At a time when the American public is expressing unprecedented levels of distrust in the Israeli government, Congress just proposed tying the US to the Israeli military more than ever before.

Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the US military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948.

Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.

If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the US has with any other country in the world. To be sure, the US has worked closely with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan. And, as the No. 1 arms dealer in the world, the US provides weapons to militaries across the globe. But that is mostly a one-way street, with the US providing weapons to foreign buyers who only occasionally make parts for those weapons themselves, as in the case of the F-35’s global supply chain.

The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored.

Section 224 would be a different beast entirely. It would fuse the US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber. It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the US beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics: jobs in the US. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.

The result could well be a US political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East.

This unprecedented level of US-Israeli military integration stands in stark contrast to the traditional aid model of defense cooperation, in which Israel already stood out as the top recipient of US military assistance. As laid out in a recent Quincy Institute brief, authored by Steven Simon, this shift from an aid model to a military integration model has troubling implications, namely:

The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.

This all comes at a time when the Israeli military has repeatedly used US weapons in strikes that have violated international humanitarian laws in Gaza, and as Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires (as has the US itself) in the Trump administration’s unnecessary war with Iran.

The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored. Just 30% of respondents to a New York Times-Sienna poll from mid-May believe President Donald Trump made “the right decision” to go to war with Iran, with 64% saying it was wrong. An Institute for Global Affairs poll released earlier this week dove even deeper into the American psyche when it comes to arming Israel, finding that “just 16% say the United States should keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions. Thirty-eight percent want to stop supplying weapons entirely, and another 24% want weapons conditioned on how they’re used.”

Yet, mainstream leadership in both parties remains largely pro-Israel and continues to shape the base legislative text before amendments and broader congressional debate open it to the full body, as is the case with this NDAA provision.

Though slowly, tides within both parties are shifting as more and more members speak out against the growing divide between Israel’s actions and America’s interests. For example, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday that, “the Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” On the Republican side of the aisle, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) have openly decried the Israel lobby’s corrosive influence—a stance that may have, at least partially, cost both of them their seats in Congress.

What can other members of Congress who are concerned about Israel’s destabilizing actions do right now? Stop the Israeli-US military-industrial merger in its tracks. Lawmakers should reject Section 224 from the NDAA to avoid deep integration with Israel's military at a time when a growing number of Americans oppose Israel's actions in the region.

In response to recent developments in Venezuela under imperialist siege, international solidarity activists should adopt a stance that does not inadvertently reinforce Washington’s drive for domination. Our central responsibility is not to adjudicate every tactical decision made under siege conditions, but to oppose the imperialist aggression that creates those conditions.

The overwhelming structure of US hybrid warfare against Venezuela remains intact, continuing to suffocate the country’s economic recovery and undermine its sovereignty. Washington continues to exert decisive pressure over the country’s principal source of national revenue, the oil sector. It uses sanctions, financial coercion, and domination of global banking systems, as it has against other targeted states such as Iraq and Syria.

At the same time, the threat of direct military escalation remains ever present, a danger underscored by continuing military deployments, aggressive rhetoric, and repeated threats.

What some may regard as unjustifiable compromises by the Venezuelan government pale in comparison with our obligations as international solidarity activists: defending Venezuela and Cuba against the policies of imperialism. The US continues to intensify blockades, sanctions, destabilization efforts, and military threats against these revolutionary processes while simultaneously waging disinformation campaigns against the Chavista leadership and the Cuban Revolution.

The role of internationalists is to oppose imperialism at home, not to instruct Venezuelans on how to defend their revolution.

Both Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez identified US imperialism as the principal enemy of humanity. Our primary political focus should therefore remain opposition to imperialist domination, rather than allowing secondary disagreements to obscure the central contradiction.

The Responsibilities of Internationalists

First and foremost, the main blow must be directed against US imperialism. Any discussion of shortcomings, compromises, or concessions should be understood within the context of relentless external aggression, destabilization efforts, and military threats.

That is why internationals vigorously campaign both for the safe return to Venezuela of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores and for the immediate and unconditional lifting of all sanctions.

The political choices made by the Venezuelan leadership must ultimately be resolved within Venezuela itself. The role of internationalists is to oppose imperialism at home, not to instruct Venezuelans on how to defend their revolution.

Support for Venezuela against US imperialism does not require agreement with every decision taken under conditions of coercion. Understanding political decisions made under such circumstances is to situate them within the realities imposed by imperialist military power. This includes the extradition of Alex Saab.

A longstanding objective of US policy has been to fracture the unity of the Chavista leadership, military, and popular base. Despite immense pressure, that unity has largely held. Attempts to counterpose solidarity with the popular base against solidarity with the leadership, however well intentioned, objectively strengthen imperialist aims.

The Conditions Facing Venezuela

We do not know the full extent of the pressures exerted on the Venezuelan government, nor the range of alternatives realistically available under present conditions. The Venezuelan leadership operates under severe geopolitical constraints. The US openly threatens Libya- or Iran-style retaliation. Another major military escalation remains entirely possible.

Unlike in earlier periods, Venezuela today lacks strong regional allies, while in the context of the ongoing Gaza genocide, so-called “international law” offers little meaningful restraint on US power.

In conclusion, under conditions of economic warfare, military threat, diplomatic isolation, and perpetual destabilization efforts, Venezuela’s contradictions cannot be analyzed abstractly or outside the realities of imperialist power.

Given the vast military asymmetry between the two countries, the consequences of direct military confrontation would be catastrophic for Venezuela, potentially including the destruction of vital infrastructure and long-term devastation of the oil industry upon which the country depends.

If the US succeeds in placing the extreme right-wing opposition in power, the likely result would be devastating political repression directed against Chavismo and the popular sectors.

Strategic Realities and Political Continuity

While continuing to rely upon the Chavista base, the government also recognizes the necessity of building a broader patriotic bloc capable of resisting imperialist pressure more effectively.

Even amid forced compromises, the central achievements of the Bolivarian process remain significant: preservation of the revolutionary leadership, survival against destabilization efforts, and avoidance of a full-scale invasion.

Years of sanctions and economic warfare severely degraded Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. Restoring productive capacity, reestablishing trade, and attracting investment have therefore become vital imperatives.

The political transitions from Chávez to Maduro to Delcy Rodríguez largely reflect changes in the international geopolitical landscape. Yet there has remained substantial political continuity within Chavismo, evident in continued solidarity with Cuba, the vitality of the communal system, and the endurance of the revolutionary mass movement.

In conclusion, under conditions of economic warfare, military threat, diplomatic isolation, and perpetual destabilization efforts, Venezuela’s contradictions cannot be analyzed abstractly or outside the realities of imperialist power. The primary task of solidarity movements within the imperial centers remains what it has always been: opposing the aggression of our own ruling classes.

As a long-time death penalty abolitionist, I’ve often compared the death penalty in America to a train with no brakes: Once the machinery starts moving, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to stop.

But the real problem is that the train should never have been built.

Today, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are experimenting with nitrogen gas executions, a method officials claim is more humane. But from noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to kill is a story of failure—not moral progress.

There’s no acceptable way to practice a form of state killing that, for Black Americans especially, has long been intertwined with terror.

History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable.

Take my home state of Arkansas. Within a year of becoming a state in 1836, Arkansas adopted laws establishing a racial hierarchy by which even civilian whites could dispossess or punish a Black person. These codes even designated certain offenses as capital crimes when committed by Black people but lesser crimes when committed by white people.

