions supporting social capital. There are countless informal clubs, interest groups, and associations, and the city is chock full of locally owned businesses, religious communities, gorgeous parks and museums, vibrant music venues and art galleries, and is home to several community-oriented local radio stations.

In short, New Orleans has tons of social capital. But sadly, its cultural richness and rootedness may not be enough to enable it to survive much longer.

The Last Second Line

I think a lot about the future of New Orleans, so naturally I watched Dr. Emily Shoerning’s recent climate video on the prospects for Louisiana in a 2°C world. Her forecast for the southern region of the state, based on the most recent county-by-county National Climate Assessment, is devastating. Later this century, New Orleans will be an island effectively cut off from the Mississippi River and hence its main source of fresh water. Even if people continue living in the parts of the city that are still above sea level and they manage to harvest and purify rainwater on a sufficient scale, the prospects for maintaining anything like current levels of population and economic activity are dim indeed.

A recent study published in Nature Sustainability concluded that New Orleans residents should plan now to move away from the city. For the hundreds of thousands who live in New Orleans, and the millions of others, like me, who love the Crescent City, this is an incredibly sad conclusion. And it’s a conclusion that many other cities rich in culture and history will face around the world as sea levels rise.

We’re all living in some version of New Orleans. Every place on Earth is now vulnerable, each community held together by ecosystems under attack and culture that’s unraveling.

Somehow, we must imagine ways to transplant the culture of New Orleans to other places. Musicians and listeners can adopt the city’s music anywhere, and chefs in Los Angeles and Peoria can learn to make decent beignets and red beans (many already do). But it would be even more important to identify one or two places where archives, people, and perhaps even some buildings could be rehomed. The American Resiliency climate video for Louisiana, linked above, suggests Lafayette or Baton Rouge as possible sites.

It’s been a life-changer to know New Orleans these last 35 years or so. I hope to keep going back as long as I can. I feel as privileged as the folks who knew Paris in the 1890s or Harlem in the 1920s must have felt. Those of us who’ve been to the Big Easy can make our own communities more resilient through what we’ve seen, heard, and tasted there.

Meanwhile, we’re all living in some version of New Orleans. Every place on Earth is now vulnerable, each community held together by ecosystems under attack and culture that’s unraveling. Still, if we face a century of crises, it’s good to have songs to sing, friends you can count on, and recipes that remind you of good times. Those are just some of the gifts of New Orleans.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has waged war on nonprofits. Actions have included federal funding cuts to the tune of billions of dollars, targeting of specific organizations with investigations or indictments, and threats to tax-exempt status. While some efforts have been turned back by the courts, the administration has been unrelenting and, sadly, every American community will suffer as a result of this sustained attack.

Presidential announcements warn of “anti-American NGOs” and allege without any credible evidence that networks of nonprofits are acting as “domestic terrorist organizations.” Recently, the administration issued proposed regulations intended to impose sweeping new restrictions on nonprofits that receive federal funding—including that such organizations not advance diversity, equity, and inclusion or assist in voter registration.

The consequences of these attacks are dire. New data from a survey our organization conducted earlier this year show that nonprofits, which employ 1 in 10 Americans, are reeling. We see a dramatic increase in burnout among nonprofit leaders, whose stresses often include new worries about the safety of their staff and those they serve; financial distress as more organizations book deficits; increased difficulty raising funds from foundations (which are facing unprecedented demand as nonprofits look to replace lost government funding); and cutbacks to programs and staff in order to keep their doors open. On top of all this, demand for nonprofits’ services has increased as communities struggle amid higher inflation and cuts to federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Fully two-thirds of nonprofit leaders say they have concerns about their organizations’ financial sustainability. We’re seeing a growing number pause operations, scale back services, or close altogether. This is happening to organizations that provide vital services to people of every geography, party affiliation, and political ideology—services such as food, housing, and substance abuse prevention; assistance for survivors of sexual assault; teen violence prevention; and general community support.

The time is now to make your support known publicly by giving whatever you can to the nonprofits in your community that you care about.

This attack on the nonprofit sector is unprecedented. In his 1988 Republican National Convention speech accepting the nomination for president, George H.W. Bush famously talked about local nonprofits as “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” In a similar vein, nonprofit leader and former Democratic cabinet official John Gardner once quipped, “If you can’t find a nonprofit institution that you can honestly disrespect, then something has gone wrong with our pluralism.”

This vision of organizations pursuing varied and diverse objectives has its roots in the origins of this country and in the First Amendment, and was famously observed by French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 who remarked, with admiration, that Americans are “forever forming associations.” He saw these organizations as a ballast to a strong democracy—and a deterrent to despotism.

Whether they know it or not, every American’s life is touched for the better by nonprofits: through an after-school program, visits to a museum or a trail created by a local land conservation nonprofit, or help provided by frontline human services organizations like food pantries or domestic violence shelters. Nonprofits provide job training to veterans and other populations needing support. They do crucial research on diseases. They staff crisis hotlines, clean up parks and streets, and rush in to help after a natural disaster. “Nonprofits have been taken for granted in American society as institutions that will always be there to catch us when we fall,” notes Akilah Watkins of Independent Sector.

Most nonprofits are small and community based, and they are the infrastructure of American communities. They are, by law, nonpartisan; many are religiously affiliated. In practice, local nonprofits are one of the few places that volunteers and staff come together in pursuit of the common good without regard to political party or ideology.

This crisis is unlike anything either of us have seen in our 25-year careers working in philanthropy. Nonprofits experienced a similar increase in demand in 2020 during the pandemic, but, at that time, the federal government increased funding to nonprofits to help them navigate the crisis. This time, it is the government that has created the crisis, by cutting funds that have been duly congressionally allocated and by targeting organizations with which it disagrees.

The federal government has historically relied on nonprofits to deliver a range of essential services to people in communities across the country, regardless of their political affiliation. While the government has targeted specific nonprofits before—during the civil rights movement, for example—this administration is going after the entire sector as a whole.

It is this attack on nonprofits that is, in fact, anti-American.

Every American should be concerned about the health of the American nonprofit sector. The time is now to make your support known publicly by giving whatever you can to the nonprofits in your community that you care about—whether that’s money, time, or both.

As Diane Yentel of the National Council of Nonprofits says: “Nonprofits are the backbone of this country, providing critical support to improve communities and save lives. Defending and supporting them should not divide us along political lines—it should unite all Americans.”

Years before Republicans overturned Roe v. Wade, I sat in a hospital bed, preparing for my own abortion after a devastating pregnancy loss.

The grief was consuming. My husband and I were mourning the abrupt loss of a future we had longed for. At the time, I never considered myself to be fortunate. That feeling didn’t seep in until nearly eight years later—when Republicans began passing extreme abortion bans across the nation, unleashing widespread, preventable suffering upon millions of women.

In that hospital room, I was surrounded by compassionate doctors who offered me a choice between a surgical or medication abortion—the best forms of treatment available to prevent severe bleeding and infection. Yet now, those same methods of care are considered felonies across dozens of states, and are being actively targeted by Republicans. While I was welcomed into the wing of my local hospital for the procedure, women today are forced to travel hundreds of miles for care or told to wait in hospital parking lots until their lives are in jeopardy before they can legally be treated. While I took time to recover at home—both physically and emotionally—after leaving the hospital, women today are handcuffed, investigated, and even threatened with murder charges after suffering their own miscarriages.

Republicans have made it clear: They don’t care about the cruelty of their bans, the women’s lives that are being lost to them, or that the vast majority of Americans want abortion access to be legal and protected. Their extremist agenda has not only stripped women of their freedoms; it has caused widespread pain—including sharp spikes in life-threatening infections, infant and maternal deaths, and worse miscarriage outcomes than in states without abortion restrictions.

As attacks remain in full steam, abortion has already had an outsized influence on the 2026 midterms.

But the most horrifying part of all is that Republicans are not stopping here.

Emboldened by extremist MAGA allies, the US Supreme Court is currently considering whether to outlaw telehealth, mail, and pharmacy delivery for abortion medication, instead requiring patients to obtain it in person. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is conducting a sham Food and Drug Administration “review” of mifepristone—a safe, effective, and FDA-approved medication used in the majority of abortions in the US—in order to lay the groundwork for national restrictions. These attacks could result in the biggest rollback to abortion access since the Dobbs decision.

As the president of EMILYs List, I’ve seen firsthand that Republicans’ relentless pursuit of their anti-abortion agenda remains a motivator for voters nationwide. American women are fed up with their bodies, their health, and their lives being treated like political pawns—and until Republicans stop attacking our rights, the desire to protect abortion will continue driving voters to the polls.

That proved true in 2025, when Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won historic governorships against anti-abortion Republicans who had clear intentions of enacting extreme restrictions in their home states. Abortion was also one of the most powerful drivers of Democratic wins downballot across Virginia, where every EMILYs List-endorsed woman running to flip a Republican-held seat did just that in November, protecting our majority in the House of Delegates and protecting Virginians from a surefire ban.

As attacks remain in full steam, abortion has already had an outsized influence on the 2026 midterms. Over the last two months, I’ve met with voters on the ground across the nation, including in key US House flip districts, where Denise Powell (Neb.-02), Lindsay James (Iowa-02), and Marni Von Wilpert (Calif.-48) battled out competitive primary victories solidified by their staunch pro-choice bonafides. We’re seeing this at the state level too, like in Pennsylvania, where Brittany Bloam (Pa.-HD45) cruised to a primary win over Pat Catena, a Democrat who unsuccessfully tried rebranding as pro-choice, despite a record proving the exact opposite.

Voters trust women like these to fight for abortion access in their communities because they have never wavered in their support of women’s right to choose, and they have the track record to prove it. These women are our strongest pathway to taking back power in Congress and pumping the breaks on Republicans’ unhinged agenda.

Four years without Roe, it’s clearer than ever: As long as Republicans are in power, none of our rights are safe. They are decided election by election, one seat in Congress at a time. And this November, they depend wholly on firing anti-abortion Republicans, and electing Democratic pro-choice women to lead the fight to take back our freedoms.

While the IDF was ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, razing 80% of its buildings and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of its people in an internationally condemned genocide, the Israeli people were calm and happy. Now that Trump is forcing Israel to stop attacking Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli warmongers are furious. This society has screwed-up priorities.

The post War Is Peace appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

During the pandemic, I did something stupid: I published a book. Bookstores were closed, so authors obviously could not promote their books by going on tour. Like a lot of other titles that came out in 2021, “The Stringer”—a graphic novel written by me and drawn by Pablo Callejo—got lost in the shuffle.

