The United States is a country with a long history of violence and oppression against poor people, women and minorities. And by extension, with authoritarianism. The fact that the Trump presidency poses today a fundamental threat to democracy and social progress is not an unprecedented phenomenon in U.S. history. There have been many other U.S. presidents with anti-democratic approaches while a strong case can be made that minority rule has been the rule rather than the exception in the governing of the nation.

Indeed, for the most part, oligarchy has always had the upper hand in U.S. politics and the economy. After all, this is a nation that was founded on settler colonialism and the elimination of the native and relied on slavery as an engine of economic growth while it never managed to get rid of its racist roots. By the same token, resistance by enslaved people and struggles for emancipation and movements fighting for civil and social rights have also shaped the course of U.S. history. But history is not a linear progression. Every time social progress was made, the forces of reaction plotted to turn back the clock. This is the most obvious underlying intent of the Trump phenomenon and of the far-right movements and parties surging all over the world, now with the support of the world’s richest person, Trump’s Nazi-buddy Elon Musk.

At this point, the key question is this: what can be done to defeat right-wing extremism? In the U.S., defending democratic values and the rights of people from Trump’s neo-fascist politics, especially with the return of white supremacy to mainstream politics, a philosophy of resistance and rebellion needs to operate mainly outside the confines of the liberal political establishment. It is crystal clear that the Democratic Party is incapable of fighting Trump. The sight of Congressional Democrats to Trump’s joint address to Congress holding pathetic little signs and appearing in pink as signs of protest should speak volumes of the devastating failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of Trumpism, let alone of coming up now with a fight back strategy against the Führer.

The key question is this: what can be done to defeat right-wing extremism?

It is obvious that a new style of political action is needed in the United States today. The balance of de jure power has shifted dramatically toward an elite characterized by the fusion of wealth and power in the political system that plain resistance alone is not enough. What is needed, even beyond anti-fascism strategies and tactics, is the adoption of new ways to democracy and citizenship.

Indeed, anti-fascist organizing is only useful if it carries within it a vision of a post-capitalist alternative order since fascism has always been a reaction to capitalist crises. After all, fascism does not oppose the logic or the principles of capitalism. In fact, fascism has always been a particular way of “managing capitalism,” as the late Marxist theoretician Samir Amin correctly pointed out.

First, in the fight against fascism, the concept of democracy needs to be reimagined beyond elections and identified, in turn, with self-government and bold ideas to restructure the economy. The Democratic Party of the past 30 years has shown that it is simply incapable of undertaking this mission as it is itself a byproduct of a system in which the few set the terms under which the economy and society operate at large. The notion that a few progressive elected officials can tilt the party to the left in a radical way is a democratic fantasy.

The left needs to make a clean break with the mindset of political compromise that characterizes the Democratic Party.

We need economic democracy—institutions, organizations and practices that break away from the destructive and oligarchical tendencies of the current system and are geared in turn towards meeting workers’ needs, who are the backbone of the economy. Economic democracy starts with dismantling corporate power and extends to nearly every part of the economy—from the workplace to housing and from health to education. Public ownership is key to the idea of economic democracy as a way of transforming economic practices. Hence, we’re talking about forging a radical economic democracy project that can challenge the economic rationality of capital and private appropriation of labor, land and nature.

Working with the liberal political establishment to accomplish this mission is yet another democratic fantasy. In fact, progressives keen not only on anti-Trump resistance but also willing to embrace a postcapitalist alternative to oligarchy should make their voices heard in every way possible by letting their elected representatives know that while they despise the Republican Party for what it stands for and what it is doing to the country under Trump-Musk, they do not trust the Democrats when it comes to fighting back and making the right choices for a more humane and just socio-economic order. They should let them know that democracy is much more than elections and surely not about serving special interests. It is about giving political power to ordinary citizens.

Likewise, the project of economic democracy mandates the reconceptualization of citizenship. The notion of confrontational citizenship is of particular import in these dark times as it emphasizes that political change is the result of confrontation, not of compromise. Al Green, a democratic congressman from Texas, practiced confrontational citizenship as an elected official with his outburst during Trump’s speech to Congress. For that, he was forcefully removed from the House Chamber while his Democratic colleagues opted to display “civility” toward the Führer. Eventually, Rep. Green was censured by his colleagues for his lack of "civility," with 10 Democrats joining all Republicans.

Democracy is much more than elections and surely not about serving special interests. It is about giving political power to ordinary citizens.

One does not fight fascism with props as a form of protest. Or unjust wars and invasions by releasing doves. Practicing civility towards fascism is like signing one’s own death. One confronts fascism head-on and based on solidarity and from a position of strength. Yes, confronting fascism requires also courage and not concerns with whether someone’s name is going to end up on a list of “radical leftists” by some reactionary watchdog.

In sum, a transformative vision for a world beyond capitalism should be an integral component of the fight against Trump’s policies. The left needs to make a clean break with the mindset of political compromise that characterizes the Democratic Party. The rise of Trumpism was based not simply on lies and propaganda but on the strategic use of the politics of confrontation and by capturing what was actually happening on the ground. In this context, reimaging democracy and reinventing citizenship could be powerful tools in the fight against Trump’s assault on civil society and his vision of a dog-eat-dog world.

      Echoing other analysts, New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “What happened in the Oval Office on Friday…was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.”

      The public display in the Oval Office was unprecedented and bizarre. “But there’s nothing unique about an American president disrespecting and distancing himself from a close European ally suffering a brutal invasion and years-long occupation during ‘a major war in Europe.’”

      My senior thesis advisor at Columbia University, where I was a history major, was Robert O. Paxton, a leading expert on European fascism and the collaborationist government of Vichy France. Paxton suggested that I explore America’s plans to treat France after D-Day not as a liberated country but as a defeated enemy, receiving the same status (“Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories,” or AMGOT) as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

What I uncovered from my research at the FDR Presidential Library and the National Archives was an obscure and fascinating episode in the history of World War II.

      There are startling parallels between the way that President Trump dressed down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt showered General Charles De Gaulle of France with contempt and opprobrium.

      Roosevelt had long believed that France was unstable and unreliable. France’s quick defeat in six weeks in 1940, followed by its signing an armistice with Germany, territorial partition and establishment of a collaborationist puppet state in the southern spa city of Vichy confirmed his worst views of the country as weak and louche. After the war, FDR decided, the U.S. would seize France’s vast colonial empire. France would certainly not revert to its prewar status as a “great power.”

      Representing the opposing view was General De Gaulle, who rejected entreaties to join Vichy. Instead, he fled to London after the fall of France. There he formed the Free French and took to BBC radio to urge Frenchmen to join him in England with a view toward someday reconquering their homeland alongside the Allies. Conservative, a devout Catholic and fiercely nationalistic, De Gaulle dedicated himself to restoring France’s greatness and wiping away the humiliation of defeat and collaboration. De Gaulle toured and raised funds across the United States, where he was popular with the press and a public sympathetic to French suffering under Nazi and Vichy rule.

      A clash between these two personalities was inevitable.

      Roosevelt viewed De Gaulle as an ingrate and illegitimate colonialist who didn’t deserve support. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who admired De Gaulle’s patriotism and whose government provided material support to the Free French, vainly tried to steer a middle course, asking Roosevelt to recognize the Free French as a government in exile and De Gaulle as de facto head of state after liberation. Instead, the Roosevelt Administration maintained full diplomatic relations with the Vichy regime until Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval severed them in late 1942.

If not De Gaulle, Churchill asked, who would govern France after the Germans were vanquished? FDR didn’t have an answer. But he knew who he didn’t support. Perhaps like Trump vis-à-vis Zelensky, Roosevelt viewed De Gaulle as an arrogant pipsqueak without portfolio. It didn’t help that, far from playing the obeisant supplicant, an imperious De Gaulle was constantly making demands for information, money and weapons. Churchill found him amusing­—”[De Gaulle] had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance”—but Roosevelt couldn’t stand him. “De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France,” FDR’s son Elliot recalled him saying. “I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more.”

And, in another echo of Trump, Roosevelt obsessed over De Gaulle’s democratic bona fides. Who had elected this annoyingly prideful man, this dictator-in-training? No one.

Matters came to a head in late 1943 and early 1944, when the Allies were preparing for the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944. By then, Roosevelt had more withering contempt for De Gaulle than ever. De Gaulle had launched several freelance military operations against French colonies that had fallen under Vichy control, including Syria, Senegal and a pair of tiny islands adjacent to Canada’s maritime provinces, without bothering to consult with both of his Allied patrons (who would have refused permission).

Despite Churchill’s entreaties, Roosevelt was livid. He was determined to impose harsh AMGOT terms on France. As Le Monde Diplomatique reported in 2003, “AMGOT would have abolished [France’s] national sovereignty, including its right to issue currency.”

General Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of D-Day planning, expected France to resume its top-tier status as an economic and military power after the war. Moreover, he believed that Roosevelt’s stubbornness was blinding him to the fact that there was no practical alternative to installing De Gaulle and the Free French as the first postwar French government. The only other option was a communist takeover. The Free French could provide intelligence about the landing site and order the Resistance to attack and distract German forces behind enemy lines. A frustrated Ike slipped classified invasion plans to the Free French and promised them he would sabotage Roosevelt’s AMGOT plans.

The heroic assault on Omaha Beach is seared in our national memory as a straightforward, noble liberation of a beleaguered European ally. Behind the scenes, however, things were complicated.

In the same way that Trump hopes the U.S. will be compensated for the American investment in the defense of Ukraine with that country’s mineral wealth, Roosevelt wanted France to pay the U.S. for its own liberation. FDR ordered the U.S. Mint to print and distribute sheaves of English-language “flag-ticket francs” to Allied troops sent to Normandy. French shopkeepers who accepted them would be directed to look to the postwar French government, not the United States, to back them. When De Gaulle found out about the scheme, he declaimed the Allied scrip as fausse monnaie (fake money) and advised his radio listeners not to accept them.

Ignoring Roosevelt, Eisenhower embedded Free French forces into Operation Overlord. In the days following the June 6th landing, a wild scrum ensued as rival governments competed to seize mairies in each Norman village and city that fell under Allied control. AMGOT military governors were ordered to subject the populace to martial law; Vichy mayors refused to leave; Free French mayors declared themselves the lawful Provisional Government of the Republic of France; and, in some cases, communists and socialists hoping for a revolution shouted at one another and came to blows in local government offices.

 In at least one instance, rival mayors and their forces occupied different floors in the same building and sporadically exchanged gunfire in stairwells. Allied forces under orders from Eisenhower persuaded the non-Free French wannabes to yield. AMGOT’s harsh plans for France were ignored and never put into effect.