The message was clear: Some lives were worth less than others.

That message echoed through the decades that followed. Between 1877 and 1950, Arkansas recorded 493 documented lynchings—the highest per capita rate in the nation. In Arkansas and throughout the South, these killings were not hidden crimes. They were public spectacles—acts of terror meant to reinforce social hierarchy.

Eventually, lynching became politically unacceptable. But state killing did not disappear—it simply changed form. The spectacle moved behind prison walls, and the language became more clinical. But the act of killing remained the same.

George Hays, who served two terms as governor of Arkansas, wrote in 1927 that “if the death penalty were to be removed from our statute-books, the tendency to commit deeds of violence would be heightened owing to the Negro problem. The greater number of the race do not maintain the same ideals as the whites.”

Since the Civil War, Arkansas has executed nearly 500 people—and 68% of those executed were Black or Native American. This is not distant history. Black inmates make up about 50% or more of the state’s death row today, despite Black Arkansans comprising less than 16% of the state’s total population.

Nor is Arkansas an outlier. Nationally, over half the people on death row today are Black or Hispanic.

Modern executions are often carried out by lethal injection, presented as sterile and humane. The condemned is strapped to a gurney while witnesses sit behind glass and chemicals stop the heart. But as these chemicals become less available, Arkansas and some other states have replaced lethal injection with nitrogen gas executions.

They claim the method is painless, but it is death by suffocation. Even veterinarians are forbidden from euthanizing cats and dogs with nitrogen hypoxia because it takes too long to lose consciousness and amounts to torture.

History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable. During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany constructed gas chambers designed to turn mass death into a technical process. This process was bureaucratic, hidden from public view, and deemed “efficient.”

Today, the death penalty follows a disturbingly similar logic. Each generation promises that the newest method will finally make execution humane. The noose. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection. Now nitrogen gas.

Yet the fundamental act has never changed. The state still kills. The train keeps moving. Even when jurors change their minds. Even when victims’ families plead for mercy. Stopping the train requires courage—especially from elected leaders who have the power to do it.

Our history tells us what happens when a society accepts killing as justice. The death penalty has evolved for nearly two centuries, but there is only one real measure of moral progress: not how we kill, but whether we finally choose to stop.

This month, the world watched as US President Donald Trump wrangled up his bro-squad of capitalist billionaires and chartered them across the world to China. We watched in disbelief as the China-hating Trump administration paraded around Beijing gawking at beautiful ceilings and giant rose bushes. “China is beautiful,” Trump said.

All the while, the top US oligarchs met with Chinese officials, hoping to find openings they could us to slither into China’s large, booming markets and siphon off even more wealth that they most definitely don’t need. Fortunately, China just wasn’t that interested.

Even though nothing much came of the meetings, all the China hawks in Washington were on the edge of their seats, anxious that better relations with China would risk their favorite justification for raising the military budget to an unprecedented $1.5 trillion. But we need to prepare for war with China by 2025… no, 2027… wait, maybe 2030? Forever?

Mainstream media had a lot to say about the meeting. The Guardian was especially deceptive, with one article titled:

This is the kind of headline we’ve come to expect from outlets like the New York Post, whose credibility is on par with a spam email. In fact, they did have a similar article:

It’s not a huge surprise that Western media is trying to make it sound like war was China’s idea, when it’s the US that has been actively preparing for it for the last decade. It’s part of their strategy to use misleading headlines to stoke fear about China, so nobody pays attention to the war-antagonizing behavior of the United States.

When President Xi Jinping speaks about the “Thucydides Trap,” he is warning the US against treating war with China as inevitable and instead urging it to pursue diplomacy and cooperation. Many US policymakers, however, continue to frame China’s rise primarily as a military threat, expanding military posturing across the Asia-Pacific in an effort to preserve US dominance even at the risk of escalation.

It’s reported that Trump and Xi also talked at length about the US war on Iran. This conflict—as well as US military actions in Venezuela—is also tied to the broader US confrontation with China. Both countries possess major oil, gas, and critical mineral reserves and have become important economic partners to China. By targeting two of China’s key energy suppliers, the US is attempting to limit China’s access to the resources, while hoarding them for itself (and Israel).

The US war on Iran has been a disaster, which is one of the reasons Trump is in China, hoping for concessions. It’s not just energy dominance the US is worried about. While oil and gas prices are skyrocketing around the world, Iran has made an exception for Chinese oil tankers, which trade with Iran using the Chinese yuan. For decades, US global power has depended on the petrodollar system, which keeps global energy trade tied to the US dollar and gives the US enormous economic warfare abilities. But China’s continued purchase of Iranian oil using the yuan, along with growing efforts by countries across the Global South to trade outside the dollar system, threatens to weaken that dominance.

The global order is clearly shifting toward a more multipolar world. The question is whether the US will respond with diplomacy or attempt to preserve unipolar dominance through military confrontation with China. To prevent escalation, we must reject the idea that war between great powers is inevitable. And we must also demand media coverage that accurately and credibly covers the role the United States is playing in escalating tensions. That includes news outlets like The Guardian, which clearly prioritize painting China as the villain over credible and in-depth reporting.

The advent of generative AI has made it even harder to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t, and also easy to claim what is real is fake. This threatens to undermine the very idea of "evidence," which traditionally has been used to enforce accountability, by fracturing shared, verifiable reality.

For example, in Iran authorities attempted to dismiss protest footage as edited or artificially manufactured after AI was used to enhance long-distance footage of someone confronting the military, effectively turning this doubt into a propaganda weapon. Doubt was also a feature in the aftermath of the recent bombing of a girls' school which killed 168 people—mostly children—in Minab, Iran. And in the midst of an already distorted information ecosystem, methods developed to detect AI fakes are now being weaponized to falsely discredit authentic evidence.

This affirms that the emergence of generative AI is not simply a technological issue, but is creating a visual evidence problem. The consequences are already being felt not only by those chronicling and exposing injustice.

Historically, visual media has been an important tool to document injustice. In South Africa, for instance, a generation of photographers used the camera to challenge the prevailing power structures of apartheid. By exposing the apartheid’s injustices and delegitimizing the system, as well as documenting resistance and everyday life, photographers had a huge impact on the liberation struggle in South Africa. So much so, that the camera would be “seen as an instrument of insurrection” by the apartheid regime, resulting in a ban on foreign journalists and documentary photography.

What would have happened if the apartheid regime had claimed that photographs like Nzima’s were faked or AI generated? Would this have created doubt for the audiences who saw it, impacting international support for South Africa’s liberation struggle?

Although they were not the sole targets of apartheid repression, those photographing or filming were often targeted by the regime. Security forces regularly exposed films, confiscated equipment, conducted raids, and banned publications, as well as people. For example, photographer Sam Nzima was harassed by police and placed under house arrest for months following the publication of his iconic photo of the dying 13-year-old Hector Pieterson who was shot by police during the youth uprising on June 16, 1976. The photo not only fueled the liberation movement within South Africa, but also galvanized stronger international condemnation of apartheid. Apartheid Minister Stoffel Botha even referred to those documenting what was unfolding in the country as "media terrorists."

While there have been attempts to deny or downplay apartheid, including from the now late last apartheid president F. W. de Klerk, systemic denial has not been possible owing to the evidence available. This underscores the role of documentation in defending truth, even if incomplete.

What would have happened if the apartheid regime had claimed that photographs like Nzima’s were faked or AI generated? Would this have created doubt for the audiences who saw it, impacting international support for South Africa’s liberation struggle? Today these questions are not rhetorical, owing to the emergence of generative AI.