Too bad, and not just for my bottom line. It was a good read about an important topic: deepfakes. What would happen, I wondered after considering the intersection of underemployed reporters in an age of decline with their deep connections to the dangerous places some of them cover, if a rogue journalist were to manipulate global politics—and even start wars—by creating fake imagery and audio of world leaders insulting one another?

Behind that question lies a deeper philosophical and psychological concern. What do human beings do after they come to accept that they cannot believe anything they read, hear, or see? What if there is no reliable way to tell the difference between reality and artifice? What happens?

Learned helplessness?

Revolution?

Nothing?

Americans have always lived in an era when politicians lied and news organizations misled, typically through sins of omission. Democratic-aligned news orgs ignore Benghazi and Biden’s mental decline; Republican ones neglect to follow up MIA WMDs and promises of $2-a-gallon gas.

There used to be ways to triangulate the truth. A myriad of news sources from a wide range of ideological viewpoints and formats, all financially incentivized to check and criticize one another, competed within metro areas and across the nation. The decline of print as a profit model, corporate consolidation, and legacy journalists succumbing to the race for clicks in a highly polarized political landscape have since reduced both the frequency and the reliability of verification and debunking between rivals.

Until a few years ago, stories were almost never made up of whole cloth. Bias manifested itself through which aspects of a story were emphasized or ignored in order to decontextualize events. Now, if you are a reasonably savvy news consumer, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: Is this real? Did this really happen?

Ninety-four percent of U.S. social media users told a recent CNET poll that they encounter AI-created or altered content, but only 44% of adults feel confident that they can tell real photos and videos from fakes. I’ve been fooled. Now, when I watch a video, I tell myself: Wait a minute. This might be BS.

Eighty-four percent of respondents to an international March Malwarebytes survey say that video evidence no longer feels like proof.

Nor does lack of evidence. When Trump’s ballyhooed $16 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., turned sour—with algae blooms turning the water green and the newly installed blue bottom disintegrating—the president quickly blamed unidentified vandals for using some sort of box cutter to create a 350-foot-long slash a foot and a half below the water line. No one, not even Trump-affiliated media outlets like Fox News, presented visual evidence. Right-wing influencers spread Trump’s ridiculous lie. Those are the people I worry about most—those who believe everything they see and hear, as long as it originates from a source they’ve decided to trust because they agree with its politics or some other cultural signifier.

Evolution did not prepare us for this tsunami of digital slop. Human cognition evolved for smaller-scale, lower-volume information environments. AI deepfakes flood us with hyper-realistic, unverifiable content, overwhelming our common sense and prompting us to check out in order to stay sane. They also feed into the “liar’s dividend” paradox, where the existence of deepfakes allows politicians and other liars to dismiss inconvenient facts: “That’s a deepfake! Fake news!”

Polls show that Americans (and citizens of other countries) are tuning out the news and social media because they do not know what to believe. Only 25% of Americans trust what they see on the news, a record low.

Our situation is not without precedent. Soviet citizens consumed sports scores, the weather, and other apolitical content readily, but when it came to politics, they relied on rumors, personal networks, foreign and opposition broadcasts, and samizdat. Soviet citizens were not passive dupes. They were active interpreters navigating a polluted information environment, and they knew it.

What can we do? In a global news environment riddled with deepfakes, there is no alternative to the lies—we need a relatively objective extraterrestrial broadcaster with no stake in Terran affairs. Deepfake technology is improving by the day; soon that telltale “AI sheen” will disappear altogether.

Human beings are highly adaptable and require accurate, reliable information in order to conduct business and live their lives. So we will eventually figure this out.

Independent fact-checkers have largely proven ineffective in discouraging misinformation. Some that purported to be unbiased turned out to be tainted, and partisans reflexively reject truths that run against their narratives. Watermarking, cryptographic signatures, and mandatory disclosures for AI-generated content, however, are already emerging as warning signs that you are being exposed to artificial material. Public funding for nonpartisan journalism would help, but ironically that would require bipartisan congressional approval. We should all adopt a tone of epistemic humility. It is okay to admit that you know that you do not know, and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude before reacting to an outrage that may or may not have really occurred.

Until we unravel the deepfake mess, politics in particular—and the public square in general—is going to get a lot rougher, stupider, and less responsive to our wants and needs. The first step, after all, is admitting we have a problem, and we’re not there yet.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

 

The post Is This Column Real? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Juneteenth celebrations in my town were lit. There were so many events I had a difficult time choosing which ones to attend. As a grandmother, I ended up at the event on the grounds of the Historic Harriet Barber house (circa 1875) in Hopkins, South Carolina, where my daughter and her 3-year-old son were drumming. The celebration was filled with spirited performances, great food, and camaraderie. Historical reflections centered on the origins of Juneteenth, commemorating June 19, 1865, when African-descended people who were enslaved in Texas finally learned of their freedom—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had officially declared them free. Many gave shout-outs to African American ancestors for all of their visions, sacrifices, and accomplishments. It was a joyful space.

While we are still in the Juneteenth celebratory spirit, we should not sleep, lest it will be another two-and-a-half years when we wake up and realize that our freedom has been lost through a series of recent institutional white supremacist political maneuvers such as: weakening voting rights; attacks on Black political districts, and bans on African American studies.

In his classic 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, warned Black people not to believe the lies taught in school that are full of distortions, intentional inaccuracies, and omissions. He also warned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation. Nearly 100 years later, we are still facing the revision and erasure of Black history.

For example, PragerU—a conservative website that promotes conservative viewpoints via digital media—has produced a series of edu-tainment videos full of revisionist historical distortions and half-truths.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told.

One video, "The Inconvenient Truth About Juneteenth," is narrated by a young Black man, Xaviaer. In the 56 second TikTok-style video, the narrator presents himself as an “influencer” and is casually walking down the street, iced coffee in hand, as he opines that Black folks are mentally enslaved for believing the conventional story about Juneteenth.

Immediately, evoking the name of Rosa Parks, Xaviaer signifies that Rosa should have made the viewers sit in the front of the bus and take a history class. The cleverness of the misinformation, though, is apparent when he says that Democrats kept Black people enslaved two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This slight of hand fails to clarify that the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties switched around 1870. Before that time, Republicans controlled the government and used its power to protect Black people who were formerly enslaved and guarantee their civil rights during Reconstruction. Most Democrats, particularly in the South, opposed many of these efforts. However, as the nation shifted its attention toward economic growth and industrial expansion, support for Reconstruction began to wane. Many Northern Republicans became less willing to invest political capital in protecting Black rights in the South.

By the mid-to-late 1870s, the Republican Party had largely retreated from its commitment to reconstructing Southern society and safeguarding the rights of African Americans. Following the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, White Democrats regained political control across much of the region and systematically dismantled many of the gains Black people had achieved during Reconstruction. Over the following decades, political allegiances gradually shifted, and by the mid-20th century, many African Americans increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly as it became more supportive of civil rights initiatives.

Xaviaer concludes "The Inconvenient Truth about Juneteenth" by admonishing Black people for referring to Juneteenth as a Black Independence Day. He argues that the political left has repackaged the holiday through what he characterizes as a segregationist lens. He adds a mocking remark, suggesting that if viewers truly believe Juneteenth is a separate Black Independence Day, he does not want to see them "twerking on a boat" on the Fourth of July—not resisting the urge to slide in a stereotype.

The comment is intended to be humorous, but it serves a deeper purpose. By ridiculing those who celebrate Juneteenth, the video dismisses the historical reality that many enslaved African-descended people were excluded from the freedoms celebrated on July 4, 1776. Rather than engaging this historical contradiction, the video substitutes mockery for analysis and caricature for historical understanding.

From a critical perspective, Black people should not be getting history lessons from social media influencers, political propagandists, or organizations masquerading as educational institutions. History is too important.

Fortunately, other scholars have challenged the distortions and omissions that permeate traditional historical narratives. While Dr. Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro remains one of the most important warnings about the dangers of accepting history uncritically, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, exposed how textbooks sanitize and distort the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States intentionally centers the experiences of people who were oppressed, marginalized, and excluded from dominant historical accounts.

Misinformation is not merely about getting facts wrong. It is about shaping how people understand themselves, their communities, and their possibilities. Dr. Carter G. Woodson once reflected that it took him 20 years after earning his doctorate from Harvard University to recover from what he described as his intellectual conditioning. James Baldwin similarly observed that it took years to free himself from the myths and falsehoods he had been taught about race, history, and human worth.

The stakes are especially high when misleading narratives are packaged in entertaining videos designed to reach young people. And by the way, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, cautioned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told and the understanding of the need to seek truth from credible sources.

It’s still hard to swallow, almost 24-hours after one of the most intense, indeed stressful election days in Colombia that I’ve witnessed, albeit from here in New York.

Colombian right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella does appear to have clinched a very narrow victory in Sunday's presidential election, at least according to the initial ballot count that still needed to be officially verified as of this writing.

De la Espriella had 49.66% of the vote while his rival, Senator Ivan Cepeda, trailed by roughly 250,000 votes at 48.70%, according to the national registrar's tally of just under 100% of ballots in the runoff election.

In trying to make personal sense of the closest presidential elections in recent Colombian history, I can’t help but think that the final results are a reflection of how Colombia has failed to acknowledge its stained history of state-sponsored, politically motivated violence, even ten years after a fragile peace accord was signed that put an end to one aspect of the decades-long conflict.

What we must not take away from this electoral outcome is that de la Espriella is an “outsider” who, by challenging the political status quo in Colombia, will bring something new in his approach to governing the country.

This latest election represents a national rejection—albeit by a very narrow margin—of the policies of “total peace” of the current administration of President Gustavo Petro. The results are an affirmation of and an open call for “total war,” reminiscent of some of the darkest days of the widespread regional violence that occurred throughout the country at the turn of the century and the early stages of this century.

A portion of the Colombian electorate—almost half—continues to view the country’s troubles through a fractured lens of national security, of unrepentant militarism, and of the firm belief in the need to apply the heavy hand of the state to confront criminality. These Colombians have essentially vetoed their collective memory of generational violence, of a civil war whose origins have always been traced back precisely to the lack of a state presence where it is most needed—in a sustainable public health system; in accessible housing and education; in the opportunities that come with equitable distribution of land, the protection of human rights, and universal support for robust democratic participation across the citizenry, regardless of race, class, or political affiliation.