By July, FDR was resigned to the facts on the ground. Newspapers reported that De Gaulle and his Free French were popular and greeted by enthusiastic crowds wherever they appeared. The conflict between the United States and its European ally was papered over by the liberation of Paris on August 25th, where De Gaulle famously stood tall the next day as bullets presumably fired by a residual Nazi sniper nearly struck him and everyone around him hit the ground. Finally, in October, the U.S. government formally recognized De Gaulle as president of the provisional government pending elections.

Anti-Americanism in France was partly fueled by this episode, which was well-known in postwar France thanks in part to Gaullists’ lingering resentments.

Whatever you think of Donald Trump’s attitude toward a beleaguered European ally, it was not unprecedented.

The post When Presidents Clashed with Allies: Trump, Zelensky, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle in Historical Context appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Ted Rall and Robby West take the helm for Manila Chan, diving headfirst into ICE’s stunning crackdown on pro-Palestine advocates! Today, they’re unpacking two jaw-dropping cases: the March 8 arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia University grad student and protest leader, and the March 9 detention of a British cartoonist at the Canadian border. With President Trump proclaiming Khalil’s arrest as “the first of many” on Truth Social, this episode promises a no-holds-barred look at the escalating clash between free speech and immigration enforcement.

Khalil, a green card holder, was nabbed at his Columbia apartment by ICE agents claiming a State Department order to revoke his status, citing vague “Hamas-aligned activities.” Just a day later, a British cartoonist—visiting as a tourist—was stopped at the border, with ICE disappearing her into its gulags. Trump’s January executive order targeting “Hamas sympathizers” on campuses and his $400 million funding cut to Columbia set the stage, and now ICE is flexing its muscle.

Ted and Robby break it all down: the 300,000-signature petition for Khalil’s release, Columbia’s weak response to ICE campus access, and Trump’s vow to purge “pro-terrorist” voices.

We’ll explore the ripple effects—will this silence dissent or ignite more resistance? With Ted’s sharp wit and Robby’s incisive takes, this episode is your front-row seat to a defining moment in the battle for expression and immigrant rights. When ICE comes knocking, “The TMI Show” answers back!

The post TMI Show Ep 94: “ICE Unleashed: Pro-Palestine Voices in the Crosshairs” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

During his marathon, fact-free speech to Congress last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration plans to address the growing incidence of childhood cancer.

“Since 1975, rates of child cancer have increased by more than 40%,” Trump said. “Reversing this trend is one of the top priorities for our new presidential commission to make America healthy again, chaired by our new Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. …Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

As usual, Trump got the statistic wrong. In fact, childhood cancer rates increased 33% since 1975, according to a study published in the journal PLOS One in January (and verified by the American Cancer Society), and the uptick in cases can be at least partly attributed to improved detection technology.

What would a major loss of federal scientific expertise mean for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s childhood cancer commission? Given that Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, is not known for paying attention to scientific evidence, it may not matter much.

That said, the PLOS One study did find that some childhood cancers—notably leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, liver tumors, and gonadal tumors—are on the rise, so by all means, the federal government should do more to try to reduce them.

But at the same time Trump is pledging to reverse childhood cancer rates and “get toxins out of our environment,” he and his attack doge Elon Musk are gutting federal health agencies to help pay for huge tax breaks for corporations and the uber rich.

Indiscriminate Cuts Across the Board

All of the agencies that protect public health are on the chopping block.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, his administration illegally fired some 5,200 employees at Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including nearly 1,300 staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), roughly a tenth of the agency’s workforce.

Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the new administrator, Lee Zeldin, is threatening a budget cut of at least 65%. That would leave the agency with an annual budget of about $3.2 billion, less than a third of its budget in fiscal year (FY) 1970—the year it began—in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars. Such a meager budget would destroy the agency, exactly what the fossil fuel industry-funded Republican Party has been wanting to do for years.

The Trump administration is also trying to ax a key portion of National Institutes of Health (NIH) biomedical research funding, which would undermine any effort to curtail childhood cancer—not to mention research on other deadly diseases.

On February 7, it announced it will cut an estimated $4 billion from NIH grants by capping funding for “indirect” overhead costs that cover such expenses as facilities, electric utilities, and administrative and janitorial services at 15%, half the current average rate. About $26 billion of NIH’s $35 billion in FY2023 grants that went to more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions covered direct costs—researchers and laboratories. The balance—$9 billion—paid for overhead.

Experts warn that without adequate overhead support, researchers would not be able to do their work.

Three days after the administration announced its intention to cut the NIH budget, five medical associations and 22 states filed lawsuits challenging the plan. Later that day, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston granted a temporary restraining order. She followed up on March 5, the day after Trump’s speech to Congress, by filing a preliminary injunction that put the cuts on hold while the lawsuits proceed. “The risk of harm to research institutions and beyond,” Kelley wrote in a 76-page order, “is immediate, devastating, and irreparable.”

It’s 2017 all Over Again (With a Major Difference)

Trump’s zeal to hobble federal medical and scientific research should not come as a surprise. To a great extent, his current budget-chopping campaign reflects the FY2018 budget he proposed in May 2017. That radical proposal called for shrinking the budgets of NIH by 18%; EPA by 31%, the Food and Drug Administration by 31%, and the CDC by 17%, which would have been its lowest budget since 1997. It also called for hacking $610 billion from Medicaid over the following decade on top of an $880-billion cut a Republican healthcare plan advocated.

That budget was dead on arrival, despite the fact that Republicans controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate, albeit by only a 51 to 49 margin. Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, then-chair of the House spending subcommittee that funds NIH, told Scientific American that he did not expect Congress to support Trump’s proposed cuts. Other legislators from both sides of the aisle also rejected the president’s NIH budget proposal. (Nevertheless, Trump’s previous administration did a lot of damage by eliminating or weakening over 100 environmental safeguards.)

Today, Republicans have the White House and slim majorities in both houses of Congress. Unlike 2017, however, congressional Republicans are in lockstep with Trump, and thus far have been cheering him and Musk on from the sidelines as they dismantle the federal government.

What would a major loss of federal scientific expertise mean for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s childhood cancer commission? Given that Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, is not known for paying attention to scientific evidence, it may not matter much. It’s been widely reported that Kennedy has been telling children and adults in Texas to try Vitamin A, cod liver oil, and other dubious treatments if they get measles instead of urging them to get vaccinated, so one could only imagine what he would recommend that parents give their children to protect them from cancer. Aloe? Emu oil? Kombucha? All of the above?

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO, and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual cease-fire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark, and Poland took small parts in the invasion; Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list; and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, U.S. President Donald Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its general secretary and Soviet premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms buildup, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala, and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Barack Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the United Nations Security Council. France, Germany, and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany, and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.

Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

With then-U.S. President Joe Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder, “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq War. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies—European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, now the E.U.’s foreign policy chief—have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation, and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms-control treaties, nuclear disarmament, and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia, and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Mark Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands power. He is not playing chess; he is playing a reckless game of Jenga with the foundational components that actually made America great. With each ill-conceived move, he pulls out another critical block from our national structure, destabilizing the entire edifice while claiming to strengthen it. His vision for American greatness is anchored in a historically dishonest version of the Gilded Age—a period he explicitly admires, when he believes "we were at our richest." It's no coincidence that this era represented the apex of white supremacist control following Reconstruction, when newly enfranchised Black Americans were systematically stripped of their voting rights and democratic participation.

"We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country," Trump has declared, revealing his nostalgia for an America where oligarchs accumulated vast wealth while the masses struggled in poverty, where women couldn't vote, and where Jim Crow laws ensured white supremacy remained intact.

This conception of power is devastatingly wrong and dangerous. In Trump's worldview, might is measured solely through domination: tariffs, walls, military threats, economic leverage, and the unchecked authority of the executive branch. His fantasies about seizing Panama or purchasing Greenland reveal a colonial mindset where sovereign nations exist merely as potential American acquisitions—trophies for his ego and extensions of a twisted imperial vision. This approach not only reflects a backward 19th-century understanding of power but abandons the very sources of American influence that have made us a genuine global leader for generations.

True Power Lies in Innovation and Academic Freedom

While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence. For the first time in modern history, China has edged past the United States in producing the most frequently cited scientific papers—a critical measure of research impact and intellectual leadership. Research tells us what is true, research shapes reality, and research determines which voices hold authority. The United States for decades led in research and therefore was positioned to determine truth and shape worlds. This position of power is now being deliberately eroded as Trump attacks universities, academic freedom—a necessity for innovation and discovery—and withdraws vital funding.

History demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.

The power of the United States has never stemmed primarily from military might or economic leverage; it has flowed from our leadership in knowledge creation. Researchers worldwide have looked to institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance. The articles published in American journals have become foundational concepts within disciplines, allowing the U.S. to lead in virtually every intellectual field. When federal agencies generate data and analyses that become the global standard, America exercises an influence far more profound than any military operation could achieve.

When Trump attacks universities that dare to uphold academic freedom, cutting their federal funding and threatening scholars with deportation, he isn't demonstrating strength—he's surrendering intellectual authority. The recent arrest of Palestinian academic Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder detained by ICE "in support of President Trump's executive orders"—reveals how quickly academic freedom can collapse under authoritarian pressure. This is not projection of power; it is its destruction. Trump is making the United States powerless and weak.

America's Power has Come from Welcoming the Persecuted

Trump's vision of American greatness is narrowly nativist, focused on exclusion and ideas of racial purity that have ties to eugenic projects that have historically ended in atrocities like the Holocaust. Yet history demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.

When Hitler's Nazi regime drove Jewish academics and intellectuals from Europe in the 1930s, America's willingness to welcome these refugees transformed our scientific and cultural landscape. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and countless others fled persecution and found new homes in American universities and laboratories. Their contributions to the Manhattan Project and beyond revolutionized physics, mathematics, and engineering—laying the groundwork for America's technological supremacy in the latter half of the 20th century.

True power comes not from building walls and criminalizing free speech but from recognizing talent regardless of origin or wealth. Trump's methodical dismantling of immigration pathways and his demonization of foreigners don't make America stronger—they deprive us of the next generation of brilliant minds who might otherwise choose our universities, our laboratories, our companies, and our communities. Our greatest resource has never been the oligarchs who were invited to buy a "gold card" but the persecuted who found that this country welcomed them and supported their work.