To be sure for most of the world, the saying, “The camera never lies” has never been true. Visual media was vital to the Nazi regime's propaganda efforts. Before that, it played “a critical role in propagating colonialist myths about Africa,” with colonial states using photographic imagery to cement white supremacy. It would also become a tool for apartheid in South Africa, used to not only legitimize and validate itself, but to also attempt to shape global perceptions of what was happening in the country.

But the story did not end there. Visual media would also become a tool for liberation movements in South Africa and beyond, because documentation impacts how the world is perceived, meaning is made, and reality is verified.

For example, Human Rights Watch recently used geolocated images to verify the Israeli military’s unlawful use of white phosphorus, a highly reactive chemical which ignites when exposed to oxygen, in residential areas in Lebanon. This offers a pathway for accountability in the future. Similarly, the Syrian Archive, which tracks and preserves videos of war crimes in Syria, has used documentation to pursue accountability for the deadly use of chemical weapons in the country.

Documentation is critical in the pursuit of justice, as well as the need to preserve the past to confirm reality. Not only for these worthy ideals, but also so that those who are left to pick up the pieces know that their experiences of injustices are documented, even in the face of denial and propaganda aimed at persuading people otherwise.

Of course the risks and harms are heightened in conflict situations, which does not need to be inevitable. For example, Meta’s Oversight Board recently called for new rules on how deceptive AI content is managed by the platform to enable users to distinguish between what is real and fake. This follows Meta’s failure to appropriately designate an AI-generated video that purported to show significant damage caused by Iranian soldiers in Haifa, Israel. While the board’s recommendations are not binding, should Meta fail to urgently implement these, it will be yet another example of a platform knowing how to address harms but failing to do so. This must change.

To this end, pushing back against the assault on verifiable reality is a crucial undertaking. This includes protecting people's ability to safely document and preserve their documentation; accessible and effective detection tools, alongside transparency for AI-generated content; and democratic policies, laws, and regulations that center human rights considerations.

As history has repeatedly shown us, secrecy is a shield that protects injustice and emboldens bad actors. So, bearing witness, exposing truth, and insisting on justice remains as important now as it was for South Africa’s liberation movement and beyond— even in the age of generative AI.

Dear Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche,

I am writing to formally submit my application to your newly established federal “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for compensation in the form of a cash payment for damages incurred at the hands of the United States government.

As you stated while announcing President Trump’s new $1.776 billion fund, “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”

Todd, if I may, I saw your former client — President Trump, for whom you previously provided legal representation — backed you up, saying, “This is reimbursing people who were horribly treated.”

Additionally, Todd, I read an Associated Press report noting that during congressional testimony you stated that you “wouldn’t rule out the possibility that rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6 would be eligible for fund payouts.” After hearing your remarkably broad interpretation of governmental victimization, I felt compelled to share with you what the government has done to me and my family by writing the letter below — which reveals several forms of government abuse my family and I have endured which, while you may not find as severe as the temporary loss of access to the U.S. Capitol experienced by individuals convicted of felonies related to January 6, nonetheless caused considerable hardship for us.

I was initially reassured that my request was reasonable after learning that Adam Johnson — best known for carrying Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern through the Capitol during the January 6 attack — is reportedly considering a claim of up to $5 million himself.

However, after learning that Brandon Fellows — another January 6 defendant pardoned by President Trump — reportedly plans to seek $30 million from the fund, including $21.5 million for what he described as “wrongful imprisonment,” I realized that the harms experienced by my family and me may in fact fall closer to Mr. Fellows’s compensation range.

So, after reviewing your department’s stated principles, apparent standards, and anticipated applicant pool, I believe I am highly qualified for compensation and would like to make a modest request of $30 million.

In fact, Todd, I believe I possess two major qualifications that should place me among the strongest candidates for compensation, which I will detail below.

Claim One: Descendant of Enslaved People

First, since this appears to function as a reparations program for people harmed by state injustice, I should begin by saying that I come from a family with a long legacy of being brutalized by the United States. And if you think the January 6 defendants have a compelling claim for compensation due to governmental mistreatment, wait until you hear about this historical episode called slavery.

My great-great-grandparents, Laura and Thomas Lenoir, were enslaved in Marion County, Mississippi, and spent their lives laboring without compensation in a nation loudly proclaiming “liberty” while designating Black people as property. After decades spent tracing our family history, my father recently discovered the very plantation where they were enslaved— a breakthrough that finally allowed our family to identify the precise location where generations of uncompensated labor helped build this country’s wealth.

My ancestors worked this land they did not own, built wealth they could not keep, and endured violence they could not legally resist. No compensation was ever provided for the stolen labor, stolen children, stolen wages, stolen land, stolen futures, or the generations of poverty and discrimination that followed emancipation. Stories of Laura’s beatings and brutal treatment have been passed down through my family for generations.

In explaining why she believed January 6 defendants deserved compensation, Rachel Powell — who prosecutors identified as one of the first rioters to breach Capitol grounds and who was filmed using a battering ram to smash a Capitol window — recently stated: “We endured a lot. Our lives are still not the same. I don’t know what kind of price you can put on that.”

Todd, I must admit I found Ms. Powell’s reflections unexpectedly relatable. Indeed, many descendants of slavery have similarly struggled to determine what monetary figure might adequately compensate for generations of forced labor and legally sanctioned terror.

For many years, I was informed that reparations for descendants of slavery were unrealistic, unaffordable, divisive, or simply impossible. Republican and Democratic leaders alike repeatedly explained that while slavery was unfortunate, there was no practical mechanism for compensating descendants in the present day. However, your department’s new fund has helped me understand that no sum of money is too large for the government to produce once it decides that a great injustice has been perpetrated.

And then there is the symbolism of the fund’s exact amount — $1.776 billion — which is especially moving. President Trump, with his trademark subtlety and keen sense of gravitas, must have chosen this specific figure for providing reparations to people claiming mistreatment by the government as a fitting tribute to a nation founded by those who declared liberty for all in 1776 while simultaneously enslaving and brutalizing Black people.

Claim Two: My Arrest at a Capitol Building During Political Protest

My second major qualification is that, like many of the fund’s anticipated beneficiaries who stormed the capitol building on January 6, I was also arrested at a capitol building during a political protest.

In 2012, Washington state announced a special legislative session to determine how to slash education and healthcare budgets by some $2 Billion during the aftermath of the Great Recession. At the time, I was helping organize with the Social Equity Educators (SEE), a group of educators fighting against austerity and for educational justice.

We joined a much larger mass protest at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia to oppose billions of dollars in cuts to public services. Just before lawmakers gaveled in the special budget cutting session inside the House Ways and Means Committee meeting room, several of us managed to enter the chamber before they locked the door to the many protestors surrounding the building. The moment the session began, we mic-checked the room and read aloud the Washington State Constitution language that explicitly specifies funding education is the “paramount duty” of the state, and we declared therefore the state not only had a moral obligation but also a legal obligation to fully fund public education.

After finishing the statement, I produced a pair of plastic handcuffs I got at the dollar store and invited the legislators into my custody for what I announced was citizen’s arrest.

As I approached the legislators’ benches carrying self-made citizen’s arrest warrants to issue to each member, a police officer apparently arrived at a somewhat different interpretation of the law than I had. In an astonishing twist, he arrested me instead of the legislators.