Instead, they’ve voted for a person openly committed to gutting 40% of the already weakened state in all these sectors. De la Espriella has blamed Petro, the former M-19 guerilla leader and outgoing president, for the country's current economic and security troubles. The growth of these armed groups throughout the country in recent years are attributed to Petro’s attempt to negotiate directly an end to the violence during his time in office. Rarely are the policies of Petro’s predecessor, Ivan Duque, mentioned in this context, despite his deliberate efforts to jettison just about every aspect of the 2016 peace accords between FARC and the Colombian government, leading in many ways to the expansion of these groups.

And now, the president-elect has vowed to end all talks with the armed criminal organizations, while boosting the oil and gas sector, lowering taxes for the middle and upper classes, and building massive prisons to detain indefinitely all the criminals they can find in the process, a la strongman Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. He pledges to fortify the military and manage the state security forces with an iron fist, something that will be made much easier by a blank-check insurance policy granted to him by the Trump-Rubio-Hegseth Western Hemisphere doctrine of domination and control.

The opposing candidate of the left-of-center coalition known as Pacto Historico, Senator Ivan Cepeda, 63, had pledged to continue many of the policies of President Petro, the country's first leftist president. Those policies included state pension payments for the poor, union-backed labor reforms, a moratorium on new oil projects, and continued peace talks with armed groups to try to put an end of the ongoing violence. Some analysts think Cepeda should have distanced himself a bit more from Petro on the campaign trail, given how the media openly embraced the Kryptonite narrative that Petro represents for the left in Colombia. Instead, Cepeda, himself the victim of state-sponsored violence, stuck to a set of arguments tied to building peace through social justice, human rights, and most importantly, not returning to the past.

Despite the youthful energy and visible enthusiasm of the very diverse range of supporters who came out for Cepeda’s candidacy, it was not enough to put a pause on the establishment’s profound, almost religious hatred of left-wing leaders with social movement connections, who are almost instantaneously written off as puppets of guerrilla terror, branded threats to the Colombian homeland. In many ways, it’s much like the simplistic MAGA refrain for attacking their opponents as un-American or enemies of the people, except in the Colombian context, it is a recipe for extreme violence, death sentences for many of those on the receiving end.

Over 12 million Colombians did not vote for this reactionary, ahistorical vision for the country. More than 12 million voters placed their bets on a future of peace and dignity for all Colombians.

What we must not take away from this electoral outcome is that de la Espriella is an “outsider” who, by challenging the political status quo in Colombia, will bring something new in his approach to governing the country, a tantalizing myth that somehow caught traction during the campaign in the Colombian corporate press and their counterparts in the US media. De la Espriella may not have the privileged political pedigree of the openly nepotistic tradition that has characterized over a century of Colombian political history, but to call him an outsider in 2026 is to ignore the foundation of his success as a defense attorney, a businessman, and of the fortune that allowed him to fund his campaign independent of the “mainstream” power bosses of the Colombian political elite.

He is an entrenched insider within the right-wing, para-state apparatus that had metastasized like a slow-moving blood cancer into every part of the governing class in Colombia since the early 2000s. This para-state infrastructure was built on the backs of the millions of internally displaced Black, Indigenous, and peasant communities; tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared; and the many innocent civilians murdered in countless massacres that brought fear to the countryside for decades.

While FARC rebels were guilty of much of the violence in Colombia since the mid-1990s, it was the brutal reaction to FARC criminality carried out by the unholy alliance between large landowners, narco-traffickers, and the military that blew the lid open for the widespread terror we saw from 2000 to 2010.

Behind this was a public discourse framed by the term “democratic security,” coined by former two-term President Alvaro Uribe Vélez, and backed wholeheartedly by the US under its Plan Colombia project. It was followed by eventual “negotiations” between the paramilitaries and the Uribe government, as well as a major scandal where it was exposed that almost half of the elected members of Colombia’s Congress had direct ties with the paramilitary organizations that were responsible for the above-mentioned crimes. De la Espriella understood this when he defended many of the paramilitary leaders and narco-traffickers implicated in these crimes. This is an insider who made his mark in this process. There’s no denying this.

The tough-guy approach to national politics that the “Tiger” so openly declared on the campaign trail is the continuation of a long process of authoritarian, right-wing extremism that emerged in the early 1990s, one that sees any opposition to their political, economic, or territorial control of the country as the equivalent of terrorism that must be liquidated militarily. This is the profound danger I see right now in the days, months, and years ahead for Colombia.

Nevertheless, with all these dark clouds on the horizon, for the millions of people who supported Ivan Cepeda in these elections, there is room for some optimism, albeit with considerable caution.

That is the fact that over 12 million Colombians did not vote for this reactionary, ahistorical vision for the country. More than 12 million voters placed their bets on a future of peace and dignity for all Colombians. They hit the streets and attended rallies and posted online videos recalling the darkest days of the war, shouting the names of the victims of this violence, saluting the brave mothers who still demand justice for their sons killed by state security forces.

They did not vote against their collective memory.

They are a very powerful force today, and for the future of Colombia.

They will not be backing down any time soon.

For they’ve faced the barrel of many guns in the past, and they’re still here.

“The pump don’t work ‘Cause the vandals took the handles.”—Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Sometimes President Donald Trump’s diatribes reveal his own guilty behavior. Take his disastrous promotion of the makeover of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not only did he hire an incompetent contractor whose prior work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago gave him the shady inside track, but also Trump’s insistence on an environmentally disastrous “royal blue” caused an increase in the amount of algae now polluting the pool. Perhaps it might be time to break out a new MAGA hat, all in green, with the words, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

Of course, neither Trump nor his buddy contractor would admit their malfeasance and responsibility for what has happened. Given Trump’s other corrupt vandalism of national sites in DC, why should we fleeced taxpayers and residents of the city expect accountability from such grifters? Instead, the predictable accusation by the Orange Menace is that vandals were the cause of the algae bloom. The real vandals, Trump and his enablers, were operating in plain sight and with presidential impunity.

Indeed, Trump’s vandalism has engulfed the White House and environs. From the destruction of the “Rose Garden” (heaven forbid that he would want to wake up and smell the roses) to leveling the East Wing for his ballroom and bunker (again, at the taxpayers’ expense), the wrecking of the grounds continues unabated. Added to this devastation was the garish Claw, erected for the UFC blood sport on the White House lawn. Oh, yeah, the lawn is gone. Perhaps to be replaced by what—a Circus Maximus!

As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands.

And speaking of Rome, the actual sacking of the city by the Vandals in 455 only lasted some two weeks. Trump’s pillaging of the federal government has lasted more than a year. While the most obvious physical vandalizing is very evident, buried in much of the legislation and executive orders is a massive amount of damage to people’s lives and the future of the country and the world.

Only now are we reckoning with the harm caused by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Hundreds of thousands thrown off Medicaid, children and families denied basic foodstuffs. Trump and his Republican allies apparently aren’t even interested in offering “bread” along with the circuses that Trump revels in.

Meanwhile, Trump’s insane pal at Health and Human Services, brain-worm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sacking those doctors who believe in science in order to hire charlatans whose medicinal palliatives are hardly better than reading entrails. Eliminating tried and true medical practices, such as vaccines, has led to outbreaks of measles and will, undoubtedly, cause additional health problems.

And it should not be surprising that his toxic masculinist buddy, Pete Hegseth, the white Christian nationalist who occupies the office of the “Secretary of War,” now is overseeing a flu outbreak among the troops in the aftermath of making a vaccine “voluntary.” On the other hand, the 200-plus boaters murdered by Hegseth’s Pentagon pals in Latin America did not have the “luxury” of a choice about their well-being!

And speaking of well-being, the predictable worldwide deaths of people who relied on medical assistance from the United States was caused by DOGE’s slashing of international aide. Trump’s fellow vandal, the neo-Nazi Elon Musk, haughtily embraced such pillaging, seeing it as a way to extirpate empathy from any and all governmental policies.

Another fellow vandal on the world stage is Bibi Netanyahu. With the assistance of the US, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. (As the historian Tacitus reflected on the depredations of the Roman military campaigns: “They made a desert and called it peace.”) The devastation wrought by these two bullies has spread to Lebanon and Iran. However, these vandals may have overplayed their hand in Iran.

Finally, one of the most egregious examples of Trump’s vandalism is sending out legions of armed thugs to cause murder and mayhem on the streets of major cities around the country. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harass, intimidate, and kidnap thousands of innocent people, sending many to prison hellholes built by the private corporate buddies of Trump.

As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands. Trump’s vandalism, and that of his enablers, will only be terminated when they are unceremoniously expelled to those islands of incarceration where others now languish.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Incumbents beware: The left-wing public is pissed off, too. As voters express frustration with the corporatist establishment, democratic-socialist congressional candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani have the potential to score upsets in New York’s primary elections today.

• The Senate passes, 85-5, a major housing bill with a goal of cutting housing prices by stopping Wall Street investors from buying up more than 350 single-family homes, among other things. The House will pass, Trump will sign, it will have no effect.

• A judge bans Trump’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements,(SAVE) because the national database of aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data could result in voters being wrongly purged.

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The post Populists Favored to Win | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In December 2025, I volunteered on an educational mission with the Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics, or JHPIEGO, teaching neonatal ICU nurses in East Jerusalem about modern care of premature infants. As a neonatal and pediatric critical care nurse, this training meant a great deal to me. I knew it would help these nurses save the most fragile newborns. When I was offered the opportunity to return a few months later for additional educational work, I immediately took it.

I knew about the arbitrary and unpredictable barriers Israel erects in front of anyone trying to help Palestinians. Still, I thought that with my Jewish heritage and American citizenship, I would be the last person blocked from Israel-Palestine. I unfortunately learned that being of Jewish descent, an American, and a nurse affords no protection in the eyes of the Israeli or American governments. I was there to help Palestinian babies, so I was a threat.

My grandmother, Sylvia, was a genuinely beautiful soul. She was born in 1928 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in London. I was born on her birthday, and we lived two houses down the street from each other, so naturally she and I became best friends. As a child I had tea with her almost every day after school. She loved to be silly and to laugh, but she also shared the pain of her childhood. She once told me about British Nazi sympathizers throwing rocks at her grandfather on his way to synagogue. Imagining her as a little girl, seeing her grandfather violently dehumanized like that, I wondered how anyone could be so cruel to another human being.

Because of my grandmother’s stories, visiting the DC Holocaust Memorial Museum as a child was deeply personal. What I experienced going through the museum shocked me, and I was left wondering what my grandmother couldn’t bring herself to tell me about that time in her life.

I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for.