The Gilded Age's True Legacy

Trump's romanticization of the Gilded Age is an admission of his true aim: the systematic dismantling of American democracy in service of white supremacy—a defining feature of those years he aims to recreate through his brutal agenda attacking diversity initiatives, public service workers, universities, and fundamental human rights.

Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 former Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. Though these efforts couldn't explicitly mention race, they introduced ostensibly neutral poll taxes, property requirements, and complex literacy tests designed to prevent Black citizens from accessing the ballot box. In South Carolina, these measures reduced Black voter turnout from 96% in 1876 to just 11% in 1898. Across the South, Black turnout plummeted from 61% in 1880 to a mere 2% by 1912.

This is a legacy of the Gilded Age—a retreat from democratic principles that locked in white supremacy for nearly a century. The era Trump celebrates as America's peak was precisely when our democracy was most severely compromised.

The Choice Before Us

Trump's conception of power represents a devastating miscalculation. By fixating on the trappings of 19th-century dominance—tariffs, military posturing, white supremacy and misogyny, and oligarchic wealth—he surrenders the very sources of influence that have made America genuinely powerful: our intellectual leadership, academic freedom, diverse talent pool, democratic institutions, and moral authority.

The question isn't whether Trump makes America powerful—it's whether his understanding of power belongs in a modern world. When he severs relationships with allies, seeing cooperation as "weakness," he doesn't demonstrate strength but reveals a profound failure to understand how international influence operates in the 21st century.

True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility.

When he dismantles the Department of Education and undermines scientific research, he isn't eliminating waste—he's surrendering our most significant competitive advantage. How do we measure the loss of a great mind who might have contributed to our understanding of climate science, identified cures for devastating diseases, or developed technologies to preserve our democratic systems? The cost of his destruction is beyond measurement.

Trump is indeed making America powerless even in ways that he should be able to understand through his myopic worldview—after all, he is making America bow to the richest man on earth and embracing dictators who destroy democracy. But he is abandoning the very sources of American power that have made us exceptional: our commitment to knowledge, our embrace of talent regardless of origin, our democratic institutions, and our capacity for moral leadership. The world could once rely on the United States, that is no more.

The gilded America he envisions—where oligarchs extract immense wealth from land and labor, where white supremacy reigns unchallenged, and where democratic participation is systematically suppressed—isn't a vision of American strength. It's a return to a time when our nation's power was narrowly concentrated among the few at the expense of the many. That is no power. That is a monarchy. That is death to democracy.

True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility. By abandoning these principles, Trump isn't making America great again—he's making America powerless in the ways that truly matter.

On March 4, 2025, President Donald Trump gave a speech to a joint session of Congress. Although this speech may be labeled by some as a State of the Union address, it is actually not a State of the Union address because those are delivered by a president in January or February after they’ve completed their first year in office.

Of course, a president is free to speak in front of Congress anytime he or she wants to, but I think a fake State of the Union address that is filled with lies spewed out by a man who was convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, whose company has been found guilty of fraud, who ran a fraudulent university that defrauded its students, who filed numerous fraudulent lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, and who orchestrated a multi-state fraudulent elector scheme to stop the 2020 election certification, is very on brand.

It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them.

Donald Trump tells lies like a fish swims through the water, but some of his most egregious lies are related to immigration and immigrants. Perhaps his most notorious and dehumanizing lie about immigrants was about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs. However, his speech to Congress on March 4 contained numerous lies about immigration that are worth debunking. I cannot possibly write about all of the lies contained in his speech, but I want to highlight the ones that stood out to me, and that I can help provide important context on.

Immigration Lie No. 1: Lowest Number of Border Crossings

Within minutes of starting his speech, Trump shot out the following lie: “Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border, and I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country, and what a job they’ve done. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded, ever. They heard my words, and they chose not to come.” This is actually multiple lies tied together to push a false narrative, which again, is very on brand.

First, the military was already deployed to the border by former President Joe Biden in 2023. It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them. Second, the Border Patrol was already at the border, because that’s their entire mission. His lie makes it seem like the Border Patrol wasn’t there before, but that he, in his infinite wisdom, sent them to the border and now they are stopping people from crossing. Third, the U.S. is not being invaded at the southern border. An invasion implies a foreign army or some other militant group, but we know that the people who come to the border are increasingly families and other desperate people seeking help, many of whom are fleeing from the effects of decades of right-wing U.S. policy. Characterizing these people as invaders is not only extremely loathsome, but it is just plain incorrect, and it serves the greater narrative that Trump is pushing that we are under attack.

Remember, the purpose of framing migration at the southern border as an “invasion” is to build support for himself and his brutal, militarized immigration policies that will cause suffering to a vulnerable group of people who need help, as well as enriching his private prison corporate campaign donors and increasing the power of the federal police state, which he will almost certainly use for nefarious purposes.

If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it.

Fourth, Trump claims that as a result of his actions, “illegal border crossings” dropped to the “lowest ever recorded” in February 2025. Of course, he doesn’t cite to a specific number, so it’s impossible to know what exactly he is referring to when he makes this claim. The best guess is that he is referencing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s February 2025 border “encounter” numbers, which haven’t even come out yet. Because the number hasn’t been released, we can’t definitively fact check him, but there are months from the past that already have lower numbers than what’s been reported by news agencies for February 2025. However, the bigger issue is that Trump is conflating “border crossings” with border apprehensions. This is an important distinction. The number of arrests decreasing doesn’t mean that fewer people tried to cross the border illegally: it just means fewer people were caught.

It’s also important to understand that many of the illegal crossings were people crossing the border and then immediately turning themselves in so they could claim asylum. If we had a well-functioning immigration system, there would be a way for people to come to the border, claim asylum, do their credible fear screening, get a background check, and then be legally paroled into the country to pursue their asylum claim. This is what the CBP One app was designed to facilitate, but it was woefully inadequate. Instead, the only practical way for most people to claim asylum was to cross illegally and then turn themselves in. The status quo before Trump was already a failure in our immigration system, caused by a lack of funding and the right-wing policy that treats asylum-seekers like an invading army.

To make matters worse, one of Trump’s first executive actions after the inauguration was to cancel the CBP One app, and completely suspend asylum at the border. Suspending asylum is not only illegal, but it will cause people to cross the border and disappear into the interior instead of crossing the border and turning themselves in to start the asylum process. Trump is pointing to the lower number of arrests and lying to you by saying that illegal crossings are down, when in reality, he has likely just pushed more of them into the shadows.

The best way to reduce illegal border crossings is to: 1) give people pathways to come to the U.S. legally; and 2) stop the right-wing policies that disrupt living conditions in the countries to the south of us that cause people to flee and seek refuge in the U.S. Trump wants to push the narrative that immigrants are invaders and the best way to stop them from crossing the border is with walls and militaristic border policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Immigration Lie No. 2: Insane Asylums

The next immigration lie from Trump is that under the Biden administration, there were “…hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month, and virtually all of them, including murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from mental institutions and insane asylums, were released into our country.” I’m not going to spend much time on this, but this is false. He previously said it was millions of people, so he can’t even get his story straight, but this has been debunked numerous times. This is one of his favorite immigration lies, and I am sure he will keep repeating it for the foreseeable future.

Immigration Lie No. 3: Gold Card

Trump briefly touched on the so-called “gold card” he had announced recently. “With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the Gold Card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It’s like the green card, but better and more sophisticated.” He says they have developed this “in great detail” but there is actually no detail as to how this would work. It appears that he is saying that people would be able to buy permanent residency by paying $5 million dollars, but that would have to be enacted by Congress because the president cannot create new green card categories. Also, there is already an EB-5 investor green card, that actually requires investment in a U.S. business and creation of jobs, whereas the “gold card” apparently doesn’t actually require that any U.S. jobs be created. He is lying to the American public by implying that rich people will create jobs in the U.S. if we allow them to just buy their way into the country.

Remember when they called former President Barack Obama a tyrant because he tried to help Dreamers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)? DACA is well within the purview of presidential authority because it is simply prosecutorial discretion coupled with employment authorization. I wonder if the GOP will make the same critique if Trump illegally creates a new category of permanent residency that he admits will allow Russian oligarchs to effectively buy U.S. citizenship. He also said of the gold card holders, “They won’t have to pay tax from where they came, the money that they’ve made, you wouldn’t want to do that.” Since he doesn’t have the authority to suspend tax laws in the home countries of these people, this is clearly a lie, or possibly just incoherent rambling.

Immigration Lie No. 4: 21 Million People Poured into the U.S.

Trump claimed that, “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States.” Not only does this use dehumanizing language, likening people fleeing from desperate situations to some kind of flood, but it’s completely incorrect. The narrative that the Democrats should counter with is that immigration is a good thing, but right-wing policies create illegal immigration by pushing people out of their home countries and denying them a legal way to come to the U.S.

Immigration Lie No.5: The Dangerous Immigrant

Trump’s last major immigration lie was the “immigrants are dangerous” narrative that he has been poisoning American discourse with for nearly a decade. He pushed this lie by making a spectacle out of the deaths of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray and cynically using their families as political props. This exploitative appeal to emotion is meant to obscure the basic fact that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at a lower rate than U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens are the primary smugglers of fentanyl into the U.S. through ports of entry. Statistically speaking, if you were walking down the street and there was a U.S. citizen walking toward you from one direction and an undocumented immigrant walking toward you from the other direction, you’d be safer if you walked toward the undocumented immigrant.

To bring it full circle, the ultimate irony is that Donald Trump is himself a convicted felon. If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it. He would have you believe that immigrants are a threat to public safety, while he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to his Covid-19 mismanagement, responsible for freezing USAID funding that will lead to thousands of deaths around the world, and many more.

Every single thing that Trump says about immigrants should be scrutinized and not taken at face value because there is a good chance it is a lie or misleading. They say that every Republican accusation is a confession. We should all keep that in mind the next time Trump tries to fearmonger about immigrants.

Not even two months in office and President Donald Trump has slashed U.S. climate partnerships and aid to developing countries, notably from USAID. Expected? Yes. International anomaly? No.

Last November's COP29 conference on climate finance showed the widespread vapidity of global action. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, revealed 1,200 notifications went out about significant gas leaks over the past two years to governments and businesses around the world. Only 1% responded. The U.N. acknowledged "capacity issues, technical barriers, and a lack of accountability," but failed to acknowledge another contributing factor. People are fundamentally not incentivized to care—because the climate crisis is consistently poorly communicated.