He grabbed my arm, forced it behind my back, and cinched the handcuffs tightly around my wrists. Officers then moved me into a back room while they attempted to figure out how to remove me from the building as hundreds of protesters outside chanted, “Let the teacher go!”

Eventually, police whisked me out and pushed me into the back of a squad car and repeatedly questioned me about my actions even after I informed them that I wished to speak only in the presence of legal counsel. I was transported to a nearby jail, had my mugshot taken, ordered to exchange my clothes for a jail-issued orange jumpsuit, and placed in a jail cell with several other people for the evening.

While I was in jail, unbeknownst to me, my students at Garfield High School created a Facebook page titled “Free Mr. Hagopian.” When I returned to school the next day, students had changed the page into “Seattle Student Walkout for Education.”

Within twenty-four hours of my arrest, more than 500 Garfield students organized a mass walkout protesting the education cuts, carrying signs reading “Fund Our Future” and chanting, “We’re the future of our nation, no more cuts to education!” Students later formed a coalition called Students of Washington for Change to pressure the legislature through protests and letter-writing campaigns.

Importantly, Todd, not long afterward the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the legislature actually was violating the constitution in what became known as the McCleary decision, so I trust that my legal vindication strengthens my application considerably. And if generations of slavery fall short in qualifying me for compensation, I trust my arrest at a capitol while protesting government lawbreaking will place me in strong standing under your department’s standards.

A Possible Weakness in My Application

Now Todd, in the interest of full transparency, I should acknowledge one possible weakness in my case. The Department of Justice fact sheet explaining your fund notes that “Claims are awarded on a case-by-case basis, and the Commissioners must consider a claimant’s personal conduct and character when making a determination.”

I must admit, Todd, this language gave me some pause.

While I was arrested at a capitol building during a large political protest — something I understand may weigh heavily in my favor given your department’s apparent sympathy for January 6 defendants — I did not use a battering ram to breach the Capitol building, assault police officers, carry Confederate flags through the halls of government, or attempt to overturn the results of a presidential election.

In retrospect, I recognize this may complicate my claim.

Still, I would respectfully submit that my application remains highly competitive. Unlike many January 6 defendants, when I protested at a capitol, the court later ruled that the government I was protesting had actually broken the law.

Instructions for Disbursement of Funds

Todd, thank you for taking the time to read and consider my formal application for compensation from the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

Once my claim has been approved, you may issue a direct payment in the form of a contribution to Where I Got My Name: Down in Mississippi — a documentary film project about my father discovering the plantation where our family had been enslaved and our journey to Mississippi to recover our family’s history — or to Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project, organizations that have spent decades supporting honest education about the history of this country and the people who were truly “horribly treated” by their government (as President Trump put it).

Todd, I appreciate your department’s newfound commitment to reparative justice, and I look forward to receiving confirmation of my $30 million award soon.

Sincerely,

Jesse Hagopian

Although the 2026 midterm elections present the most immediate opportunity for Democrats to capitalize on widespread public discontent with the current Republican-controlled Congress, unofficial preparation for the 2028 presidential race has already started to take shape.

Gavin Newsom is rallying Democrats in Texas; Josh Shapiro is flexing his battleground state bona fides across Pennsylvania; Pete Buttigieg is headlining town halls in Iowa; while Ro Khanna and AOC are jockeying to consolidate the progressive lane.

Whatever their differences on policy and posture, these candidates share a common blind spot: they are not talking nearly enough about Russell Vought.

Whether we’re recounting the Department of Government Efficiency’s infiltration of the federal government or tracking the day-to-day material harms created by Trump administration policymaking, RDP has urgently sought to classify Vought as Trump 2.0’s top villain.

Democrats, however, have badly underinvested in making Vought as infamous as Elon Musk, his former DOGE co-lead. Our Kenny Stancil recently examined this reality in a Talking Points Memo op-ed, where he observed that:

“Democrats sent 478 unique emails mentioning Musk from January 27 to March 31, 2025—including 91 sent during the week of January 31 to February 7, the zenith of Musk’s D.C. rampage when DOGE infiltrated the Treasury Department and shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development. In comparison, Democrats mentioned Vought in just 28 emails between October 1 and November 12, 2025, even as the OMB director used the government shutdown to intensify his longstanding efforts to gut federal agencies and block the disbursement of congressionally appropriated funds [...] In all, Democratic lawmakers mentioned Vought in just 78 e-newsletters sent between January 20, 2025 and April 30, 2026. Musk, by contrast, was invoked in 858 emails during the same period—11 times more often.”

The ambitious politicians quietly auditioning for the Democratic presidential nomination have no reason to continue making this mistake. Any candidate serious about their presidential bid has both a strategic and moral imperative to build a coherent narrative against Vought—the main engineer behind the GOP’s government power grab.

Why Vought?

The case for candidates to make Vought a central villain in their 2028 campaigns is not merely because he deserves the attention. It’s also a political layup hiding in plain sight.

Presidential campaigns are, at their core, exercises in narrative construction. The most durable campaigns provide a compelling explanation of what went wrong and—most importantly—who’s at fault. FDR had his “economic royalists;” Obama had the financial industry that cratered the economy; and Biden had the chaotic Trump 1.0 administration and its lethal mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis.

The 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will need a similarly coherent villain. Vought embodies that role more completely than any other figure in the Trump administration, including Trump himself.

What makes Vought so uniquely suited for this role is his position as both the connective tissue between Trump’s two terms and the architect of a right-wing political project that will outlast Trump. Vought was a principal architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for restructuring the executive branch around (Trump’s) unchecked presidential power. Vought’s fingerprints are on the document’s most radical chapters, including the one laying out a strategy to dismantle the administrative state. When Trump is gone, the devastation Vought wrought—gutted agencies, traumatized civil servants, impounded funds, weakened congressional oversight—will remain.

The 2028 Democratic nominee will be running, in part, on a platform of de-Trumpification and pro-democracy reconstruction. To make that transformative project tangible, voters need to understand what was destroyed, how systematically it was destroyed, and by whom. Vought is the answer to all three questions.

Moreover, the Republican nominee will be able to point to the fact that they are (presumably!) not Trump and seek to distance themselves from Trump. But Vought, the glue that binds each of the disparate elements of the GOP together, and Voughtism will still be around. The Republican party is not going to disavow corporate funded right wing think tanks, Christian nationalism, or boring but incredibly powerful white guys. Vought and Voughtism, unlike Trump, will not be disavowed.

The Record Is There. Use It

One advantage that 2028 candidates have over their counterparts in prior cycles is that the evidence against Vought is not abstract or speculative; it is documented, voluminous, and in many cases already adjudicated as illegal.

Consider the impoundment campaign alone. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Government Accountability Office has identified at least six instances in which the administration committed clear violations of the Impoundment Control Act—the post-Nixon law passed specifically to prevent presidents from unilaterally withholding congressionally approved spending.

When Vought isn’t handwaving away these violations as “non-events with no consequence,” he’s blatantly lying to the American public about his illegal activity. At his April 2026 Senate Budget Committee testimony, Vought flatly denied having impounded any funds.

2028 hopefuls should be rallying around the negative consequences of Vought’s efforts to veto socially useful spending and harm government workers:

• At least $410 billion in funding owed to communities nationwide has been blocked or delayed under Vought’s watch.
• There are 278,000 fewer federal civil servants than there were at the start of Trump’s second term.
• Medicaid payment portals in at least 20 states went dark in the opening weeks of the administration’s funding freeze, leaving doctors and hospitals unable to access reimbursement systems.
• NOAA’s capacity to warn communities about severe weather has been degraded—a fact with life-and-death implications that any candidate running in a hurricane- or tornado-prone state would be wise to amplify.