What did it feel like to be dehumanized like that? To know that powerful “others” regard you as disposable? Grandma was the most childishly playful person I’ve ever known. Still, when I heard her talk about her own childhood, and what it was like to live in Jim Crow America, it was impossible to miss the pain of her own childhood.

Grandma knew nothing about the United States when she arrived here, and she quickly learned that her new country was far from the bastion of freedom she was expecting. Discrimination against African Americans in particular shocked her. Having been on the receiving end of European antisemitic racism, she simply couldn’t understand why people would hate others in this way. She would often remind me, “We all bleed the same color.” Despite—maybe because of—her having little formal education, Grandma could see toxic ideas for what they were.

Jennifer Arriaga's grandmother is shown as a young woman in London.

Since childhood I’ve cared deeply about the fight for human rights in my own country and the state of Texas. But before October 7, 2023, I paid no attention to Israel or the Palestinians. As much as I loved my grandmother, neither Judaism nor Israel were important in my upbringing or my adult life. But as I watched the assault on Gaza through my phone, I became disgusted by political leaders and those around me who blindly “stood with Israel.” In 2024 a neonatologist I worked with, Dr. Yassar Arain, volunteered in Gaza. When he returned we spoke about his time there, and about the complicity of the United States in the genocide.

Yassar’s descriptions of the conditions in Gaza were beyond anything I’d ever imagined. In my mind the kind of vicious dehumanization that allowed people to kill babies had been left in my grandmother’s past. Today we have the Geneva Conventions and iPhones. But as the assault on Gaza seemed to reach ever higher levels of depravity, I couldn’t take it any longer. By December 2024, I answered a call to volunteer for a medical mission to Gaza.

Gaza was my first time volunteering internationally. My family, friends, and co-workers were worried, but once I saw the call for volunteers I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t really consider my distant Jewish heritage, but more so what Grandma would say about what I was doing. I guessed it would be something like: “The world has forsaken these children, just like it did my family. Go help them.”

As a nurse and a human being, it is ingrained in me that all people have a right to live. Seeing the attacks on innocents, even within the walls of hospitals, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for rather than as “an infrastructure to be destroyed.”

Blocked

Israel controls all access in and out of Gaza. With the Rafah Crossing closed, entry for all humanitarian workers starts in Jordan. On January 22, 2025, I landed in Amman and met the team for the first time.

“We’ll get the final list late tonight,” our mission coordinator told us. “Someone always gets denied, so just be prepared for that.”

“Sorry,” I cut in. “Denied?”

“COGAT” she explained, referring to the Israeli military office, “will send a list of who was approved. Everyone else is denied.”

To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.

I didn’t know how to respond. Israel tells doctors and nurses where they can and can’t go? Who they can and can’t help? That night we learned three physicians and one nurse from our team would be blocked from entering Gaza. I was allowed in.

The effect on my colleagues was devastating. One might think it would be a relief to be blocked from entering one of the most violent places on Earth. But the moment one learns that their name is not on “the list,” issued by an unaccountable and faceless entity, is the moment a healthcare worker realizes something about themselves. Healthcare workers help people. We devote not only our careers but our whole selves to this pursuit. To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.

One of those blocked was Sandra (name changed). Sandra is a pediatrician, a Canadian citizen of Indian origin. She was enthusiastic and kind. Her smile was incredibly warm, and I could picture children responding to it and feeling safe with her. She and I were sitting next to each other at dinner when we were told she had been blocked.

I’ll never forget the shock and devastation on Sandra’s face. She tried to stay calm but burst into tears, trying to speak through them to say she was glad at least I would be able to go. More than a year later she still does not understand: “Why was I blocked from entering? What did I do?” She doesn’t understand that the simple fact is there’s only one reason to stop a pediatrician from doing their work: to enhance the suffering of children. In Gaza, my bunkmate was also a pediatrician. I remember her coming to our room at the end of every day, exhausted, and telling me how badly pediatricians were needed. After all, half of Gaza’s population is children, and by many measures they are the sickest and most traumatized kids on the planet.

John (name changed), a family doctor and wound-care specialist, had been to Gaza twice before. He left his wife and two toddlers to volunteer a third time. His first two trips showed him just how much damage Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza’s healthcare system had done. Hoping to bring back useful solutions, he spent the eight months between his last trip and this one investigating wound-care techniques in resource-limited settings, knowledge he was eager to spread to his Palestinian colleagues.

John was so devastated by the news that he was being blocked from Gaza that, while everyone was focused on Sandra, he silently got up from the table and left to see his family in Amman. We did not see him again until we ran into him at the Jordanian border the next day. Instead of going with us to Gaza, he was going to attempt to visit Jerusalem.

This state of affairs seemed so outrageous that I couldn’t sleep that night. Sandra, John, and the others were not allowed to… heal people? Lying in bed I tried to convince myself: It can’t be just because we were going to heal Palestinians specifically. Right? There must have been some kind of security concern! But as I dragged my bags across Kerem Shalom, I had to face reality: That morning, both Sandra and John visited Jerusalem as tourists. How could they be security concerns in Gaza but not in Jerusalem?

Months later, John still refused to believe that anyone would deliberately stop a doctor from providing care. “Clearly I’m not a threat,” he told me, just before trying to return to Gaza again. “I was approved to enter Israel! It was just a mistake.” He signed up for another mission. On August 18, 2025, Israel blocked him from Gaza again.

I wonder if whatever Israeli bureaucrat at the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs came up with this particular assault on human dignity is proud of themselves.

“You Can Sleep Here or in Jail”

When I left Gaza, I promised my Palestinian colleagues I wouldn’t forget them and would bring their stories to my family, friends, and community in Texas. I organized speaking events at local churches to reach people who, like me, knew nothing about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians with our tax dollars and weapons. I signed an open letter to President Donald Trump, along with 151 other American healthcare workers who had volunteered in Gaza, telling him what we had seen with our own eyes.

Then, in August of 2025 I connected with a nurse practitioner who was looking for a neonatal ICU nurse to go to East Jerusalem for the JHPIEGO educational mission. I quickly signed up. As the trip drew closer, the possibility of being blocked started to worry me. I had come to know dozens of other healthcare workers who had been denied entry into Gaza, and Israel had started blocking healthcare workers from volunteering in the West Bank as well.

I entered Israel through Ben Gurion Airport with little difficulty. Meanwhile my co-volunteer Heather (name changed), a British physiotherapist who had never been to Israel or Palestine, was blocked from entering. At the end of that trip, JHPIEGO asked me to come back and teach again in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, just one month later. I happily agreed, especially since it seemed that I was one of the few people who could enter consistently.

How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others?

Five weeks after this educational mission ended, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport again, on January 28. I presented the visa I had been given in December. The agent asked me a series of questions and then told me her supervisor would like to speak with me. After two hours, I was called into a small office with one unidentified man, asking questions and writing my answers down on a scratch piece of paper. I was asked exactly the same questions as before and gave exactly the same answers.

Then I was taken to another holding area and told to wait. After about one hour the same man came over and handed me a piece of paper telling me I was being denied entry to Israel. The organization I was volunteering with, he said, was “blacklisted.” I explained that it was not blacklisted; they had an established office in Jerusalem. He insisted they were indeed blacklisted and told me to proceed with him to a detention area.

I called my team’s handler in the United States. “They’re saying JHPIEGO is blacklisted,” I told him. No, he explained, it most certainly is not. Another physician had entered with JHPIEGO one week prior and had been told the same thing. At that time JHPIEGO contacted Israeli border control, cleared up the misunderstanding, and she was allowed entry. I explained this to the nameless Israeli agent, who said it didn’t interest him. I contacted an Israeli lawyer who has helped international volunteers enter Gaza, but before I could explain the situation a new nameless Israeli agent showed up and demanded that I follow him to security for inspection.

It was now late at night, and the airport was mostly empty. The nameless agent took me, along with two elderly people who were also being deported, to an empty gate and told us to stay there until the morning. I managed a laugh and asked, “We’re sleeping in the airport?”

“You can sleep here or in jail.”

“Okay,” I said, taken aback. I would be fine, but it seemed like cruelty for its own sake to require an elderly couple to sleep on an airport floor. “Do you know how we can get our luggage?”

“Your luggage isn’t my problem.”

At that moment, my team called and said they had called the American embassy and asked them to explain to the Israeli government that JHPIEGO is not a blacklisted organization. “But”—my hopes were raised, only to be dashed—“the embassy wants nothing to do with this.”

After exhausting every avenue, reality started to set in. My Jewish heritage and my American citizenship wouldn’t help me help people, because I was there to help the wrong people. Suddenly I was overwhelmed, the same way Sandra and John had been when they were blocked from Gaza. Oscillating between anger and sadness, I broke down crying.

On May 18, a colleague of mine texted me, “I joined the club for people not allowed into Israel.” A blonde, blue-eyed, American-born nurse practitioner in her late 60, she has been working with the Palestinians since the 1990s. She has flown through Ben Gurion Airport more than a dozen times. This time, at the request of JHPIEGO’s East Jerusalem office, she was on a team of six healthcare providers traveling to the West Bank to teach the pediatric Fundamental Critical Care Support course offered from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. She would have taught Palestinians how to save the sickest children’s lives. Israel blocked 5 out of their 6 teachers. “No real explanation—except our visa was not the right one for a volunteer mission. Totally false.”

How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others? Would she even believe someone who told her that a self-declared Jewish state denies sick infants access to volunteer nurses and doctors?

Ali

In January 2025 I worked with a nurse named Ali Al-Najar in the pediatric ICU (PICU) at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, a city in the middle of the Gaza Strip. We were caring for a 3-year-old boy, Ibrahim (name changed), who had been shot. The physicians decided Ibrahim needed a CT scan, requiring us to transport this incredibly sick child to another building and back.

This is risky work under controlled circumstances. But in Gaza, where the elevator and electricity frequently fail and human resources are stretched thin, it seemed to me like an impossible task. But Ali reassured me: We can do it together. So, we made a plan: He would guide us down the stairs and through the hallways, while I would monitor Ibrahim. I would care for Ibrahim; Ali would care for me.

Ali picked Ibrahim up and placed him on a transport stretcher. I held onto the breathing tube in his throat, pushed oxygen into his lungs with an Ambu bag, and slung the intravenous drips of medications keeping Ibrahim alive and asleep over Ali’s shoulders. We carried Ibrahim down the stairs of the pediatric building, outside into the utter chaos of the strip, into the main hospital building, and over to radiology.

In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward.