Publications like The New York Times typically report climate change like this: "Emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year." The U.N. Emissions Gap report's front page has this seething call to action: "Limit global warming to 1.5°C, struggle to adapt to 2°C, or face catastrophic consequences at 2.6°C and beyond." The media skews toward this numerical doom-and-gloom for two main reasons: One, journalists are often taught people pay attention to negative information. Two, scientists are often taught numbers speak for themselves. Logically then, numbers with negative consequences should make people care…

Instead of telling governments to fix a leak because the "data says so," we need to emphasize the positive impact on people.

No. As someone with training in data journalism and storytelling, I advise considering the underlying psychology. In 2023, a Pew Research Center survey revealed 7 in 10 Americans feel "sad about what is happening to the Earth" after seeing climate change in the news. Despite that negative frame, only about 4 in 10 Americans feel "optimistic we can address climate change" when they see news on the topic. And only about 1 in 10 Americans feel activism is "extremely or very effective at getting elected officials to act on the issue." Sadness, fear, and anxiety don't often translate to motivation.

"Climate change" and "greenhouse gases" are simply too abstract. When former U.S. President Joe Biden said climate change is an "existential threat to all of us," it felt like a hypothetical issue. When the media reduces climate change to facts and numbers—to "emissions" and "gigatons" and "degrees Celsius"—it feels like a psychologically distant entity devoid of humanity and ineligible for our care.

How then should we communicate? Maybe the solution is emphasizing the negative consequences on human beings… showing images of wildfires destroying communities and people suffering from drought. Nonprofits, for example, traditionally use negative imagery of emaciated children, often Black and brown, to get donors' attention. And many studies show this "poverty porn" works. After Haiti was severely damaged by an earthquake in 2010, for example, the negative images of victims was criticized by the media. But it led to the second biggest success in the organization's fundraising history.

Destroyed Houses during Haiti's Earthquake in 2010. (Photo: ECHO/Raphaël Brigandi via Flickr).

These conclusions, however, lack nuance and ethics. Negative imagery may inspire pity and a donation out of guilt in the short-term. But it can lead to decreased care in the long-term. By portraying people in an undignified light, as "others" in need of "saving," we fetishize their suffering and infantilize their agency. Research demonstrates we attribute less respect and less agency to those in helpless, suffering outgroups, and are less likely to back policies that support them.

If negative data, "poverty porn," and "disaster porn" all aren't the answer, what then is? In my TEDx talk on data communication, I emphasize how emotion guides our decision-making. Research has found people gave the most money to charity after hearing simple stories that start with sadness and end on hope. Yes, negative frames do grab attention and elicit sympathy. But evidence of success emotionally inspires us to act.

Consider the U.N.'s 1% response rate to gas leak notifications. According to the executive director, "We are quite literally talking about screwing bolts tighter in some cases." Our current approach can't even get governments to screw in a bolt. If we want global leaders to keep their COP29 promise of $300 billion in annual funding for developing countries (which the U.S. certainly isn't helping with anymore), we desperately need to pivot.

Instead of telling governments to fix a leak because the "data says so," we need to emphasize the positive impact on people. How will decreasing your abstract methane emissions lead to better health for human beings? How will donating trillions to some abstract goal of "1.5°C" benefit people in your local community that you personally care about? If we want the climate crisis to be seen as not just an "existential" environmental problem, but a horrifically human one happening right now close to home, we need to stop sharing negative stats and start telling hopeful stories. Especially with staunch resistance from a second Trump administration, we need to communicate the climate crisis in a much more human and much more ethical way if we are to inspire global action.

The evening of the 8th of March, which coincides with the Holy month of Ramadan celebrated by almost 2 billion Muslims worldwide, took an expected turn for Mahmoud Khalil and his wife. Khalil just returned home from iftar—the evening meal Muslims eat to break their day-long fasting during Ramadan. His wife was eight months pregnant. The couple, perhaps, were preparing for the upcoming delivery of the baby and welcoming the new member of the family. Perhaps, they were getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, one of the two major religious festivals Muslims celebrate at the end of Ramadan.

What was likely not foreseen at all by this family was a raid, arrest, and detention by ICE. Mahmoud, a recent graduate of Columbia University and leading Palestinian solidarity organizer on campus, recently received his green card. A green card is the Permanent Resident Card that allows a person to live and work in the United States permanently. Mahmoud’s wife is a U.S. citizen. If all went well, Mahmoud could have applied for his U.S. citizenship after three to five years, subject to some terms and conditions. Because of being a legal permanent resident—the prior step to receiving U.S. citizenship through naturalization, ICE detention most likely was the last thing on Mahmoud’s mind.

I would argue that we are currently living in a state of exception. Since the Trump administration has assumed power, most of the welfare- and social justice-oriented laws and policies that were historically designed to protect and nurture our humans, environments, and the most vulnerable ones are being gradually replaced by extreme right-wing, hateful, and anti-all-kinds-of-minoritized-communities rules and regulations. To date, a total of 83 executive orders have been signed by President Donald J. Trump, and a significant portion of these orders are aimed at destroying environmental protections, abolishing social security, and cracking down against various marginalized and minoritized communities. If you are not a rich, white, Christian, U.S. citizen, cis-man, you are very likely to be impacted by a good number of these executive orders.

The goal is to remind us that we will be the next if we speak up and challenge oppressive systems.

A notable feature of most of these executive orders is that they appropriate the language of social justice. For example, the executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” is nothing about defending women’s rights but everything about erasing trans- and nonbinary identities and experiences. If President Trump really cared about women’s rights, perhaps he would have allowed federal funding for elective abortion in government programs instead of reinstating the Hyde Amendment. Similarly, the executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” disproportionately targets Palestinian solidarity organizers in various institutions of higher education—specifically those who are not U.S. citizens.

Let’s not forget the 2017 white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers displayed swastikas and chanted slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil”—a Nazi ideological slogan. Trump was heavily criticized for adopting a “both-sides” narrative in response to the violent demonstrations, as he said, “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” A 2021 New Yorker article by David Remnick dives deeper into inquiring, “Is Donald Trump an Antisemite?” The article features a series of interviews that reveal that Trump was more pro-Israel than pro-Jewish. Some of the voices from the Israeli left criticized Trump for portraying American Jews as betrayers who betrayed Israel by voting for Democrats. The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland described Trump’s views towards Jews as, “...if American Jews don’t support what he says, they are ungrateful and he can question their loyalty. He sees Jews as foreign and supplicants who should be grateful to him.”

Against this background, when the Trump administration’s executive order to “combat Antisemitism” was enacted by the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by arresting and detaining Mahmoud Khalil, we should look beyond the formal accusation of antisemitism outlined by DHS on X: “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” We must dive deeper into asking what exactly the series of xenophobic measures, which include but are not limited to travel bans, visa cancellations, crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, terminating the Spanish-language version of the White House website, and trade and diplomatic wars, along with cuts on government spending and reducing the size and scope of the federal government, aim to achieve.

The U.S. has long been transforming into an oligarchy, which has been alarmingly expedited under the leadership of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. An executive order has assigned the White House more power to monitor and vet independent federal regulation agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, restricting their ability to regulate cryptocurrency trading or curb the monopoly of multinational tech giants like Meta or Amazon. Billionaire elites are engaged in a partnership with the state, where the state is primarily tasked with serving elite corporate interests. Professor Allison Stanger rightfully says, “When we grant tech leaders direct control over government functions, we’re not just streamlining bureaucracy—we’re fundamentally altering the relationship between private power and public governance.”

When the balance of power between private versus public sectors disappears, and the state is no longer aimed at serving the commoners, the state struggles to maintain its relevancy and seeks legitimacy from the common people. Noam Chomsky argues that one of the most effective ways to establish the state legitimacy is the creation of a culture of fear and the construction of endless enemies, which pits vulnerable communities against each other without drawing any attention to intersecting systems of oppression. Since the Trump administration is not going to serve anyone in this country except for its billionaire allies and rich-white-Christian-cis-male supporter base, it needs to give the rest of the people the impression that it is going to save them from some existentialist threats.

I would argue that the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is part of the Trump administration’s larger project of creating and sustaining the illusion of endless enemies, which include but are not limited to Arabs; Muslims; Palestinians; immigrants; refugees; Indigenous communities; people of color; women; the “undeserving” poor; and trans, queer, and nonbinary communities. Even though the Trump administration must be well aware of the fact that the oversimplistic conflation of all Palestinian solidarity organizers with “Hamas sympathizers” or the attempt to detain and deport noncitizen peaceful student protestors on the false ground of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” will face serious legal challenges in the court and pushback from progressive and social justice organizations, why does it continue to threaten Palestinian solidarity organizers?

I would say the goal is to leave a chilling effect. The goal is to remind us that we will be the next if we speak up and challenge oppressive systems. The goal is to emphasize that even securing a green card will not ensure that the constitutional right of freedom of speech or freedom of peaceful protest would extend to us. The goal is to push us to a state where we would start censoring ourselves in anticipation of being targeted long before the authoritarian state intervenes and starts penalizing us.

As the Trump administration attempts to restrict abortion and gender-affirming care and erase trans and nonbinary experiences in the name of protecting “life,” protecting “America’s children,” and protecting “family values,” Khalil was torn apart from his eight-month pregnant wife. The pregnant U.S. citizen wife was threatened with being arrested by ICE for trying to help her husband. The eighth month of pregnancy could feel debilitating, yet with a heavily pregnant body, Khalil’s wife has been forced to deal with the unbearable psychological and physical stress of spending hours communicating with lawyers and traveling between New York City and New Jersey trying to find the whereabouts of Khalil only to stay in the dark.

Will Khalil be able to be there with his wife on the day of Eid al-Fitr? Will he be able to be there by the side of his wife during the birth of their baby? If not, the United States does not really deserve to claim itself as “the land of the free.”

Last week witnessed the Third Meeting of States Parties at the United Nations in New York to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force on January 22, 2021. This historic intergenerational meeting occurred 80 years into the nuclear age with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weeklong meeting was attended by survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, whose average age is currently 85. Additionally in attendance were their descendants and other victims of the nuclear legacy from testing to extraction and mining. Others engaged at the 3MSP included faith leaders, and Mayors of cities all around the globe, including Hanover in Germany, Chicago in Illinois, Rochester in New York and Easthampton in Massachusetts. Scientists, artists, scholars and many other diverse members of civil society were there led by ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, with representatives of its 650 partner organizations.

The focus of the meeting was to further universalize the Treaty and stigmatize nuclear weapons and the nation states that continue to possess them. Currently half the world’s population has endorsed the Treaty with ratification by 73 nation states and 94 signatory nation states.

Ultimately, we will see the end of these weapons, either by the verifiable elimination supported by the efforts this week, or by their use whether intentional or by miscalculation, accident or AI algorithm.