None of this is the product of partisan gridlock or legislative failure. It is the deliberate handiwork of one man operating with a coherent ideological agenda, largely outside public view. Presidential campaigns exist to bring that kind of structural harm into public view.

Another aspect of Vought’s record that has direct implications for 2028 campaign strategy is what historian Colin Gordon calls “vindictive federalism:” the systematic withholding of federal funds from Democratic-led states and cities as a coercive tool to force compliance with the administration’s agenda. Our Aya Dardari explores this topic in detail in a new report.

This is not a peripheral concern for governors like Newsom or Shapiro. It is a direct attack on their executive authority and their constituents’ livelihoods. When Vought’s OMB freezes Medicaid reimbursements in California, or holds up SNAP payments in Pennsylvania, he isn’t engaging in abstract federal policy disputes. Vought’s actions inflict tangible harm upon real communities, which governors eyeing a 2028 run are well-positioned to document, personalize, and prosecute politically.

Any governor in the field should be holding press conferences that connect Vought’s funding maneuvers to closed roads, delayed medical treatments, and disrupted social services in their states. The argument writes itself: this is what a shadow president operating without accountability looks like, and this is what a Democratic administration will undo.

Candidates Need to Start Building an Anti-Vought Narrative Now

The 2026 midterms will consume most of the political oxygen between now and the formal start of the 2028 presidential race. But the pre-campaign period is precisely when narratives get built. Voters aren’t introduced to presidential candidates fresh in a general election; they encounter them having already absorbed years of framing and counter-framing about the state of the country.

The framing that will serve Democrats best in 2028 is one that identifies the damage, names the responsible party, and makes a credible case for restoration—and Vought gives the 2028 field everything they need to construct that framing:

• a paper trail of illegal acts;
• a documented theory of unlimited executive power;
• a catalog of concrete harms affecting voters across the country;
• and an extremist ideological agenda that the majority of Americans do not share.

The political process for building that case is not glamorous. It requires sustained attention to a man who is deliberately uncharismatic and strategically obscure. It also requires candidates to make the OMB directorship feel as urgent as any Cabinet post with a higher public profile.

But the alternative—arriving at the 2028 general election without having made Russell Vought a known, notorious quantity—is a gift to the Republican Party and the man who has spent decades reshaping the federal government in ways that no single election can easily reverse.

The 2028 Democratic nominee will be asking voters to believe that government can work for them again. The most compelling version of that argument starts with explaining, in detail, who broke it.

Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.

In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.

The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.

The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.

But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.

The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.

Their efforts worked; just ten years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:

“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)

The railroad corporations claimed that because they were taxed at different rates on property they owned in Santa Clara and Santa Ana counties in California, they were “persons” being denied the “equal protection of the law.” The Court determined that the California constitution already dealt with tax issues like that, giving the railroad the relief they wanted, but there was no federal action at all.

However, the lie about corporate personhood buried in the headnote took root and lives on to this day. For example, yesterday afternoon I asked DuckDuckGo’s AI the question:

“Who won the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court decision?”

And the answer I got back was:

“The Southern Pacific Railroad Company won the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, affirming that corporations are considered ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

None of that is true, but it was nonetheless the basis of the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision written by Lewis Powell himself (of “Powell Memo” fame), claiming that because corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment right to free speech — they could spend big bucks to swing elections. In that decision, the Court majority footnoted:

“It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U. S. 578 (1896).”

Because corporations don’t have mouths to speak with, Powell reasoned, their money served the same purpose. So they could “speak” freely with millions thrown into elections, corrupting our democracy to their benefit and our detriment.

Two years earlier, in Buckley v Valeo, the Court had struck down the 1970s campaign contribution limits Congress put into law after the Nixon bribery scandals. They ruled that wealthy Senator James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) could use his own money to finance his election campaign because his money was functionally the same thing as his First Amendment-protected free speech.

Which led straight to Clarence Thomas — the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, then on the take from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting rightwing billionaire — to cast the deciding vote in Citizens United.

That bizarre decision blew up hundreds of campaign finance and other good-government laws, claiming that there should be virtually no limits on the money morbidly rich individuals, corporations, and even foreign entities could pour into US elections.

Clarence Thomas even cited the Bellotti case and, thus, its reference to Santa Clara to justify handing our democratic processes over to the richest people and biggest companies in the nation.

And now we’ve arrived at terminal insanity. As Reuters reported on Tuesday:

“A judge in Delaware, where many big U.S. companies are incorporated, ruled on Tuesday that a small town that allows corporations to vote in municipal elections was not violating the state’s constitution.
“Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing companies and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.”

More corporations are incorporated in Delaware than any other state in the nation because of that state’s lax corporate laws and low corporate taxes: there are more corporations in the state than people.

And now they can vote.

I wrote Who Stole the American Dream? to wake people up to the corruption of our democracy by the rich and powerful, particularly the corporate “artificial beings” that keep buying off judges and politicians because of corrupt Supreme Court cases citing that corrupt headnote, starting with Santa Clara and then going to Covington and then straight-lined to Bellotti and Citizens United.

The entire thing is a fraud, a 140-year-long scam, as knowledgeable legislators like Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and Elizabeth Warren will tell you in a New York minute.

And it needs to be overturned.

There are a few ways to do that, the most effective being a constitutional amendment, but reorganizing the Supreme Court and even strong legislation can take a bite out of it. I detail them all in the book, and good government groups like Move to Amend and Public Citizen have been on this case for years.

The situation, after all, has become so bad that I suggested in my book Rebooting the American Dream (which Bernie read from on the floor of the Senate in his famous filibuster) that members of Congress should be required to wear NASCAR-style patches to let folks know which corporations are “sponsoring” them.

If we don’t get active and take back our democracy for humans, corporations may one day vote one of themselves into office and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court will probably simply nod along.

Give Dangerous Donald credit. Coming off the floor of his 2020 defeat, under several federal and state indictments, a convicted felon, accused by over sixty women of sexual abuse or worse, his endorsed candidates having lost in the 2022 elections, the Trump business brand wilting along with his polls, Trump displayed more vengeful energy and cunning than the entire feeble, defeatist Democratic Party apparatus. He roared back against all odds in 2024 as an elected dictator to implement his declaration that he “can do whatever I want as president.”

Trump’s wrecking, endangering, and weakening of America worsens by the day, as he doubles down and calls his critics “deranged,” “demented,” “wackos,” “weak,” “low-IQ,” “crazy,” and “treasonous.” Moreover, his vicious expletives expand by the day.

However, the tide is finally turning against the failed gambling Czar and Netanyahu dittohead. Trump’s relentless greed is starting to undermine his dwindling support, despite his control of the Republican primaries. The headlines tell the story of his decline, and not just in the polls, with approval ratings down to 35%. The majority of Americans polled—nearing 60%—want him impeached and removed from office. This demand comes without the backing of the Democratic Party leadership, still skittish about mounting an Impeachment Drive. The case for Impeachment is aided and abetted daily by Trump’s outrages.

Let’s go to the revealing Headlines:

“Millions are Expected to Lose ACA Coverage” (Washington Post, May 20, 2026).

Due to Trump’s GOP ending subsidies.