While carefully walking down the many staircases, over the broken and uneven pavement, and trying to balance the stretcher with one hand and push air into Ibrahim’s lungs with the other, all the while blindly trusting Ali, my mind flashed back to when I saw Ibrahim rushed into the ED. I had watched him go through surgery for his gunshot wound and performed chest compressions on him when his heart stopped after surgery. He had been through so much in his short three years of life. “He survived all of that,” I told myself. “We will get him to radiology.”

When Ali placed Ibrahim into the scanner, the tech reminded him to avoid the bullet fragments lodged in the machine’s bed. Ibrahim was sedated and certainly wouldn’t comprehend English, but I talked him through what was happening anyway while continuing to push air into his lungs. Anywhere else in the world a lead apron would have been available to shield me from the scan’s radiation. When the scan was finished, we did the whole exercise in reverse, bringing Ibrahim back to the PICU. The excursion took well over 90 minutes, an eternity of risk for this fragile, grievously injured toddler.

My mission in Gaza ended before Ibrahim awoke, but on my way out of Gaza, as I was processing all the emotions from the trip—an impossible task, as one cannot exit Gaza without driving through the largest fields of rubble on Earth—I received a text from another nurse. It was Ibrahim, awake and smiling, drinking juice.

Transporting Ibrahim was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. In the United States we would have had a mobile ventilator, a respiratory therapist, and both myself and a nurse assistant. We would have had a working elevator, dependable electricity, a clear hallway, protection from radiation, and a CT scanner that worked reliably and hadn’t been shot. In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward. His family was displaced and homeless. He couldn’t assume he or any of his loved ones would be fed or alive when he returned “home” to his tent. But despite all of that, he dedicated himself not only to Ibrahim but even to me, making sure that I felt I could provide the best care possible in this healthcare nightmare.

A few months later, in Fort Worth, I took another patient to the CT scanner. As we raced through the halls of the hospital I couldn’t help but think of my time in Gaza with Ibrahim and Ali. I told my astonished co-workers what it was like to do this in Gaza, fondly recalling Ali’s guidance and care.

After my shift I couldn’t stop thinking about Ali. I texted him but got no response. I figured he was busy. But a few days later I saw a post about him on Instagram. On May 2, 2025, Israel murdered Ali and his brother, blowing them up with a drone.

Sylvia and Ali

Working with the Palestinians taught me more about the world than I expected. My grandmother was everything I knew about Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. I simply cannot recognize her in the unnamed and casually cruel men at Ben Gurion Airport. I don’t see her in either the drone operator who pushed the button that ripped my friend Ali to shreds or in the state organizing and carrying out the genocide in which he was killed.

I see my sweet grandmother’s face in my memories of Ali. I see her in the nurses and doctors I met in Palestine, and in the mothers of Gaza who deprive themselves of everything to keep their children alive for just one more day. The beauty, resilience, and dignity that my grandmother carried in her heart and soul is found today in Gaza and throughout Palestine. And the ugliness of the neo-Nazis who threw stones at my great-great grandfather for being Jewish is manifest nowhere more than in the ultra-racist arrogance of Danny Danon, Bezalel Smotrich, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Daniella Weiss in Israel, and Ted Cruz and Randy Fine here at home.

A fanatically Jewish supremacist, “super-Sparta” state of Israel, serving as American gendarme over the people of the Middle East forever, is no solution to the problem of Jewish safety. Neither the United States nor this distorted and perverse conception of an exclusively Jewish state act to keep Jews safe.

We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.

I’m hardly the first person to say so. Jewish thinkers from Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt to Benjamin Balthaser, and Palestinian intellectuals from Walid Khalidi to Edward Said, have all argued as much far more convincingly than I can. Josh Nathan-Kazis recently noted that “Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves” to the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran despite the obvious fact that “they are setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do.”

I hope my experience can help others, especially those who can’t work directly with Palestinians, to see these simple truths. I’ve seen what occupation and genocide are, up close, if only for a few weeks. They are systems that prioritize state power and control over the welfare of children and the lives of healthcare workers. Israel’s own behavior convinced me that even the most cynical argument for why all of this is necessary—without it, the Jews will never be safe!—is absurd. We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.

Our real allies are the people who want what everyone wants: to live their lives in peace, to watch their children grow and thrive. Our real allies are the nurses at Nasser Medical Complex, not the thugs in Tel Aviv’s airport.

The 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may lead to lasting peace or it may be over within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the US and Israel. If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped US foreign policy for decades.

Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the US-Iran memorandum and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the US fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.

If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war between Iran, Israel, and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.

This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries—all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in US aggression and Israeli regional expansion.

President Donald Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the US and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the US from the war on Iran that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.

But to understand the roots of this crisis in US foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive US foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that US military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”

Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.

The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the US defeat in Vietnam. After President George Bush II and Vice President Dick Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Presidents Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.

This US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s. From the Suez crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.

In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.

They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia; the occupation of Beirut; the invasion of Grenada; the airstrikes on Libya in 1986; as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities,” and “unconventional warfare.”

They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact “a strategic reorientation of the US military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”

Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the US and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.

But the US involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East. It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; US and Western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.

Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying US special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concentrating such a large share of US war casualties in such a small force—about 70,000 men and women at any one time—helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.

The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated, or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.

Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked US and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.

Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.

But the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of US imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of US and Western politicians and establishment media.

US political, military, and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.

In the US-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power, and uphold international law.

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security, and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in US aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.

As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the US empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting US imperial violence for generations.

It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the essential transition from empire to democracy.

That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.

Now that an initial diplomatic deal between the US and Iran has been signed and intensive negotiations are under way to fully end the war, Congress should do everything possible to ensure this agreement is fully implemented. While the agreement is likely to have imperfections—thanks in large part to President Donald Trump harming US leverage and interests with a disastrous war—it would be a massive mistake to attack the deal simply because it comes from this president. The key question to consider is what steps Congress can take to ensure it becomes a durable peace—rather than merely a pause before the next round of war.

With all the human loss, destruction, and global stakes, we must stop this war, but also ensure that the conditions of peace don’t lay the groundwork for a return to conflict—or inspire its repetition elsewhere. The political and financial cost of ending this war must fall on those who aided and profited from it. The question is whether we build the safeguards to make it last.

In June 2025, it was already clear that accepting President Trump’s false narrative of absolute victory (claiming to have fully obliterated Iran’s nuclear sites) would not end US-Iran tensions. Any peace will remain fragile if the conditions that produced the war persist: the might-makes-right mindset that proved hollow against Iran’s strategic resilience; the preference for militarism over diplomacy, from Trump’s Joint-Comprehensive Plan-of-Action withdrawal to Biden’s failure to pursue a serious alternative to “maximum pressure” sanctions; the unconditional support for Israel even when it runs counter to US interests.

It is highly possible that during the initial 60 days of negotiations contemplated in the MOU, Israel will continue military action against Iran or in Lebanon to provoke a reaction and restart the cycle. The US cannot fully control what Israel would do. But it can stop aiding and abetting the war, which would make it far more difficult for Israel to sustain a campaign to spoil diplomacy.

The problem is not a single president or party. It is the power structures that ensure those who profit from war never pay its cost, regardless of who holds office.

Military action against Iran failed at producing any of its intended objectives, while it incurred costs that are in some cases irreversible and in others generational. The lives lost will not come back. The destruction of civilian infrastructure will shape Iranian society for decades. And the war has granted perverse legitimacy to a brutal regime, recasting the government of the Islamic Republic not as the oppressor it is, but as David against Goliath, the underdog resistor against foreign aggression. Diplomacy produced better results at far lower cost on every measure that matters.

This war confirmed what few wanted to acknowledge: that US military bases across the Gulf, sold as a projection of strength, are also a profound vulnerability. Each base became a potential target, each host government a hostage to escalation. For many Gulf governments, American military backing is a useful substitute for political legitimacy at home. Yet the war exposed the limits of that bargain: The same shield that promised security also turned them into targets.

Turning the Strait of Hormuz into a battlefield made this dynamic undeniable. Its closure hit energy markets and created rare pressure for de-escalation from Gulf elites who felt the costs directly. But while some elites were squeezed, others made billions. The system is designed so the profiteers are never the ones paying the ultimate price. That is exactly why temporary market pressure is not a substitute for structural accountability to prevent future conflicts.

Those who profit from war have learned over many years that neither Republicans or Democrats will hold them accountable. A new Congress post November has a real opportunity to change that—to serve US interests, meaning the American people, not a select elite. With $72 billion spent on the Iran war, a $1.5 trillion military budget, and war contractors more powerful and unaccountable than ever, Congress needs to investigate all war profiteers, from arms contractors to companies like the drone firm backed by the Trump sons that sought to sell interceptors to the very Gulf states being attacked, a direct conflict of interest.

In a relatively new dystopian innovation in war capitalism during the war, prediction markets like Polymarket saw millions in bets on everything from the timing of strikes to casualty estimates. Suspected insider accounts netted $2.4 million on Iran War bets with a 98% win rate. This kind of betting on war outcomes by those with proximity to power blurs the line between forecasting and profiteering. It must also be addressed.

We do not even have to wait for elections in November to start this process. The growing support for War Powers resolutions with majority house support just this month, and the 40 senators backing the Joint Resolution of Disapproval to withhold certain arms from Israel, show what may be possible when Congress does its job. Congress should condition support, block escalation, and hold hearings on the legality of what has been done.

Such measures would serve a deeper purpose: signaling that a new Congress, and eventually a new administration, can offer something more than a return to the previous status quo: a set of concrete actions that change how war is authorized, how money is spent, and who benefits.

The problem is not a single president or party. It is the power structures that ensure those who profit from war never pay its cost, regardless of who holds office.

Corruption and war profiteering are not merely governance issues. They are theft from the American people, through unaccountable war spending, the unaffordable prices it produces, and an elite class that never pays for the policies it pushes. A Congress that treats corruption and war profiteering as harm against the public and responds accordingly would demonstrate what a functioning democracy actually looks like.

The running gag in America’s yellow-bellied war on migrants is that if you’re here legally, you’re welcome, but if you’re not, we’re coming after you. The discrimination is not that discriminating.

The reigning rule on the eve of the 250th anniversary of our vanishing republic is: If you’re brown, Black, or otherwise undesirable, we’re coming after you. If you support the wrong kind of liberation movement—like, say, Palestinian rights to avoid an Israeli holocaust—or if you say the wrong thing about MAGA America on social media, we’re coming after you pretty much by any means necessary.

Doesn’t matter if you have a Green Card. Doesn’t matter if you’re a naturalized citizen. We’re coming after you. I haven’t yet heard of a native-born American becoming an unperson, but that can’t be far off. When a country loses its civil liberties and defaults from human rights to demonization, all bets are off.