The conference emphasized the humanitarian threats posed by any use of nuclear weapons and the ongoing threat posed by their very existence, even in the absence of use. Throughout the week long conference there were sidebar meetings on wide ranging topics including the myth of deterrence and its role as the principal driver in the arms race, the economics and morality of nuclear weapons, and how to bring old and young alike from where they are to an awareness of this existential threat through various media and expression.

It was clear throughout the week that the leaders of this next generation are indeed concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons to their future and are ready to act. Young high school students from Georgia to Detroit and students from Northwestern University to Morehouse College get it. It’s never been a case of them not being concerned, but rather an “awareness gap”. Once informed they are motivated and ready to share that knowledge and act for their future.

In the United States, a growing movement called “Back from the Brink” is bringing communities together to abolish nuclear weapons. Currently this movement is endorsed by 494 organizations, 77 municipalities and cities, 8 state legislative bodies, 429 municipal and state officials, and 44 members of Congress.

It calls on the United States to:

1.Take a leadership role and bring together the nuclear nations of the world in support of a verifiable, time bound agreement to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

2. Renounce the use of nuclear weapons first.

3. End sole authority for this president or any president to unilaterally launch a nuclear weapon.

4. End hair trigger alert.

5. Cancel enhanced nuclear weapon development replacing all of our current nuclear arsenal.

At this point in history, we are closer to nuclear war than at any point since the outset of the nuclear age. It’s “89 seconds to midnight,” according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Simultaneously we face two interconnected existential threats. We must abolish nuclear weapons so that we can move forward and properly address our climate crisis. What is necessary is to build the political will among our elected officials for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Ultimately, we will see the end of these weapons, either by the verifiable elimination supported by the efforts this week, or by their use whether intentional or by miscalculation, accident or AI algorithm. The choice is ours. Let’s land on the right side of history.

When I first heard President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” scheme, it brought back memories of the hopes Palestinians had three decades ago during the heyday of the Oslo Accords. Back then, I was serving as co-chair of “Builders for Peace,” a project launched by then-Vice President Al Gore to encourage American businesses to invest in the Palestinian economy to support the fledgling peace process.

We had prepared for our mission by reading the exhaustive World Bank study on the pre-Oslo Palestinian economy. The observations and conclusions were sobering, and yet hopeful. It noted obstacles that stifled the development of a Palestinian economy—problems like: Israel’s control of Palestinian land, resources, and power; its refusal to allow Palestinians to independently import and export; and the impediments Israel had created to Palestinian travel and even to conducting commerce within the occupied lands. The bank, however, concluded that if these Israeli restrictions on Palestinian entrepreneurs were removed, external investment would provide opportunities for rapid growth and prosperity.

We also read Sara Roy’s brilliant study of the cruel measures Israel had implemented to “de-develop” Gaza so as to stifle the development of an independent economy, thereby creating a cheap pool of day laborers for Israeli businesses or a network of small workshops that produced items for export by Israeli companies.

When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia.

We also made a few exploratory visits to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to meet with business and political leaders to assess the possibilities before us and the challenges we would confront. In short order, both became quite clear.

When the project was ready to launch, my fellow co-chair, Mel Levine, and I led the first of a number of delegations of American business leaders (which included both Arab Americans and American Jews) to the Palestinian lands. Our first exposure to the problems we would encounter came as we attempted to enter via the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. American Jews and others passed easily, while Arab Americans were separated from the group and forced to undergo humiliating screening.

We convened a session in Jerusalem for Palestinians to meet with the Americans interested in investment opportunities, only to discover that in order to enter the city Palestinians had to secure a pass from the occupation authority. Since the passes only permitted them a few hours in the city, the time they were able to devote to our discussions proved limited.

Entry into and exit from Gaza was equally problematic. One scene on leaving Gaza has stayed with me. Hundreds of Palestinian men filled what I can only describe as cattle chutes, waiting in the sun for permission to enter into Israel. Straddling these chutes were young Israeli soldiers shouting at the Palestinians below, ordering them to look down and hold their passes above their heads. It was deeply disturbing.

In both Gaza and the West Bank, our meetings with Palestinian business leaders were hopeful. They were eager to discuss possibilities with their American counterparts, and the Americans were impressed. A number of partnerships were discussed.

Two projects were notable. One sought to manufacture leather products and another to assemble furniture. Both sought to take advantage of Gaza’s proximity to Eastern Europe so as to export there. As both projects required that the Israelis permit import of raw material and export of finished products, both projects failed. It appeared that the Israelis might have been willing to entertain such projects but only if the Americans and Palestinians operated through an Israeli middleman, thereby reducing the profitability of the ventures.

Even opportunities that the U.S. government tried to implement failed. One day I received a call from an official in the Department of Agriculture who told me that they had provided 50,000 bulbs for Gazans to develop a flower export industry. These bulbs he told me had been sitting in an Israeli port for months and were rotting. He said that the department was able to send another 25,000 bulbs but could only do so if the Israelis ensured their entry. This too proved fruitless as Israelis wanted no competition with their flower export industry, and therefore wouldn’t allow a competing Palestinian industry to develop.

After a few frustrating years, I saw then-President Bill Clinton who asked me how the project was developing. I told him about the frustrations we were encountering due to the Israeli impediments on investment in independent Palestinian economic growth. He appeared troubled and asked that I write him a detailed memo. The letter I sent to the president both outlined the specific problems we were facing and my complaint that his peace team was not taking these challenges seriously, as they insisted that any U.S. challenge to the Israelis would impede efforts to promote negotiations for peace. I told the president that since Oslo: Palestinian unemployment had doubled, poverty had risen, and Palestinians hope for peace was evaporating. To my dismay, the response I received from the White House appeared to have been drafted by his peace team, and was no response at all. At the end of Clinton’s first term, Builders for Peace (BfP) was disbanded and with it the hopes for Palestinian independent economic growth.

Over the next decade, absent any U.S. pressure on the Israelis to change their behavior, negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians continued to falter, Palestinians became poorer, Israeli became more emboldened and oppressive, and Palestinian attitudes hardened, leading to renewed violence.

There are two other memories from that period that need to be recalled.

One of the more optimistic projects BfP endorsed was a proposal by a Virginia-based Palestinian-American company to build a Marriott resort on the Gaza beachfront. Securing initial investment, they began construction, starting with the foundation and a massive parking garage. Because of the risks involved, they sought risk insurance from OPIC, the U.S. agency created to guarantee investment against risk. The project was endorsed by then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, a champion of our BfP, and supported by PLO head, Yasser Arafat—both of whom saw the resort hotel as laying the foundation for the future economic growth of a Palestinian state.

When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia. Israel did everything it could to guarantee that Gaza would become Somalia—and they appear to have succeeded.

Against this backdrop, it was painful to hear of Trump’s insulting plan to build an American-owned Gaza Riviera. It reminded me of what might have been, but, three decades later, is being discussed without benefiting any Palestinians from its development.

The conversation on settler colonialism must not be limited to academic discussion. It is a political reality, clearly demonstrated in the everyday behavior of Israel.

Israel is not merely an expansionist regime historically; it remains actively so today. Additionally, the core of Israeli political discourse, both past and present, revolves around territorial expansion.

Frequently, we succumb to the trap of blaming such language on a specific set of right-wing and extremist politicians or on a particular US administration. The truth is vastly different: the Israeli Zionist political discourse, though it may change in style, remains fundamentally unchanged throughout time.

Zionist leaders have always associated the establishment and expansion of their state with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, later referred to in Zionist literature as the "transfer."

Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his diary about the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population from Palestine:

"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

It is unclear what happened to Herzl's grand employment scheme aimed at "spiriting" the population of Palestine across the region. What we know is that the so-called "penniless population" resisted the Zionist project in numerous ways. Ultimately, the depopulation of Palestine occurred through force, culminating in the Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948.

The discourse of the erasure of the Palestinian people has been the shared foundation among all Israeli officials and governments, though it has been expressed in different ways. It has always had a material component, manifesting in the slow but decisive takeover of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the confiscation of farms, and the constant construction of "military zones."

Despite Israeli claims, this "incremental genocide" is not directly linked to the nature and degree of Palestinian resistance. Jenin and Masafer Yatta illustrate this clearly.

Take, for example, the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the northern West Bank, which, according to UNRWA, is the worst since 1967. The displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians has been justified by Israel as a military necessity due to the fierce resistance in that region, primarily Jenin, but other areas as well.

However, many parts of the West Bank, including the area of Masafer Yatta, have not been engaged in armed resistance. Yet, they have been primary targets for Israel's colonial expansion.

In other words, Israeli colonialism is in no way linked to Palestinian resistance, action or inaction. This has remained true for decades.

Israel...rarely feels the need to explain itself to anyone. It remains a model of a ferocious, traditional colonial society that fears no accountability and has no regard for international law.

Gaza is a stark example. While one of the most horrific genocides in recent history was being carried out, Israeli real estate developers, members of the Knesset (Parliament), and leaders of the illegal settlement movement were all meeting to discuss investment opportunities in a depopulated Gaza. The callous tycoons were busy promising villas on the beach for competitive prices while Palestinians starved to death, amid an ever-growing body count. Even fiction cannot be as cruel as this reality.

It is no wonder that the Americans joined in, as evidenced by equally ruthless comments made by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, and eventually by the President himself.

While many at the time spoke about the strangeness of US foreign policy, few mentioned that both countries are prime examples of settler colonialism. Unlike other settler colonial societies, both Israel and the US are still committed to the same project.

Trump's desire to take over and rename the Gulf of Mexico, his ambition to occupy Greenland and claim it as American territory, and, of course, his comments about owning Gaza are all examples of settler colonial language and behavior.

The difference between Trump and previous presidents is that others used military power to expand US influence through war and hundreds of military bases worldwide without explicitly using expansionist language. Instead, they referenced the need to challenge the Soviet "red menace," "restore democracy," and launch a global "war on terror" as justifications for their actions. Trump, however, feels no need to mask his actions with false logic and outright lies. Brutal honesty is his brand, though in essence, he is no different than the rest.

Israel, on the other hand, rarely feels the need to explain itself to anyone. It remains a model of a ferocious, traditional colonial society that fears no accountability and has no regard for international law.

While the Israelis pushed to conquer and ethnically cleanse Gaza, they remained entrenched in southern Lebanon, insisting on remaining in five strategic areas, thus violating the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, which was signed on November 27.

A perfect case in point was the immediate—and I mean immediate—expansion into southern Syria, the moment the Syrian regime collapsed on December 8.