“Fast-Moving Ebola Outbreak May Prove Difficult to Contain” (Washington Post, May 20, 2026). “People Will Die of Ebola Because of U.S. Cuts to Global Health” (New York Times, May 22, 2026).

Significantly due to Trump cutting USAID’s funding, monitoring, and disbanding critical expert teams.

“Mosque killings follow rise in anti-Islam voices” (Washington Post, May 20, 2026).

Led by chief Islamophobe, Donald Trump, from Day One in 2017.

“Trump’s Deal with Trump,” and “Prison to Pardons to Payouts: Rioters Rejoice” (New York Times, May 21, 2026). “I.R.S. Ordered to Drop Audits Against Trump as Part of Payout Deal” (New York Times, May 20, 2026).

Trump uses the government to reward his lawless supporters and wants to put himself above the law.

“Trump’s War is Punishing the Working Class” (New York Times, May 18, 2026).

Trump cares far more about the super-rich than the working class.

“EPA Wants to Repeal Limits on ‘Forever Chemicals’ in drinking water” (Washington Post, May 19, 2026), “Coal’s Comeback Fouls the Air With Resurgent Levels of Toxic Mercury” New York Times, May 13, 2026), “Chemical Board That Trump Wants to Remove Warns on Disaster Rules’ Rollback” (New York Times, May 18, 2026).

While a deadly chemical spill in California forces evacuation of 50,000 residents in Orange County.

“Trump Ramps UP Lawlessness on the Seas” (Washington Post, May 5, 2026).

Speaks for itself.

Now comes the headline, “A tough week for Trump on Capitol Hill, as Republicans deal him setbacks” (Washington Post, May 23, 2026) that must worry Trump. The $1.8 billion slush fund for violent, convicted felons and immunity for Trump and his extended family from IRS audits and enforcement proved too much for Trump lackey Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD). At the same time, Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a crook impeached by his own Party in the Texas House, an adulterer under suit by his wife for divorce (see the Post article of May 19, 2026) over former judge, Sen. John Cornyn, popular with the Senate GOP. Earlier, Trump came out against Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), helping Cassidy lose the primary. To Thune and allies, a president coming out against his own incumbents is treachery.

So, the water in the Senate GOP’s cauldron may be starting to boil. They know about Nixon’s experience in 1974 coming off winning 49 out of 50 states in the 1972 election. With Nixon’s polls sinking after the Watergate scandal (a quaintly modest one-time crime, compared to Trump’s hundreds of continuing scandals), the Congressional GOP saw itself sinking in the 1974 elections. A delegation of GOP Senators went to the White House and told Nixon, “Mr. President, your time is up.” Nixon resigned days later.

One can envision something similar today. Trump is an unstable lame duck outlaw, including violating congressional authorities. Republicans have to face the voters in November. They are likely to lose the House. The Senate has 20 Republican Senators up for election compared to only 12 Democrats. They have a three-vote margin now. Trump, given his economy, his chosen wars, his unrestrained greed and self-enrichment, is making prospects of a Democratic win in the Senate more possible.

Had the Democrats not ceded half the states (the red states) to the Republicans decades ago, leaving behind remnants of their organized presence, almost all the Republican Senators running this year could be at risk. Instead, only about six have competitive races—thank you, obtuse Democratic Party.

In any event, most politicians, however servile they may have been to a President, prefer saving their own political skins to falling on their swords for an unpopular president losing his cognitive grip and voter sensitivity by the day. (See the April 30, 2026 statement from medical professionals in the Congressional Record – “Medical Concerns About President Donald J. Trump and His Fitness For Office.” Do you know any other president who would say “I don’t care about the financial condition of Americans” in the midst of surging inflation, rising food, health care, rental, and gasoline prices? A president who is using the White House to massively enrich himself and his family. (See Cashing in on the presidency: here).

Unless Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer open the Party to input from labor and advocacy groups to help sharpen a stronger, authentically advanced agenda (Compact for America, anyone?), the Democrats may eke out a 51 to 49 win, with erratic John Fetterman (D-PA) playing the role of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) as the swing vote. This will give the tie-breaking power to Vice President J.D. Vance.

One slim ray of hope: The Washington Post reported on May 17, 2026, that “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has directed the chamber’s Democratic policy committee to host listening sessions with members, with voters and with advocacy groups to inform a party-wide agenda…”

Even if you don’t believe Jeffries, rush through that open door with your proposals, as we will with the recommendations of 24 civic leaders (see winningamerica.net). My winning get-out-the-vote agenda is there as well. (See my column: “Somersaulting Voters: Stopping Rabid Gerrymandering,” May 15, 2026).

Contact Rep. Hakeem Jeffries – https://jeffries.house.gov/ / 202-225-5936.

Today, like yesterday, I wake up and decide to make the world a better place.

I know, I know. There are over 8 billion people living on Earth. There are more places than any one of us will ever see, and more cultures than we will ever understand. How could a single person make an impact? How could a single person change the world for the better?

Many people would say it’s impossible. And at barely 5’2”, I’m glaringly aware of my literal smallness. As an astrophysicist, I know that I take up only about 10-83 times the volume of the observable Universe: a number so small I can’t wrap my head around it. The closest comparison I can muster is that I’m about the size of an atom in the scale of the solar system. And even then, I’d still be a bit smaller.

But none of that matters. My goal is still entirely within reach. That’s something that astrophysics has also taught me: small forces can make big changes.

The proof is under our feet. Today, Earth returns to the point in the solar system where it landed 365.24 days—almost, but not quite. Almost imperceptibly, it overshoots.

This cascade of small influences may, at first glance, go unnoticed. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the trajectory of the entire planet budges.

At first glance, the Earth’s motion may appear to be shaped entirely by a single source: its most powerful influence, the Sun. But the Earth-Sun system is not static. Instead, our planet is pulled in many directions by innumerable small forces.

Its motion is shaped by the other seven planets in our solar system, each hundreds of millions of miles away. Those massive planetary neighbors had their motion fundamentally shaped by the tugs of innumerable ancient asteroids in the early solar system. Those, in turn, were shaped by the influence of distant passing stars—whose own trajectories were altered by the collective impact of stars, gas, and dark matter across the Milky Way.

This cascade of small influences may, at first glance, go unnoticed. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the trajectory of the entire planet budges. The direction of our world is determined by countless infinitesimal forces compounding to move not only mountains, but entire planets.

Just as the Earth’s motion is shaped by the sum of small forces, the direction of humanity is shaped by the sum of small choices that people make every day. We often think that making an impact looks like a single person conveying their idea to the public at large, proclaiming from a platform. Sometimes, yes, change does require a spark, the one person who says something. But the true power in these proclamations comes not from their splash, but from the ripples that they create. And a series of small ripples can create waves.

Every small decision, every conversation, launches another ripple. Rosa Parks helped ignite the Civil Rights movement by refusing to move from her seat on a bus. The #MeToo movement arose from a single conversation in which a woman was deeply affected by a young girl’s experience with abuse. The invention of MRI began as a scribble on the back of a napkin.

Every small decision, every conversation, launches another ripple.

It may sometimes seem as if the very strongest forces — or the very loudest voices — are the only ones that “matter.” Some forces, some voices, do have a disproportionate reach. In the enormity of the world, and of our Universe, we may feel small.

Yet the sum of small forces has, on Earth, made all the difference: subtly shifting the planet’s tilt and its path to produce Earth’s long-term climate cycles, dictate the timing of ice ages, and shape how life emerged and adapted on our planet. The modest tugs of the planets and of the moon, together with the cascading influence of the Milky Way environment, produce the conditions necessary for life as we know it on Earth.