We’ve become shamelessly familiar with Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s pogroms of undocumented migrants, most of whom have never committed a crime. OK. Let’s concede that they crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visa, which makes them lawbreakers, even if they’re not criminals. If you really want to destroy the economy, lose your farmworkers, your cleaning crews, your roofers, your childcare workers and servers, you could argue that they should be thrown out, even if they’re law-abiding; even if they work harder than you, me, and our American neighbors put together; even if without them, Social Security would have already gone bankrupt because it’s thanks to them that we exploit their payroll and other taxes without having to pay them a dime. Let’s concede that. Let’s throw the fuckers out.

The New Colossus has been replaced by our new Caligula’s ass.

But racism is not that discerning. Not in the slyly fascist calculus that wants a certain type of foreigner out of here. Between executive orders and administrative rules, President Donald Trump is going after legal, documented workers from browner countries by eliminating their right to work in airports or day care centers, to enroll in schools and universities, to drive trucks or even fill high-skilled jobs Americans are apparently too dumb to hold.

For example, the administration is working to end the right even of American-born children of migrants to receive federal day care subsidies. A green card is supposed to give you all the rights of an American citizen short of voting, serving on a jury, or running for office. I had one. I knew what it felt like. But now, the administration is banning green card holders from receiving small-business loans. Our own Derek Barrs, who used to be a school board member here and who now works for Trump as the administrator of the trucking division of the transportation department, has signed off on a new rule that makes it far more difficult for migrants to get commercial drivers’ licenses, though trucking has been one of the great entry-level roads to migrants’ American dream. (Faustian bargains don’t become you, Derek.)

There’s the illegal arrests and attempted deportations of numerous pro-Palestinian green card holders who had the temerity to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but not a single equivalent of pro-Israeli protesters succoring calls for a Palestinian genocide. There’s the new State Department rule requiring all visa applicants to reveal all their social media accounts and set them to “public.” The State Department uses the content to vet applicants and reject them based on past opinions, if those opinions don’t conform with MAGA ideology (calling Palestinians “animals” is fine. Calling Trump anything but god is not.) There’s the new rule requiring mere applicants for a green card to leave the United States first, which is just another way of weeding undesirables.

All that adds up to creative but sinister ways to send the message to non-Americans, especially non-Americans of certain pigments and origin, that they are not welcome, to force self-deportations, or to keep the downtrodden from imagining that Lady Liberty’s lifted “lamp beside the golden door” is still for them. The New Colossus has been replaced by our new Caligula’s ass. It’s working. Schools are emptying out. Universities, which used to be the crown jewel of American progress and unstoppable factories of Nobel prizes, are losing their brightest students to Europe and China. American innovation isn’t far behind, except in retreading xenophobic laws and methods better suited for Franz Kafka’s plots: Migrants, you’re all Joseph K now.

On this 250th anniversary, we are a diminished, insecure, fearful country, waging war on our greatest asset: our migrants, the people we once were, the people without whose ancestors none of us would be here. I’ll be celebrating in a couple of weeks. But it won’t be today’s America. It’ll be the America I came to as a migrant 47 years ago, and that me and my children hope to see again before we dig our shithole too deep to get out.

When looking at today’s Middle East, it is important to recognize that Israel is completely out of control, and no one has the will to rein them in.

This should have been understood back in July of 2024, in the waning days of the Biden administration, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to address a joint session of Congress. His government had already committed atrocious war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon. They had killed Iran’s Ayatollah and many of its political and scientific leadership. They had also occupied parts of Syria, destroyed much of that country’s military capacity, and were working to deepen Syria’s sectarian strife. At the same time, Israeli violent settlers, backed by the military, were running roughshod over the West Bank terrorizing Palestinians and systematically demolishing the homes of thousands.

In his address to the Congress, Netanyahu boasted that this murderous behavior demonstrated that Israel had become the dominant force in the Middle East fighting and winning on seven fronts. You are not defending us, he claimed, we are defending you—terming his bloody rampage across the region as Israel leading the effort to protect Western civilization against the barbarism of the East.

As inflammatory and disgraceful as his words (and the actions they described) were, he was applauded by Republicans and some Democrats, with only a handful of Democratic members of Congress vigorously protesting. For its part, the Biden administration left it to Vice President Harris to deliver a mild rebuke to Netanyahu.

During the past five US administrations, it has been precisely this pattern of behavior—whether outright support for Israeli crimes or silence and timidity in the face of them—that has fostered Israel’s impunity, coupled with a megalomaniacal sense of mission. President Clinton termed Netanyahu impossible or ridiculous; Obama considered him “incorrigible”; and even Trump has described his frustration with the Israeli leader in harsh, obscene language. But none have taken firm steps to rein him in.

In the wake of President Trump’s half-baked “deal” attempting to end his ill-considered, costly war with Iran, Netanyahu has been quiet. He has left criticism to ministers in his cabinet and opposition party leaders. Vice-President JD Vance’s rebuke of Israeli critics was noteworthy but absent threats of serious changes in policy Vance’s words will be dismissed as nothing more than words.

At this point it must be noted that Israel’s dangerous impunity and expansive sense of mission is not just a Netanyahu problem. It is a deeper Israeli problem that historically has manifested itself in two ways.

During the Clinton and Obama years, when the US wanted the Israelis to stop settlement expansion or honor terms of agreements that were being broken, their administrations hesitated to take tough measures against Israel, or even use tougher language, for fear that it would embolden Israel’s hardline right and end up being counterproductive. As a result, there were no crackdowns on Israeli governments led by Yitzak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Naftali Bennet.

This deference toward Israeli leaders, out of concern for the problems they would face from hardliners should we force them to make hard decisions, is never shown toward Palestinian or other Arab leaders. The result of this coddling has been the emboldening and empowerment of Israeli hardliners to the point where they and their espoused views are the dominant political current in today’s Israeli politics. This is not to say that there aren’t “liberals” contesting Netanyahu’s coalition government. But their liberalism is defined by their opposition to Netanyahu’s corruption, his authoritarian instinct, and his courting of the ultraorthodox and the religious policies they impose on the rest of Israeli society.

The opposition parties that will be contesting Netanyahu in the next election are not only not challenging his war policies, but also now posing as more hawkish than he is with regard to Israel’s wars and its treatment of Palestinians. In fact, all of the main contenders to head a post-Netanyahu Israeli government have roundly condemned his agreement to ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon. They have uniformly denounced what they’ve called his displays of subservience to US President Trump thereby making Israel appear to be a humiliated “vassal state.” All have criticized the recently announced US-Iran peace agreement, with the self-described “liberal” Democrat party blasting the deal by suggesting that it threatens to “erase all of the gains Israel had achieved” in their war on Iran.

All of this should make it clear to liberals in the US that the problem in today’s Middle East isn’t just Netanyahu. His defeat won’t mean “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It’s an entire political culture that has gone off the rails. The only way it will change is if we make Israel pay a price by ending aid and political and military cooperation, thereby creating a shock that will force a political reckoning in the country. On the other hand, if we don’t act, Israel’s out-of-control rogue behaviors will continue to set the Middle East on fire and we will be complicit in all that they do.

Remember Elon Musk running around in his DOGE garb with sunglasses and a chainsaw? The Republicans are hoping that you don’t.

The ostensible point of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was rooting out trillions of dollars of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk gathered together a group of “super-high-IQ” MAGA boys who worked 80 hours a week ransacking all the various government agencies and departments in this effort.

Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion from the US budget with his DOGE gang. Musk came up largely empty-handed in this effort. He did manage to save around $20 billion a year by eliminating USAID, a program that provided health care and nutrition to millions of people in Africa. While this ended the Bush II AIDS program, PREPAR, which has saved tens of millions of lives, it did not do much to help US taxpayers. The $5 billion cost of the program was roughly 0.08 percent of federal spending.

It is impossible to believe that there is a large amount of fraud in government without also believing that Elon Musk is a total incompetent.

Mostly, what Musk ended up doing was creating chaos in programs that he seemed to not understand. He took credit for canceling contracts that were already completed, fired people who were subsequently rehired, and did things like end a screwworm monitoring program. This last move has led to a screwworm outbreak threatening the country’s cattle stock.

But the key point here is that Musk has a free hand and a chainsaw to pursue government waste, fraud, and abuse wherever he saw it. Everyone needs to keep that in mind when they hear Republican politicians yelling about how they will save us billions or hundreds of billions from various programs, not by cutting meat, but by rooting out fraud.

This means that when Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn claimed a few months back that 12 million people were fraudulently added to the exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, she was claiming that Elon Musk and his super-high IQ boys were too incompetent to find 12 million fraudulent enrollees. That is roughly half of all the people on the exchanges.

Similarly, when Speaker Mike Johnson claims that he will deal with a projected $370 billion annual shortfall in the Social Security program, for years 2033 and beyond, by eliminating waste and fraud, Johnson is claiming that Musk and the DOGE boys somehow missed this. That would be equal to roughly 15 percent of the program’s spending.

In the same vein, when Trump claimed that Minnesota had $19 billion in fraud in its Medicaid program, he was claiming that an amount roughly equal to the state’s entire annual Medicaid budget was going to fraud. This is despite the fact that Minnesota’s per capita spending on Medicaid is not out of line with other states. But more importantly, Trump had just sent Elon Musk and his DOGE boys looking into this, and they apparently found nothing.

At this point, it should be obvious to everyone, even elite reporters, that when Republicans yell about fraud, they are just doing a slightly more polite version of shouting the N-word. Fraud does exist in government programs, and we should do what we can to minimize it. This means the hard work that the Government Accountability Office does, as well as the work that was done by the 16 Inspector Generals fired by Trump just after he took office.

It’s also more often done at the high end with major companies ripping off the government, as Florida Senator Rick Scott did in his earlier career as an insurance company CEO. The high-end fraudsters who pocket the big bucks are more likely to be found on Trump’s pardon list or at parties at Mar-a-Lago than the receiving end of a Republican investigation.

But whenever Trump and other Republicans yell about fraud, it is important to remember that they handed over the keys of government and a chainsaw to Elon Musk and gave him a free rein. It is impossible to believe that there is a large amount of fraud in government without also believing that Elon Musk is a total incompetent. Logic doesn’t carry much weight in policy circles, but the rest of us should recognize this simple fact.

That subhead of mine is certainly repetitive of me (me, me), but how can you not be repetitive in the distinctly repeated world of Donald J. Trump (Trumped, Trumped)? I mean, twice already and who really knows what’s to come?