As soon as the events in Syria opened up security margins, Israeli tanks rolled in, warplanes destroyed almost the entirety of the Syrian army, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled the armistice agreement signed in 1974.

That expansion continued, though Syria represented no so-called security threat to Israel whatsoever. Israel is now in control of the Sheikh Mountain and Quneitra inside Syria.

The unquenchable appetite for land in Israel remains as strong as it was upon the formation of the Zionist movement and the takeover of the Palestinian homeland nearly eight decades ago.

This realization is crucial, and Arab countries, in particular, must understand this. Sacrificing Palestinians to the Israeli death machine with the flawed calculation that Israel's ambitions are limited to Gaza and the West Bank is a fatal mistake.

Israel will not hesitate for a minute to militarily move into any Arab geographic space the moment it feels able to do so, and it will always find US support and European silence, regardless of how destructive its actions are.

Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab countries could find themselves facing the same predicament as Syria today: watching their territories being devoured while remaining powerless and without recourse.

This realization should also matter to those busy finding "solutions" to the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict," which narrowly frame the problem to that of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Settler colonialism can never be resolved through creative solutions. A settler colonial state ceases to exist, and a settler colonial society ceases to function if territorial expansion is not a permanent state of affairs.

The only solution to this is that Israel's settler colonialism must be challenged, curtailed, and ultimately defeated. It may be a difficult task, but it is an inescapable one.

“It is pretty wild how you can make someone mad by just holding a sign,” my 18-year-old Ro told me, as an irate driver peeled out of the intersection, shaking both his middle fingers at us but managing not to hit us. Phew!

Ro was right. It didn’t take much to turn a perpetually busy intersection in New London, Connecticut, into a discussion forum on presidential overreach, cruelty, and immigration politics — with all the excesses, including those fingers, of the Age of Trump. In fact, all it took was four of us, four signs, and a little midday coordination. Oh, and some noise makers! Our signs said: “New London cares about our neighbors” and “ICE Not Welcome” and two versions of “Vecinos, no tienen que abrirle la puerta a ICE.” The translation: “Neighbors, you do not have to open the door to ICE.”

We stood there for an hour or so, clanging noise makers, waving those signs, and telling our neighbors to be careful about the rumored activity of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) in our community. Cars slowed and beeped, drivers waved — mostly their whole hands, but sometimes just that one lone finger — and some called out “Thank you” or “Gracias!” To our surprise, even a reporter and photographer from our local paper showed up.

New London is a small city — or maybe just a big town — of fewer than 28,000 people. According to the 2023 Census, we are 51.8% White, but only 12.8% of those Whites (myself included) send our kids to the public schools. I’ve always thought that doing so was a strength in our community. And thanks in part to that, I’ve become capable of maintaining a passable conversation in Spanish with my neighbors and the parents of some of my kids’ friends.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any Haitian Creole or French, but that community is growing in New London, too. I worked for a while at a local food pantry and I loved hearing the gentleness in tone as my young Haitian coworkers helped older Haitian ladies with their food boxes. Their voices grew soft, respectful, and full of warmth.

Recent immigrants are my neighbors, friends, and have been coworkers at my jobs and other responsibilities, but when, on a recent Friday morning, I got the text about ICE entering New London, the last thing I wanted to do was launch myself into action. I had a grant application due later that day. Ro, a senior, had a random day off from school but also a looming college application deadline. We were sitting next to each other at the library plugging away and nowhere near done. But I found that I couldn’t just sit there. I had to do something.

I texted a few people, including a friend with close ties to Spanish-speaking communities in our town, passing on what I’d heard.

“Oh no,” she texted back, “what should we do?”

What Should We Do?

That is the big question, right? What should we do? What’s happening in this country all feels so big and hateful and we’re all so small. And the Spanish-speaking and Haitian communities feel so vulnerable. Of course, the Trump administration’s policies are racist and cruel (and the news only gets worse and worse). The administration began its potentially vast deportation effort by flying 104 Indian nationals to Punjab on a military airplane shackled for the duration of the 40-hour flight. The White House also sent 300 immigrants from Afghanistan, China, Iran, and other countries on a harrowing, pointless odyssey to Panama — yes, Panama! — that included being trapped in a local hotel and then bused to a makeshift prison in the jungle.

The White House announced an end to temporary protective status for Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants who would face a welter of problems back home. Trump and company then opened Guantanamo to detain apprehended immigrants from Venezuela only to abruptly airlift them all back to Venezuela. The newest plan is to use military bases across this country as detention and processing sites for people rounded up in ICE raids, sweeps, and other operations. Incidentally, though you don’t see much about this, all of it comes at an astronomical price tag. Trump’s “show of power” putting those Indian immigrants on that single C-17 Globemaster for the 40-hour flight to Punjab reportedly cost $28,562 per flight hour — more than $1.1 million (or almost $11,000 per person). So many better things to spend that money on! And we taxpayers are the ones who will foot the bill. According to the Institute on Taxation and Policy, immigrants without work papers in this country nonetheless paid $96.7 billion in taxes to the United States in 2022. Tell me how you square those two facts.

And what indeed should we do?

On a sudden impulse, I texted my friend back: “What do you think if I go hold a sign at Coleman and Jefferson? Just to let people know — and to say it’s not okay?”

The emojis came back fast. Thumbs Up. Thank You hands. Hearts.

“Okay,” I thought, “Here we go. The grant will have to wait.” I texted a few friends to see if others were hearing what I was hearing. I found out that a bunch of them were in a meeting discussing what to do if/when ICE comes to our town. “What perfect timing, friends!” I texted the group. “I was thinking of holding a sign, but let me know if you think I should do something different.”

The text I had gotten said that ICE was on Spring and Summer Streets, as well as Coleman and Jefferson Streets, conducting sweeps. Half an hour later, Ro and I joined my sister Kate and our friend Kris at Coleman and Jefferson, a very busy intersection in New London. It’s where two two-way streets meet two one-way streets, and a commercial strip becomes a neighborhood. It’s down the hill from our town’s high school and was a strategically good spot for our tiny protest/public-service announcement.

Courage is Contagious

I knew that if I got the news, half of New London had, too. Lots of people call New London “News London,” because it seems as if everyone knows everyone and everything that’s going on. We’re a city of gossips and snoops and curious curtain peepers (myself included). Unfortunately, while it’s fun to know what’s going on and it demonstrates a certain level of care and concern, it’s not enough. The jolt of fear that went through me when that text told me ICE had made it to New London was nothing compared to how that same news affected my immigrant neighbors, but it was a jolt nonetheless. I sat paralyzed for a few minutes, wrapping myself in all the work I had to do, as fear grabbed me by the throat. And I had to work through that fear before I could head out to the street corner.

Later, as Ro and I held our signs, shifting them so different groups of cars could see them as the lights changed from red to green and back again, I thought about how contagious fear is — but so is courage. The smiles, thumbs ups, and horn toots from passing vehicles reminded me that our whole country hasn’t gone mad, despite those screaming headlines daily. Good people, I suspected, were busy, scared, confused, outraged, and — yes — getting organized. Just like my friends and me.

Buy the Book

My sister Kate and our friend Kris held their signs across the street, as it rained off and on. While we stood there getting wet, some of our friends were meeting and laminating little “Red Cards” that included a statement the holder could read or simply hand to an ICE agent. Here’s how it went:

“I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions or sign or hand you any documents based on my 5th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution. I do not give you permission to enter my home based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide under the door. I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights. I choose to exercise my constitutional rights.”

The “Red Card” had that statement in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole and friends were already starting to drop bundles off at businesses that cater to our immigrant neighbors.

During one of their runs, a car full of them rolled by and said they had heard that ICE agents were at the local hospital and middle school. We promptly packed up our signs, already soggy and water-stained, and went to both locations to ask around. “No ICE here,” a worker at the hospital said. “I would have seen them.”

“They knew we were coming,” I joked, “We got them running scared.”

“It’s not right,” he replied, laughing not (I suspect) at my joke but at my attempt at humor. “It’s not right. Everyone is just trying to make it the best they can.”

I nodded encouragingly.

“We all came from somewhere,” he added.

I tried not to think about what he must have thought of me — wet, unkempt, and free (in the middle of the day) to chat him up and hold a sign that told ICE to go melt somewhere else. After all, “I” (and I have to put that in quotes) came from somewhere too, but it’s been a while.

We All Came from Somewhere

Like all of us, I did indeed come from somewhere else after a fashion.

Nearly 48 million people are immigrants today — about 14% of our total population. Three of my four grandparents emigrated here. Only my paternal grandfather, Thomas Berrigan, was born in the United States. My mother’s parents both hailed from the same small town along Northern Ireland’s coast. Elizabeth O’Mullen left it first, heading for New Jersey to find her fortune far from the provincial hatred of her Catholic minority. William McAlister soon decided to leave, too. There were no jobs, no prospects at home. “You should look up the O’Mullen girl when you get there,” people told him. And so he did. They married, settled in the city of Orange, New Jersey, opened a construction business, and had seven kids.

My father’s mother was the lone German in our family. Frida Fromhardt emigrated from the Black Forest in the late 1800s and ended up in northern Minnesota with her parents as a five- or six-year-old. Later, she met Thomas Berrigan, a railroad laborer and raconteur. They were married in 1911 and had six sons. And I’m hardly alone in my connection to the “old country.” Seventy-five percent of Americans are, in fact, the grandchildren of immigrants. That is how the United States has been and remains a “nation of immigrants.”

As far as I can tell, for both the Berrigans and the McAlisters integration into White America was fairly straightforward. On both sides of the family, the path from poverty to comfort in the middle class took but one generation of hard work and sacrifice (and the G.I. Bill and the support of the Catholic Church and access to lines of credit denied Black Americans). Grandmother McAlister — like today’s immigrants who send remittances back to their families — dispatched regular packages to her relatives in Ireland’s County Antrim with food, money, and all her kids’ old clothes.

And now, here I am in an America where Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk are fanning the flames of racial hatred and scapegoating recent immigrants. I don’t know what happens next, but I do know that holding that sign on that recent Friday was a turning point for me. It was the day that I felt transformed from someone in despair, consuming ever-grimmer news (and rumors), into someone willing to visibly resist all that in public. And in the process, I think I taught my kid something — that we can move from consumers to actors in minutes: a couple of texts, a couple of pieces of cardboard, a couple of Sharpies, and we make people mad or happy or supported or connected and become part of the news rather than simply depressed by it.