Meaningful impact need not be bold and flashy. Our small, everyday choices seed change. Intentionally or not, in ways obvious or not, these decisions compound to budge the trajectory of our world.

So today I will treat the cashier at my grocery store with kindness. I will take the time to ask my neighbor about their day, and to listen with care. I will check in on friends and family members. I will tell the people I look up to how much I admire them, and why. In the flurry of headlines, apps, and work duties vying for my attention, I will choose compassion and intention.

None of us is helpless. Our actions—as well as the actions we don't take—make a real, tangible impact. So, ask yourself: in which direction will you push the world today?

These days, most of Havana’s streets are fairly empty of cars, but full of people walking or riding bicycles, electric bikes, electric “tricycles,” or scooters. Trash has piled up on most corners where regular pick-up has become impossible given that the garbage trucks have no gasoline. The average conversation starts off with comparing who’s gone the longest without electricity. The sympathy flows, as you exchange stories of what else you are going without: water, gas, food, medicine, transportation. People list the family members they haven’t been able to see and the medical appointments they’ve missed. Inevitably, someone will say better days are coming—“because they have to”—and to keep moving forward.

This week alone, the US Department of Justice indicted Raul Castro, the former head of state, who’s now 94 years old and largely out of public life. In addition, the Supreme Court gave a green light to Cuban-American-owned companies with property claims in Cuba from 67 years ago to sue tourist industry actors who “profited” from that land. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to grow more and more publicly agitated with Cuba’s refusal to bow to his demands, and Trump’s consistent incoherence shows an absolute lack of any clear policy position towards Cuba, aside from one that may economically benefit him and/or his family.

The indictment of Castro is a page taken from Trump’s playbook on Venezuela from earlier this year. There, the administration indicted a sitting head of state, Nicolas Maduro, as a legal pretext for a military intervention, which was labelled an “emergency” and thus not an act of war that would require Congressional approval. The administration staged a geopolitical coup d’état involving international kidnapping, acts of war in plain violation of international law and the U.N. Charter, and then imprisoned that leader as a message to the world of what happens to those who defy US interests. Such indictments serve as purportedly fixed legal fictions for shifting political pretexts. In Venezuela it was supposedly the state’s support for criminal enterprises and gangs, which was the justification for the Trump administration’s stated reason for the extrajudicial killing of nearly 200 civilians in piracy actions in the Caribbean. Once Maduro was kidnapped and jailed, the administration has stopped talking gangs and narcotrafficking rings.

In Cuba, the Justice Department’s indictment of Raul Castro is a clear response to the political forces that commanded it. As the island nation is not complying rapidly enough to the changes demanded by Washington, the administration has escalated its threats, military preparations, and legal actions, albeit largely symbolic in nature.

Rubio’s Escalation of Threats as Campaign Messaging

For decades, Marco Rubio has pushed for privately what the Cuban-American community in south Florida has not achieved in nearly 70 years: to run Cuba’s political and economic system remotely from Miami and Washington. These remote “owners” of Cuba have driven and financed Rubio’s political career, leading to this moment where he is adamantly (though unsuccessfully) trying to sell the American public that Cuba is a national security threat while simultaneously telling Cubans that their government is too weak to protect them. That inherent contradiction and incoherence, long the basis of US policy towards Cuba, have never been more dangerous than at this moment when Rubio’s rage and blind ambition to cause widespread destruction is bolstered by Trump’s monarchical goals.

The contradictory discourse is present in nearly every aspect of Cuba policy. Just this week, Rubio issued an Orwellian statement in response to the ICE arrest of Adys Lastres Morera, the sister of the head of GAESA, a Cuban entity that is connected to large swaths of the Cuban economy. Rubio was right to point out that “[f]or far too long, the family members of terrorist organizations, repressive anti-American regimes and other bad actors . . . have been given a free pass to enjoy the privileges of living in the United States,” but the United States also has a long tradition of granting sanctuary to terrorists, dictators, and war criminals. In particular, Latin American leaders, generals, and intelligence operatives that have long done the US bidding in propping up violent regimes have been granted refuge in south Florida, the home of Rubio and other elected officials who have promoted violence over diplomacy.

Yet what makes international cooperation, collaboration, and survival possible is not just insisting upon respect for international law and human rights by all governments, but strengthening their ability to do so through dialogue and diplomacy. The Trump-Rubio administration has clearly not been serious about using diplomacy to solve global conflicts, and that holds true in Cuba as well. The administration has tried to identify potential “opposition” I Cuba or political leaders it can “work with” like Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. Real US diplomacy looks quite different. Twelve years ago, it brought to Cuba a boom of economic activity, a thriving private sector, better financed public institutions, and riveting cultural exchanges for over a million US residents who found in Cuba a rich cultural, musical, artistic, and academic partner.

Trump and Rubio, though they might articulate the same goals, have different ulterior motives. Their goal is not, and has never been, economic opportunity for Cubans. Instead, they want an economic boon for Cuban-Americans aching to exert political and economic control over a land many have never even visited. Although Florida no longer plays a significant electoral role in US-Cuba policy, Rubio’s recent video talking to the Cuban people—and his messaging in general in escalating threats and aggression towards Cuba—is clearly intended to rally his base. What has caused widespread anxiety and fear among millions in Cuba has nevertheless excited his political base in south Florida.

Inside Cuba

These days in Havana, Cubans are experiencing a duality that has existed for generations who have lived under the threat of US military aggression and the daily reality of economic warfare. Cubans are exhausted. They are increasingly anxious and have reached the bottom of the well of hope. There is a saying that the last thing you lose is hope, meaning it is what you hold on to until the very end. Cubans are at the very end of their ability to see a hopeful future.

I get asked questions daily. Should I take my kids to a shelter? Will the United States bomb Havana? Where is it safe to go? Why don’t US citizens stop their government?

Cubans are experts at survival, and that’s exactly what they continue to do. As US Southern Command sends the aircraft carrier Nimitz into Caribbean waters, Cubans continue to carry on with daily life like they have done decade after decade. Most days, those around me look for an electric tricycle to take them to work or their child to school or have added a child seat to their bicycles. Cars that run on gasoline have become what one of my friends calls “garage adornments.”

Given the daily threat of military intervention and the four-month long oil blockade, activities like sleep have become a luxury. Many families cook or wash clothes at 3:00 a.m. when they get 1-2 hours of electricity. My friend sleeps on the floor with her son near the front door where air drafts can keep them cool in the sweltering heat and humidity. Most of us go without water for days at a time because lack of electricity makes pumping and distributing water impossible. Another dear friend went 35 days with no water while she, her mother, and her toddler spent weeks traveling from house to house bathing and washing clothes. Cooking and cleaning become infinitely more difficult with no water, gas, or electricity. Some daycare centers use coal to cook lunch for undernourished children.

While we live under the perpetual threat of US military aggression, children continue to play in the street with sticks and deflated balls, families continue to find ways to get to work and buy food, and the deep spiritual and religious traditions that sustain many Cubans are turned to over and over again. War has a name and a face. It’s not just a vague “government.” Here there are millions of people who owe the United States nothing and instead have only demanded to live in peace, in their homeland, however flawed it may be.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) kicked off a storm when she said in a podcast interview last week that a person cannot “earn” a billion dollars.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by saying that the statement was “bizarrely foolish” and then pointed to the worst possible example he could think of to counter Ocasio-Cortez’s point: mega-billionaire Elon Musk.