Here’s the question nobody seems to be asking right now, though: What country will Donald Trump attack next? Yes, at the moment, he’s still wildly wound up in his Iran war/truce/peace/or you name it (tomorrow). Yesterday, it was, of course, Venezuela, and next week it might be Cuba or Greenland, or who on (or off) this planet knows where? And I haven’t even mentioned his military’s ongoing bombing runs in Somalia, which are barely noticed in the mainstream media here. And who knows what I’ve forgotten or what to expect in this increasingly bizarre world of ours from the president who swore repeatedly in his third election campaign that he would never, never, never go to... yes, of course, war?

Hey, only the other day, Secretary of War (a title which, of course, couldn’t be blunter in the age of You Know Who) Pete Hegseth warned that “what happens with the future of Cuba is in the hands of the president of the United States and the leadership of Cuba. No matter what, the Department of War is going to be prepared and postured for any possible contingency.”

Ah, yes, any possible contingency except one, of course: victory (which, since the Second World War, just hasn’t been in the American vocabulary) or, for that matter, peace. I mean what could possibly go wrong in a world that now, remarkably enough, has its first trillionaire, Donald Trump’s (sometimes) buddy Elon Musk? (On that, Senator Elizabeth Warren commented all too aptly: “I want to be clear: This is not just some fluke. It is a feature of a rigged economy.”)

What, in fact, could possibly go wrong on such a rigged planet? I’m sure Donald Trump and Elon Musk couldn’t imagine. What could go wrong on a world in which no American president ever seems to realize that wars are simply never to be won by this country, no matter its power and the ever-ballooning size of the Pentagon budget, now possibly heading for -- ah, yes, talking about trillionaires! -- $1.5 trillion yearly (and, no, that is not a typo), if Donald Trump has anything to say about it? And in Congress, mind you, that’s still referred to as “defense” spending.

What could possibly go wrong when launching a war on Iran, a country that’s slightly less than 6,500 miles from Washington, D.C.? That’s so much less dumb of Donald Trump than Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a disastrous war right on his country’s border with Ukraine. At least, Iran is so far away that you could ask: Whose lives could possibly be disturbed by it (other than Iranians, their neighbors, or of course, anyone who drives a car or a truck that isn’t electric and has had to pay for the gas that hasn’t been making its way through the Strait of Hormuz these days, months, or for all we know years)?

In fact, here’s a suggestion for President Trump: at only 6,500 miles, Iran really shouldn’t be considered quite far enough from Washington to truly, truly count as the world’s best enemy. What about Pakistan instead, since it’s 7,000 miles away? Wouldn’t that make better sense? Especially since, as Zia ur-Rehman of the New York Times reported recently, with the planet heating up as distinctly as it is, one district in southern Pakistan hit a record 124.7 degrees Fahrenheit as May ended. And you (and Donald Trump) know just what that means: ever more Pakistanis will feel that they have to leave their country and head elsewhere and why not head for the United States of America, only 7,000 miles away? So, Donald, how about starting another war there and while you’re at it, as wars do so effectively, pour yet more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, ensuring that Pakistan will indeed get ever hotter (and hotter and hotter) even faster (and faster and faster)?

And honestly, to ask a perfectly realistic question: if President Trump can’t continue to stack up wars one atop another, how in the world will he ever get Congress to pass his next Pentagon budget for that $1.5 trillion? We certainly need another war (or two or three) for that to happen and, honestly, Greenland’s too damn cold and minimally populated and Cuba’s too close and a mere island to truly count.

Wait! Let’s look at the positive side of things for a moment. With Trump and crew ready to fossil-fuelize this planet in striking ways, as the Department of War has made clear, “President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are ushering in a new era characterized by peace through strength.” And what more could you ask for than that, though “peace,” of course (because definitions matter) should be “war” and “strength” should mean another 1.5 trillion taxpayer dollars for the Pentagon to blow on yet more disastrous conflicts globally, right?

Who could possibly disagree with such a definition of peace? Anyone who does deserves to be sent to Iran, Greenland, or Cuba, just to find out what peace truly feels like.

Yes, give our president full credit. He lends “brink” new meaning and what could possibly go wrong on a planet distinctly on the brink of... well, who knows quite what but nothing good -- that indeed did just get its first trillionaire. I can’t imagine, can you?

And given all of that, let me end on a little more upbeat news. As the BBC recently reported, “The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared that El Niño conditions are now under way in the tropical Pacific [Ocean], with sea surface temperatures having risen sharply in recent months.” And even better, assume that it could prove to be “a so-called ‘super’ El Niño,” and even possibly “among the strongest ever recorded.”

So, count on this: our planet is going to get hotter and hotter and hotter. And Donald Trump is still doing his damnedest to shut down green energy of any kind and make more war. So, what could possibly go wrong when we have a president at the brink (of who knows what) and a planet at the brink (of who knows what’s next)?

Referring to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented on X: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.” (Walz could have added: “blamed others for his failure, conjured up a conspiracy, then prosecuted them.”)

One remarkable aspect of Trump’s horrendous reign is how many crises and problems he’s brought on himself—created them out of thin air. Then he brags about how well he’s handled them. And when they go wrong—as they inevitably do—he casts blame on others or on his political opponents.

Four examples from the last few days:

I. The Return of Operation Metro Surge

US prosecutors in Minnesota on Tuesday announced charges against 15 people they say conspired to “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.”

But when repeatedly questioned by the press, US Attorney Daniel Rosen failed to describe a single example of injuries to federal agents.

Rosen has a dubious track record with this kind of prosecution. In the months after “Operation Metro Surge,” launched by the Trump regime last December, federal prosecutors charged three dozen Minnesotans in a first wave of cases allegedly involving assaulting or impeding federal immigration agents. Most were dismissed or downgraded.

So why is Minnesota’s US attorney announcing new charges? Rosen’s predecessor as US attorney, Joseph Thompson, said he doesn’t understand it. “I think most people, on both of the sides of the political aisle, viewed [Metro Surge] as a disaster for the administration,” Thompson told The Wall Street Journal. “Why you would want to go back and re-litigate this is beyond me.”

One clue lies in the timing of the new charges—coming just two weeks after the John F. Kennedy Library awarded its 2026 Profiles in Courage Award to the people of the Twin Cities for their resistance to Operation Metro Surge.

A bipartisan committee praised the community for defending constitutional rights and demonstrating civic courage:

“Tens of thousands took to the streets to peacefully protest federal overreach and threats to immigrant families and constitutional protections, while others documented enforcement activity and alerted neighbors to federal agents’ presence. Faith leaders organized demonstrations, community groups built rapid-response networks, labor leaders and small business defended workers, and volunteers provided critical support and resources. Across religious, racial, and political lines, a broad coalition of residents of the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs united in peaceful resistance despite violent confrontation and real personal risk, defending their neighbors’ rights and strengthening the national movement to protect American democracy.”

Trump is presumed to have a grudge against the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award because last year’s award went to his former vice president, Mike Pence, for explicitly resisting Trump's demands to overturn the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021.

II. Trump’s Unending War in Iran

On Sunday, negotiators for Iran and the United States met in Switzerland for a little over an hour. No progress was made. Iranian negotiators insisted on an end to the war between Israel (a US ally) and Hezbollah (an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon) as a condition for further talks, according to Iranian state media.

The talks were also strained by Trump’s renewed threats against Iran. Fox News reports that Trump, in an interview, said he had spoken with Iranian officials Saturday night and warned them not to close the Strait of Hormuz. “You close it, and you won’t have a country,” Fox said, quoting Trump. “You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

The Iranian delegation in Switzerland decided to suspend the talks due to Trump’s threats, according to Nour News, which is affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. IRIB, Iran’s state broadcaster, said it was unclear if the talks will resume.

Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said on social media that the United States should be careful about issuing threats, adding that Iranian armed forces were prepared to respond. “No matter how much they talk, it is we who act,” he wrote.

Iran says the strait is once again closed. World oil prices are again rising.

One Republican senator described the war in Iran and the sputtering peace talks as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

Trump continues to look for a way out, at least for himself. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace agreement, only half in jest. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

III. Prices Continue to Rise

On Sunday, Trump celebrated Father’s Day with a social media post touting that the USUS has the “BEST ECONOMY EVER.”

“Happy Father’s Day!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Our Country is doing GREAT. Record Jobs Numbers and Stock Market, BEST ECONOMY EVER! Greatest Military in the World, by far. We are WINNING on all fronts, WINNING LIKE NEVER BEFORE. GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!!”

Inflation in May increased to 4.2 percent, its highest point in three years, with the food index seeing a 3.1 percent increase over the past year and a nearly 4 percent bump in energy prices. Wages are not rising as fast, which means most Americans are becoming poorer.

The latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released last week shows that only 33 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, his lowest point in both of his terms and 3 points lower than former president Biden at his all-time low.

Trump has long dismissed “affordability” as an issue Americans are concerned about, saying last week that affordability is a “fake word, made up by the Democrats.”

IV. The Reflecting Pool Worsens

All of which brings us back to the Reflecting Pool. Two weeks ago, Trump declared that his decision to repaint the Pool “American Flag blue” was not simply a “paint job” but “highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years.” The dark blue paint that Trump insisted on is now peeling, and green algae are returning.

But the blue paint is now peeling and the algae are back.

On Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool” and linked it to the etching of “8647” into the grass on the National Mall days earlier, adding that law enforcement is investigating.

Then on Saturday, Trump doubled down, claiming that “multiple individuals” had taken “some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”

So far, five people have been arrested for vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, according to Trump officials. But the evidence against them is weak at best. For example, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, 67, was arrested after he touched a flap of blue material partially detached from the bottom of the pool. Hearn, who says he has a background in material science, told CNN he checked out the pool after reading reports of algae in the water and paint or sealant peeling off the bottom. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told The Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

Yet the Reflecting Pool’s new blue surface isn’t plastic like a typical pool lining, which can be cut. It’s a coarse coat of dark blue paint. It’s peeling because the paint job—done by a Trump donor who had been given the no-bid contract—was obviously done badly, as well as being way over budget. And the algae have returned not because of vandalism but because the dark blue paint has trapped more heat, rapidly creating a friendly habitat for the algae.

As Tim Walz says, it’s the entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.

I dream of seeing the title of this post on bumper stickers, billboards, and personal tattoos. The slogan “Tax the rich and save the world” comes from a message from the Patriotic Millionaires—a group of more than 200 high-net-worth Americans, from investors and executives to filmmakers and heirs, who are actively lobbying Congress to raise their own taxes.