And in that, I’m nothing special. All over the country, resistance is rising. Massive marches in Los Angeles and San Diego a few weeks back demonstrated that recent immigrants are not afraid. Churches are suing Homeland Security to protect their congregants. In cities and towns across this country, people who do not fear deportation are building networks to respond to ICE raids.

That Friday when I demonstrated ICE did not actually apprehend anyone in New London. Still, we cheered ourselves up, feeling more connected and powerful that afternoon — a rare, wonderful, and motivating experience! It’s now been a few weeks and ICE hasn’t come back yet. Still, I know perfectly well that we’ll need more than a few demonstrators and cardboard signs to roll back the worst abuses of our dictator-in-the-making, but believe me, I’m prepared.

Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

This is an extension of Republican tactics before Trump’s second term. Prior to Trump appointing her ambassador to the United Nations, former Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard class of 2006) browbeat presidents of elite universities over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several presidents being fired.

Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006) called the student demonstrations signs of “moral rot” at the universities.

But antisemitism was just a pretext.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has termed university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities.”

I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Trump is also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.

Research universities depend on funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump reportedly aims to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation by up to two-thirds. And he’s instructed the National Institutes of Health to no longer honor negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on grants that it administers — money that universities use for laboratory space and research equipment.

In defiance of court orders, Trump has largely maintained a freeze on NIH funding.

As a result, many of America’s great research universities have stopped hiring and are cutting Ph.D. programs — in some cases rescinding offers to accepted students.

Trump’s moves are consistent with the tyrant’s playbook, but they’re also jeopardizing America’s national security and competitiveness.

Trump speaks of putting America First, but his attack on the nation’s great research universities is ensuring that the U.S. comes in second — to China.

Although America has long been the global leader in scientific output, China is now surging ahead. Even before Trump’s cuts in research funding, China was projected to match U.S. research spending within five years.

China has already surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S.

Tyrants close universities. Fascists burn books. Trump is destroying America’s most important asset — its innovative mind.

The debate over whether or not to continue to support Ukraine highlights a seismic ideological realignment on foreign policy. Democrats, who were traditionally more skeptical of militarism and foreign adventurism, are far more aggressive and warlike than their Republican counterparts.

The post Liberals Have Changed appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

We’re reaching the point with the second Trump administration where, as Wall Street investors would say, the crazy is “priced in.” There’s absolutely no reason to expect anything other than aggressively dishonest and profoundly stupid governance. Would you say, at this point, that you’re surprised to learn that the new #2 at EPA, who will be running the day-to-day operations,

made nearly $3.2 million in 2024 representing a range of corporate interests against pollution cases and enforcement actions. His clients included Chevron, Sunoco Pipeline, and Energy Transfer, a major oil and gas company that is currently litigating a high stakes trial against Greenpeace, according to a recent financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

And he wasn’t even the most egregious EPA nominee—another high-ranking future official told the Senate that as far as he was concerned the job was not to prevent climate change, it was to adapt to it once it happened. Thanks!

These kind of things are terrible, and also at this point entirely predictable. Indeed, it was all foretold with breathtaking candor in Project 2025, and then the nation voted for President Trump anyway. (Perhaps someone actually believed his demurrals about his plans during the campaign). We need to resist at every turn—please join us at Third Act as prepare for the next big round of actions on April 5—but at this point there is great damage we simply can’t avoid.

It makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn't vote for this charlatan.

I think it makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn’t vote for this charlatan. News continued to flow in from around the globe last week of countries succumbing to White House extortion to buy more liquefied natural gas, on pain of getting tariffed otherwise. And then there’s Ukraine—and if you want to watch a truly stinging takedown of Trump’s treachery, check out this from a center-right French parliamentarian. Better yet, read Antonia Juhasz’s long account for Rolling Stone of the truly extortionate “mineral rights” deal that Trump is demanding from Zelensky. She quotes Svitana Romanko, who will be familiar to readers of this newsletter—a longtime climate campaigner who has emerged as Ukraine’s most passionate environmentalist.

I have no doubt that a hidden agenda is getting access and decision-making rights to gas and oil pipelines, especially gas that’s so critical given that the European market is so important for Russia and has always been.” This is “really threatening to everything we’ve done so far” to weaken Russia’s war-fighting ability and influence, including “getting the full ban on Russian oil and gas to the European Union,” she adds.

Though it gets drowned out in the news over Russia, Canada, and Mexico but just as disgusting and revealing was the initiative unveiled this week by America’s new energy secretary, fracking baron Chris Wright, who told his counterparts from across Africa that the future was…fossil fuels, above all coal. The Africans were gathered at a Marriott across from the White House for some sense of what would happen to them now that the Trump administration has summarily shut down Power Africa, the program begun by President Obama that has connected tens of millions of homes on the continent to electricity.

According to Times reporter Max Bearak, Energy Secretary Wright sold the shutdown as a gift. “This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.” He then went on to say:

“We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”
And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.

The amount of actual nonsense crammed into those two paragraphs is…amazing. Yes, coal transformed the world during the industrial revolution. But now it’s transforming the world again, by altering the climate—which is not only the world’s biggest problem by far, but is making all the others much worse. African countries worry about public health, about hunger, about building infrastructure: here’s what the World Meteorological Organization calculated in 2023:

On average, African countries are losing 2–5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and many are diverting up to 9 percent of their budgets responding to climate extremes.

More to the point, the idea that coal is the answer for Africa is belied by history. Which is to say, we’ve known about coal—and natural gas—for a very long time, and there are somehow still 600 million Africans unconnected to the electric grid. If coal was going to do the job, perhaps it would have done so by now.

The problem, in Africa, is the lack of a grid—the huge and hugely expensive collection of poles and wires that distributes power from centralized coal-fired power stations. I remember sitting in Tanzania, years ago, with a Silicon valley entrepreneur named Xavier Helgesen: “The belief was, you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” he said. “But the U.S. is the richest country on earth, and it wasn’t fully electrified until the nineteen-forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least not over here.”

Happily, there’s now a way around that problem: it’s called distributed solar power. And, as I’ve been writing, it’s exploding in Africa. I saw some of the first solar mini-grids on the continent five or six years ago—now there are thousands. There was a World Bank effort launched last fall to find $90 billion—one quarter of an Elon at today’s market prices—to provide power for 300 million of those 600 million Africans. (That one man could electrify the whole continent and still have $180 billion left over gives you some sense of the grotesque inequality now haunting our earth). But if that happened, it would be another step leading the world away from fossil fuels and the “energy dominance” that the Trump team dreams of.

“When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.”

In case you’re wondering how all this is going to happen, it’s worth remembering that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign governments. As the evangelical magazine Christianity Today (in an earlier day, evangelicals had actually argued for the law, on the grounds of, you know, honesty) pointed out yesterday,

Taken by itself, the FCPA freeze could merely be a messy attempt to limit the authority of the DOJ and the SEC. But halting FCPA in tandem with limiting enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force poses a shift in American policy likely to affect not just American oversight of American bribery abroad but also the US government’s ability to monitor foreign agents in America.

If the U.S. is able to bully or bribe African governments into building more coal-fired power plants, let me make a prediction. Just as we’ve seen in Pakistan this past year, the expensive and unreliable power those plants deliver on underbuilt grids will be one more factor pushing people towards cheap solar. In fact, as I’ve described in this newsletter already, that process is underway across much of Africa already, as people and companies buy up cheap Chinese solar panels and liberate themselves from the status quo.

It would be cheaper, and provide more power more quickly to more people, to do this systematically with solar minigrids, as Power Africa has been envisioning, instead of one roof at a time. But the turn to the sun will happen eventually anyway; in the end, the greed unleashed by Trump, Wright, and their friends will be insufficient to alter either physics or economics. Much damage will be done in the meantime, though—to Africans, to the climate, and to whatever remains of the idea of American leadership. The Chinese are doubtless chortling; indeed by this point the laughter must be nonstop. If you want to read one account of China’s rise to the renewable pinnacle, this Washington Post piece might be it. Among other things, it makes clear that as the U.S. pushes coal, Beijing is actually offering something people want and need:

In 2024, Chinese exports of EVs, batteries, and solar and wind products to the Global South surged to account for a record 47 percent of the total.
“It’s probably a good thing for the climate because these clean technologies are diffusing all over the world,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues in the Obama administration. “But it is also probably resulting in the United States losing even more market share globally.”

At this point we sure deserve that loss. Here’s the big and wonderful news from China this week: gasoline sales fell…9 percent last year, as EVs took hold in the country. If I were Big Oil I’d be desperately trying to leverage the White House too, I guess.

"I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company."—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Deep down, we struggle to come upon accurate words to describe the terrible beauty of our aloneness. In this plight, we are together. In this musing, I, listening to the music of my heart, will attempt to hobble through and send back dispatches conveying a lexicon of aloneness.

A lesson I hope to learn by scribing a travelog of the dark: I've noticed, people who have survived the howling abyss of abandonment, and have been freed from its grip of grief, have been transfigured by the ordeal. Rarely, as a consequence, do such individuals act as errand boys, muscle, or apologists of oppressors.

They have snatched this from the mouth of despair, it would be tragic to be false to the forces that formed them. Thus make a vow to self: Do not pretend to be anything other than yourself attempting to gain the approval of heartless authority and petty tyrants of the everyday kind. Your wounds demand you speak your truth.

Leonardo Da Vinci, "Saint Jerome in the Wilderness"i (1480, unfinished)

Even in our cultural atomization, we are connected to those cast out; we are bonded to society's denizens of the dark, to those who feel the pain of the suffering Earth; to those who the misnomer known as normalcy casts from conscious awareness; to those who capitalist functionality (i.e., crackpot realism) brutalizes, kicks to the curb, and condemns to madness and death… yet life on life's terms, confronts us with innumerable, seemingly infinite connections. Within, we mirror all things. We, unbeknownst to ourselves, communicate with all things. Not only the realm of the human but soil, ocean, storm, star, galaxy, electron…

We, moment to moment, travel the bridge between each other's heartbeats. We are connected both with what we love and what we shun. Moreover, what we cast out and shun will return as affliction. Hence, the Earth herself is unwell and she rages in floods and firestorms.

Breathe in deep, clear your throat, and make exhortations on behalf of the voiceless. If you have a gift for music, compose and play them a song, let the weary take refuge in the rest between musical notes. Display sacred vehemence toward life-defying oppressors who contrive to make the life of the many a prison by incarceration of the heart.

Louise Bourgeois, "The Femme Maison"

When the culture of a nation, intoxicated on extraverted mania inherent to Mephistophelian capitalism, disallows the visions of its denizens of despair into the conversation, compensatory angels borne from the unconscious (what people in times past knew as the soul) will descend bringing on a cultural darkness. In the sterile, clinical language of our time, the phenomenon is termed a pandemic of depression.