Millionaires are watching billionaires pull further ahead financially, and watching their coastal properties sink closer to the waterline as unchecked carbon emissions push sea levels higher. As ecological economist James K. Boyce explains, the concentration of wealth that drives carbon-intensive consumption is the same force blocking the public investment needed to address it: The ultra-wealthy have the resources to protect themselves from environmental degradation, as well as the political power to resist dealing with it. Taxing the rich could help keep the planet livable for the rest of us.

The growing visibility of wealth concentration is rousing a coalition of economists, lawmakers, labor unions, and the worried rich who are pushing back against four decades of trickle-down orthodoxy. Their message is gaining traction: the ultra-wealthy are not paying their fair share, and working-class voters are getting shafted.

The Myth of 40%

A useful place to start is with a number you've probably heard: According to the Wall Street Journal, the top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all tax revenue. Jeff Bezos recently reiterated this scandalously misleading claim. The figure applies only to federal income taxes, ignoring both Social Security taxes and state and local taxes. The Congressional Research Service estimates that about 63% of US tax filers pay more in payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare—than they do in federal income taxes. In addition, state sales taxes and local property taxes eat up a larger percentage of the income of low and middle-income families than those at the top.

When the full tax picture is considered, the wealthy's "fair share" argument really falls apart. Paul Krugman dissects Bezos's claims in detail, and John Miller examines the Wall Street Journal's panicky response to Republican Mitt Romney's proposed tax reforms. The structural roots of the problem are powerfully explained by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in The Triumph of Injustice, which documents how the US tax system systematically privileges income from capital over income from labor. The most striking and consequential strategy rests on wealth accumulation: the very rich let their assets grow, untouched and tax free (capital gains aren’t taxed unless and until assets are sold for a profit). When the very rich need cash, they borrow against those assets at interest rates far below the income tax rate on wages—allowing wealth to compound while generating no taxable income at all. Capitalists have good reason to love capital.

California in the Headlines

In a Left Hook post last October, I described some important steps toward "taxing the top." Now California has captured national attention with a ballot initiative that could make history. This coming November, voters in the state will decide on the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act—a one-time levy of 5% on billionaire wealth, spread over five years. If passed, it would be the first tax anywhere in the world explicitly targeted at the combined personal and business wealth of billionaires. The initiative was drafted with input from Saez and Zucman and last week submitted enough certified signatures, more than 875,000, to qualify for the ballot.

The case is straightforward. California's roughly 250 billionaire households—0.001% of the state's families—now hold wealth equal to more than half of California's entire annual economic output. Yet from 2019 to 2025, while their wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. The four wealthiest Californians—Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg—paid an effective tax rate of just 0.07% of their wealth. Because they didn't sell their stock, its rising value was simply never taxed.

The proposed tax would raise approximately $100 billion—enough to offset the federal health care and social program funding that the Trump administration has stripped from the state. Critics warn that billionaires will flee to Nevada or Florida, but Saez and Zucman have done the math: even if every single California billionaire departed, it would take 25 years for the resulting loss in tax revenue to exceed the one-time haul from the wealth tax. Washington state has already passed a millionaires' tax, and New York City's mayor is proposing a 2% levy on residents earning over $1 million—California is widening a door that other states can walk through.

The Momentum in Washington

While private wealth has been concentrating for some time, the policies of the Trump administration have dramatized the dynamics. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has done the unglamorous work of actually following the money—and its findings are striking. All but the richest 5% of Americans are paying higher taxes on average than they did last year.

Elected officials are taking notice. The 118th and 119th Congresses have seen a cluster of Democratic-sponsored bills targeting capital income and accumulated wealth. None has advanced out of committee under the current Republican majority, but together they represent the most sustained and varied legislative push on this front in a generation. Four proposals stand out:

Senator Markey's (D-MA) Equal Tax Act would require millionaires and billionaires who earn most of their income through investments to pay the same tax rates as wage earners and would close loopholes that allow the super-rich to shelter income from taxation entirely. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a cosponsor, and the Patriotic Millionaires have energetically lobbied for it.

The Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2026, sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Brendan Boyle (D-PA) with more than 45 cosponsors, would impose an annual 2% tax on the net worth of households and trusts exceeding $50 million, with an additional 1% surtax on wealth above $1 billion. To discourage tax avoidance through expatriation, it includes a 40% exit tax on any US resident worth more than $50 million who renounces citizenship.

The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act, promoted by Representatives Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Don Beyer (D-VA) would require households with a net worth exceeding $100 million to pay a minimum annual 25% tax rate on their full income—including unrealized capital gains. Under the current law, gains on assets that are never sold are simply never taxed; this bill closes that gap.

The ROBINHOOD Act—introduced by Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY), a multimillionaire who acknowledged the bill would raise his own taxes—targets the "buy, borrow, die" strategy directly, imposing a 20% excise tax on loans and lines of credit backed by capital assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate. It is the most targeted legislative response yet to the borrowing-instead-of-selling loophole described above.

Crossing the Divide

A majority of working-class Trump supporters may already agree with the core of this agenda. Research suggests that more than half—53%—of white working-class Americans, a core MAGA constituency, believe the best way to grow the economy is to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses and invest in education and infrastructure. A 2025 poll by The Working Class Project found that working-class voters overwhelmingly believe the GOP is looking out for the wealthy, billionaires, and big corporations—not them.

Researchers who study the MAGA coalition identify a significant segment they call "Anti-Elites"—voters who are genuinely suspicious of concentrated power, supportive of economic redistribution, and persuadable on tax policy. Both the California initiative and the national legislative push offer a rare opportunity to speak to these voters on their own terms. Why should a nurse or a truck driver pay a higher effective tax rate on their income than Mark Zuckerberg pays on his? Why should billionaires be able to borrow billions against untaxed stock gains while working families lose Medicaid?

Even millionaires stand to gain from a more sustainable economic environment. Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, is refreshingly candid about his motives: "Millionaires like me want less inequality because we and our families will be better off in a society with less economic disparity. I'm not any more altruistic than the next person—I'm just greedy for a different kind of country."

Now there's a form of greed that might actually do some good. The California ballot initiative, the cluster of bills in Congress, and the polling that reveals some political realignment—these are not isolated developments. They are pieces of a gathering challenge to four decades of upward redistribution. It might even be a gathering storm.

After killing 3,500 Iranians and 13 Americans, while costing billions of dollars and America’s global credibility, Donald Trump settled his joint war with Israel against Iran with an arrangement that left Iran infinitely stronger and the United States with, at most, exactly what it had before: an open Strait of Hormuz.

The post Venit, Vidit, Ad Id Rediit Unde Coepit. appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

There is a dangerous myth embedded in the fight for reproductive justice: that the battle is solely about women, or even solely about those who can become pregnant. It is not. It is equally about men, especially those who hold power, and perhaps more critically, those who choose not to use it, because silence, in this moment, is not neutral. It is consequential.

Across the United States, reproductive rights are being dismantled by legislative bodies that remain overwhelmingly male. Men still make up roughly 73% of Congress, while some state legislatures, particularly those passing the most restrictive abortion bans, exceed 80% male representation. The result is accelerating policy built on distance: lawmakers regulating bodies they will never inhabit, consequences they will never personally endure.

As educator and activist Jackson Katz has long argued in his work, including his TED Talk “Violence Against Women, It’s a Men’s Issue,” gender-based injustices are too often framed as “women’s issues,” allowing men to disengage. Katz argues that the silence of men who consider themselves allies is itself part of the system that allows harm to continue. In the context of reproductive rights, that silence has had profound consequences.

And yet, there is a growing body of work challenging exactly this imbalance, calling attention to the role men play not just in policy, but in pregnancy itself. In Ejaculate Responsibly, author Gabrielle Blair reframes the abortion debate with striking clarity as an advocate for condoms and vasectomies; she says, “Women are expected to practice and learn how to use birth control, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to ask men to learn how to use their birth control options.” The premise is simple but often ignored: Pregnancy does not occur without male participation, and yet responsibility overwhelmingly falls on those who become pregnant.

This Father’s Day, men have a choice: to continue benefiting from silence and distance, or to finally recognize reproductive justice as their fight too.

Blair further notes that men are fertile continuously and capable of causing multiple pregnancies, while women and other people who can become pregnant have limited reproductive windows. Yet public policy overwhelmingly regulates the latter, not the former.

At the ground level, the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP) knows the human impact. Funding abortion care from coast to coast and working with more than 700 clinics nationwide, WRRAP supports thousands of patients each year, many navigating financial hardship, domestic instability, or complete abandonment by their partners.

WRRAP’s experience consistently reflects a painful pattern: Patients are often left carrying the financial burden alone after disclosing a pregnancy. Costs related to transportation, childcare, lodging, lost wages, and medical care frequently fall entirely on the pregnant person, even though pregnancy itself involves two people.

This is where the conversation about men must deepen, because while men are part of every pregnancy, they are often absent from its consequences. For WRRAP, 69% of patients have had their partner abandon them, placing the financial burden on the patient.

What would it look like if that changed? What if men were held financially accountable for pregnancies from the moment they occur, including the cost of abortion care? What if responsibility extended to ensuring that the pregnant person had the resources to make the decision that is right for them?

It is a question that exposes a fundamental inequity. The current system allows men, whether lawmakers or partners, to exert influence without bearing equivalent responsibility. They can legislate restrictions without experiencing the outcomes. They can disengage from pregnancies without absorbing the costs. And when they do neither, when they simply remain silent, the system continues unchecked.

The political reality is impossible to ignore. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, more than 1,500 politicians, overwhelmingly male, have supported abortion bans or severe restrictions.

Meanwhile, public opinion data from Pew Research Center show that a majority of men support legal abortion access in at least some circumstances. Yet support in polling has not translated into sustained advocacy, organizing, or political pressure.

Katz’s work emphasizes that change requires more than awareness, it requires action. Men must see themselves not as peripheral to this issue, but as central to it. They must challenge harmful narratives in their own circles, advocate for policies that protect access, and support organizations like WRRAP doing the work.

Because reproductive justice is not just about access to care, it is about who bears the burden. Right now, that burden falls disproportionately on pregnant people: those navigating financial instability, healthcare barriers, social stigma, and abandonment, often without support.

If men are part of the equation, and they are, then they must also be part of the solution. Not quietly. Not passively. But visibly, vocally, and materially invested in the fight for reproductive justice.

This Father’s Day, men have a choice: to continue benefiting from silence and distance, or to finally recognize reproductive justice as their fight too through advocacy, accountability, and even shared responsibility for preventing pregnancy, including vasectomies.

This piece was provided by American Forum.