Emissaries, invisible in daylight glare, appear in the dreams of the scorned and forsaken; the visitors whisper verse to those capable of stillness, and guide the willing into moments of inadvertent reprieve. In short, deliverance occurs by means of easing the burden of self—which is a gentle way of saying, aiding one in getting the living hell over oneself. These emissaries impart the message the visible world can be a mirage. Hope is an invisible force allied with luminous angels whose light would blind us upon sight. Hence, we are moved to transformation by a force not perceptible during quotidian day.

Paradoxically, because all things arrive freighted with their opposite (enantiodromia) bearers of hope are, often, those aforementioned lonely, despair-wracked individuals driven to stand at the edge of the abyss—the abjectly lonely who have been moved, by desperation, to implore the unseen for mercy.

No person wants to arrive at such a place. One would choose, and most do, a mundane life wherein we follow the signposts, on an exclusive basis, of the visible world—yet is, in essence, given our human proclivity for habitual self-reference, a graceless tour of a house of mirrors. Oh—the hellish mix of confusion and blandness of the choice.

Edvard Munch, "Evening on Karl Johan Street" (1892)

Prayer before sleep: Lord of nightmares bestow grace on me by allowing me to be reborn from within the womb of night. Despair's blackness grants the intrepid traveller the ability to navigate darkness, thereby avoiding a life defined by the limbo of complacency.

A person open to being ministered to, thus transformed, by a numinous voice, calling from the darkness at the edge of the daylight world, will, in all likelihood, spend their days alone, all too often suffering the pain of wounds inflicted by rejection. Loneliness will be a constant companion.

But as Rilke avers in verse:

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything—
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.—Rainer Maria Rilke, "You Darkness"

Joseph Beuys, "I Like America and America Likes Me"

Often, a shunned soul, one who travelled through the world of mindless consensus' inferno of fuckwit and has returned, will be put on the defensive by normalcy's bullies and challenged to make an accounting of himself—i.e., to account for the unaccountable. In the end, one who has seen and survived one's own darkness, will be able to apprehend the darkness within his inquisitors. At the speed of a synapse, his tormentors will go from bullying to claiming victimization.

For, when backed against the wall, he is often moved to speak in a soul-plangent lexicon that causes a collapse, even for an instant, of his tormentor's protective yet ad hoc walls of coping—thus revealing the fragile banality that governs their lives. In so doing, he has committed an act, in nice society, that will never be forgiven.

Rilke surveys the scene and sends back this dispatch in verse:

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial.—But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart.—Rilke, "Exposed On The Mountains Of My Heart"

René Magritte, "The Glass Key" (1959)

Stop for a moment and take it all in. This life… on our Earth. The beauty. The terror. Notice: The terror involved in taking in the beauty of it all. The act will awaken your heart. Ask yourself: Am I on my heart's path? Or does this road lead me, again and again, into the dominion of exploiters? If you received an affirmative in regard to the latter question, I suggest, after you cease weeping—a sane response to you taking notice of the heart-devoid landscape where you have strayed—ask yourself: How can I reorient myself as to the direction of my heart's path?

Do you feel thwarted by circumstance, by the inherent miseries in facing capitalist hierarchies of immovable power and the system's architecture of exploitation? Rebel by engagement with the eternity delivery system of the imagination. Doing so does not translate into idle fantasy. By a receptivity to originality, by being moved to enthusiasm by acts of creativity… will provide the libido to trundle through the living landscape of imagination; thereby, one does not need to be an artist to live and engage the world in an artful manner.

Become a one person hallelujah chorus for originality. Within you, glide wheels of fire. The valley of bones rises as an army of flesh. This is your exodus out of bondage.

Magritte, "The Healer" (1937)

A 500-year-old conquistador, hellbent on winning at any cost, has much to teach us about America today. If we have the stomach to see it.

Hernán Cortés led the expedition from Spain to the New World that resulted in the fall of the Aztec Empire and its leader, Montezuma II. Arriving on the shores of Veracruz, Mexico in 1519, Cortés saw that his men were exhausted and dispirited. There were calls to turn back, whispers of mutiny. Cortés, it is said, responded by burning and sinking his ships, thus stranding his crew, and giving them little choice but to fight and vanquish the Aztecs.

As Elon Musk demolishes the systems, institutions, and infrastructure that support and sustain America, I am reminded of the rapid fall of the Aztec empire, and the deliberate ruination that precipitated it. Like Cortés, Musk’s goals are destruction and assurance that there can be no going back.

People are overwhelmed and exhausted by the magnitude of consistent, determined, and effective resistance against the conquistadors who, having skuttled the ships, seek now to become overlords. Yet we have no choice but to act, to push back.

And another once-great empire falls.

Each day, the nascent “Mump” Regime—allegedly helmed by U.S. President Donald Trump, but clearly commandeered by Musk—razes more American foundations, moving us ever closer to the tipping point where far-right authoritarianism replaces an admittedly flawed, but principled, democracy.

If our president hasn’t the historical awareness, focus, or intellectual capacity to formulate and execute a complex plan, his surrogates and henchman do, and they are reveling in the dual promises of destruction and personal gain.

As Elon Musk, the Project 2025 architects, their accomplices, and enforcers gleefully erase 250 years of accomplishment—by turns, glorious and imperfect—they are creating a seemingly irreversible path to their own ends by reducing to rubble the institutions that might save us.

Department of Education? Burn it.

FEMA? Burn it.

USAID? Burn it.

NATO? Burn it.

Climate science? Burn it.

Medical research? Burn it.

Alliances, treaties, promises? Burn them.

The Republicans who control Congress daily demonstrate their own gullibility and culpability. And the Democratic minority wrings its hands, wavering among unorganized resistance, outrage, and a dawning awareness not only that it can happen here, but that it is happening here.

For the most part, the American people mirror Congress. Many outraged and resistant. Some condoning much of what they see, cherry-picking actions they consider laudable, while refusing to scrutinize the ones that cause their stomachs to clench. And others naively hoping thugs who have cheated their way through life will suddenly begin playing by the rules, i.e., the Constitution, the courts, existing laws, and the checks and balances of a three-branch government. Rules, the thugs sneer, are for suckers and losers. Meanwhile, they set fire to and sink ship after ship. There will be no going back, they assure themselves with a smug grin and a not-so-clandestine Nazi salute.

They may be right.

I’d like to believe that the best and brightest minds among democracy’s defenders and patriots are huddled together crafting solutions that will save America from the evil unleashed upon us by corrupt, would-be dictators, but with each day’s atrocities, lies, deliberate distractions, and concealments, my hope for my country fades.

America is burning. People are overwhelmed and exhausted by the magnitude of consistent, determined, and effective resistance against the conquistadors who, having skuttled the ships, seek now to become overlords. Yet we have no choice but to act, to push back. As British statesman Edmund Burke famously said, “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

This is what it looks like when a once-great country is dismantled.

Do not look away.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.

In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.

President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.

If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.

The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.

The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.

DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.

Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.

For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.

DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.

James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”

Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.

This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.

By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.

Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.

Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”

This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.

This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.

Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.

By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.

Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.

Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”

DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.

This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.

With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.

But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.

This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.

DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”

This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.

The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.

If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.

International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire global political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.

In principle, international law should have always been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism to practically enslave the Global South for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonization of the South.

Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society for merely advocating the enforcement of international law.

From the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the war on Libya and numerous other examples, past and present, the United Nations was often used as a platform for the strong to impose their will on the weak. And whenever smaller countries collectively fought back, as the U.N. General Assembly often does, those with veto power, military, and economic leverage used their advantage to coerce the rest based on the maxim, "Might makes right."

It should therefore hardly be a surprise to see many intellectuals and politicians in the Global South arguing that, aside from paying lip service to peace, human rights, and justice, international law has always been irrelevant.

This irrelevance was put on full display through 15 months of a relentless Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that killed and wounded over 160,000 people, a number that, according to several credible medical journals and studies, is expected to dramatically rise.

Yet, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened an investigation of plausible genocide in Gaza on January 26, followed by a decisive ruling on July 19 regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the international system began showing a pulse, however faint. The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants were another proof that West-centered legal institutions are capable of change.

The angry American response to all of this was predictable. Washington has been fighting against international accountability for many years. The U.S. Congress under the George W. Bush administration, as early as 2002, passed a law that shielded U.S. soldiers "against criminal prosecution" by the ICC, to which the U.S. is not a party.

The so-called Hague Invasion Act authorized the use of military force to rescue American citizens or military personnel detained by the ICC.

Naturally, many of Washington's measures to pressure, threaten, or punish international institutions have been linked to shielding Israel under various guises.

The global outcry and demands for accountability following Israel's genocide in Gaza, however, have once again put Western governments on the defensive. For the first time, Israel was facing the kind of scrutiny that rendered it, in many respects, a pariah state.

Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society for merely advocating the enforcement of international law. Those targeted included U.N.-affiliated human rights defenders.

On February 18, German police descended on the Junge Welt venue in Berlin as if they were about to apprehend a notorious criminal. They surrounded the building in full gear, sparking a bizarre drama that should have never taken place in a country that perceives itself as democratic.

The reason behind the security mobilization was none other than Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer, an outspoken critic of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the current United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.

If it were not for the U.N.'s intervention, Albanese could have been arrested simply for demanding that Israel must be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.

Germany, however, is not the exception. Other Western powers, lead amongst them the U.S., are actively taking part in this moral crisis. Washington has taken serious and troubling steps, not just to protect Israel, and itself, from accountability to international law, but to punish the very international institutions, its judges, and officials for daring to question Israel's behavior.

Indeed, on February 13, the U.S. sanctioned the ICC's chief prosecutor due to his stance on Israel.

After some hesitance, Karim Khan has done what no other ICC prosecutor had done before: issuing, on November 21, arrest warrants for two Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. They are currently wanted for "crimes against humanity and war crimes."

The moral crisis deepens when the judges become the accused, as Khan found himself at the receiving end of endless Western media attacks and abuse, in addition to U.S. sanctions.

As disturbing as all of this is, there is a silver lining, specifically an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed based on new standards, justice that applies to all, and accountability that is expected from all.

Those who continue to support Israel have practically disowned international law altogether. The consequences of their decisions are dire. But for the rest of humanity, the Gaza war can be that very opportunity to reconstruct a more equitable world, one that is not molded by the militarily powerful, but by the need to stop senseless killings of innocent children.