In the eyes of the US government, and specifically the IRS, there’s no question about it. Elon Musk did not “earn” his wealth. Otherwise, he’d be paying a tax rate at least 17 times greater than he is—and generating a tax bill bigger than the GDP of Nevada.

Unless you’re immortal, Ocasio-Cortez is indeed correct that it’s impossible to earn a billion dollars.

The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.

But what if you are Elon Musk? How long would it you take then? A billion years to earn a billion dollars, and 800 billion years to earn $800 billion—so, 58 times longer than the existence of the known universe.

Now that’s bizarre.

The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.

Elon Musk—like Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Elison and many of the world’s other richest men—only “earns” $1 a year. He is what's known as a $1 CEO because he gets paid an annual salary of $1.

What most people don’t realize when we talk about wealth and wealth taxes is that we’re talking about two types of wealth. There’s earned wealth, which is when you get paid for you what you do (eg salaries, wages, etc). And then there’s collected wealth, which is when you get paid for what you own—eg dividends for owning stocks or rent money for owning real estate.

Most people primarily rely on earned wealth for a living. Billionaires on the other hand, their wealth is almost entirely collected wealth.

And that matters, because collected wealth tends to grow a lot faster than earned wealth, but more importantly, because governments tend to tax collected wealth a lot less than earned wealth.

In fact, billionaires very often deliberately reshuffle their wealth around into collected types of wealth specifically to underreport what they “earn” to the IRS and pay less income tax. It’s why Elon Musk can be the world’s richest man on an annual salary of $1. It’s why he and Jeff Bezos have been able to pay zero income taxes in some years while topping the Forbes richest people's list. It's also why Bezos was able to receive a family tax credit for families earning less than $100,000 a year.

But it gets even more bizarre.

Many billionaires aren’t just not earning much, they’re hopelessly in debt—apparently. Many of them are actually living off huge loans that they don’t expect to pay off in their lifetimes. It’s a scheme called “Buy, Borrow, Die.”

Taking their tax allergies to the extreme, rather than selling assets to get the money they need to actually pay for things, some billionaires take out loans against their assets instead. This way, they don’t have to pay the taxes that would have applied if they sold their assets, plus they get to hold on to the assets which can become worth even more over time. And because the money they get this way is technically loan money, it doesn’t count as earned income—and so they can continue to underreport their “earnings” to the IRS and underpay tax.

It might come as a shock to Sen Cruz, but many US billionaires, like his example Elon Musk, have done all they can to “earn” as little to none of their wealth, and some have even gone so far as to “indebt” their billions instead.

But why should we care about any of this?

Because it’s this two-tier tax system that gives special treatment to collected wealth over earned wealth that has allowed the extreme wealth of super-rich individuals to quadruple since the 1980s.

The rise of extreme wealth is directly linked to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt, and to people living shorter lives. A G20 report co-authored by winner of the Nobel prize for economics Joseph Stiglitz warns that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.

What makes wealth taxes so powerful—and so opposed by a vocal minority among the superrich—isn’t just the huge sums of public funds they can bring in. It’s that by specifically taxing collected wealth, wealth taxes directly challenge this two-tier tax system. It’s about protecting economies, people and planet from the harms of extreme wealth.

Whether you’re a wealth earner or a wealth collector, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.

By Ralph Nader May 29, 2026 Give Dangerous Donald credit. Coming off the floor of his 2020 defeat, under several federal and state indictments, a convicted felon, accused by over sixty women of sexual abuse or worse, his endorsed candidates having lost in the 2022 elections, the Trump business brand wilting along with his polls,…

Far-right leaders in the United States are fighting tooth and nail to eliminate rights for transgender people.

Many couch their claims in language like “protecting children” and “freedom of religion.” But buried beneath these rhetorical flourishes is another pernicious philosophy: that being transgender is a sin, and that the government should punish it.

Case in point: Conservative Christian organizations like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) and the Liberty Council are pushing the Supreme Court to allow states to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports.

In a press release defending ERLC’s position, interim president Gary Hollingsworth proclaimed: “We serve an infallible God. The same God who made the universe made humanity in His image with intentionality and purpose. He gave humanity two immutable genders, man and woman, as gifts reflecting His own nature.”

There are conflicting, even incompatible interpretations of the Bible. But for us, the consistent messages of love, care, humility, and equity shine brightly.

Meanwhile, at the state level, far-right evangelicals in Colorado recently secured enough signatures to put anti-trans legislation on the ballot. And in Idaho, due to pressure from conservative legislators and organizations, the state is poised to implement one of the most extreme anti-trans bathroom laws in the nation.

If all one read were these stories, it would appear that the Bible is unequivocal in its condemnation of gender expansiveness and that all of Christendom is unflinching in its interpretation of that scripture.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As scholars who have studied the Bible for decades, we believe transgender people—just like all people—are our sacred, precious, divinely cherished neighbors. There’s no reason that one narrow religious interpretation should be able to dictate policy and structure our community.

The author of Genesis writes that “male and female [God] created them” (1.27). While some point to this scripture as confirmation of a gender binary, others identify it as a rhetorical device known as a merism, used frequently throughout the Bible to describe an expansive concept. For example, in Genesis 1:1, the Bible describes making “the heavens and Earth.” But this is widely understood to represent the entire cosmos—stars, comets, planets, and beyond—not just the heavens and Earth. Later in Genesis, the Bible uses both “evening and morning” and “night and day” to represent an entire day—including dawn and dusk. Similarly, male and female do not exhaust the diversity of gender identities and sexualities, all of which God blesses as good.

Moreover, the work of many Biblical scholars such as Dr. Esther Brownsmith, Dr. Joseph Marchal, and Dr. Linn Marie Tonstad has critically improved and expanded Christian theological studies by demonstrating that, as Brownsmith recently said, “We can’t do Biblical scholarship without [transgender people].”

Brownsmith’s scholarship on nonbinary readings of Hebrew Bible figure Mordechai, Marchal’s work on ancient conceptions of gender in Paul’s letters, and Tonstad’s formulation of the Holy Trinity as a framework for considering gender expansively—and vice versa—are just a handful of recent examples in a rapidly expanding discipline of thinkers helping us read scripture in more rigorous ways.

As Christians, we believe that, as the scripture tells us, humanity is created in God’s image. Our glorious variety and multitude is reflective of God’s own limitlessness. Indeed, transgender people’s embodiments and expressions mirror God’s intentional and enduring refutation of definition, binaries, and subjective stability. And they offer us a precious gift—the ability to look beyond strict structures and appreciate humanity in all its diversity and complexity. So, too, as theologian Virginia Mollenkott suggests, because God created humanity in God’s own image, we might well speak of God as gender nonconforming or “omnigender,” the God of all genders and of none.

For some, the Bible mandates a strict gender binary, and that belief guides their participation in public life. However, that interpretation is not the only one—and hardly the only one rooted in history and theological tradition.

As Jesus proposed in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the question we must ask is twofold. First: who is my neighbor, whose rights I am obligated to affirm and defend? Second: Who is the one who proves neighborly, the one who acts in loving, compassionate, and just ways?

There’s no question: There are conflicting, even incompatible interpretations of the Bible. But for us, the consistent messages of love, care, humility, and equity shine brightly. To love the neighbor—including our trans family members, friends, coworkers, and congregants—means to advocate for that neighbor’s right to be; to love and be loved; and to enjoy a healthy, fulfilling life in dignity and safety.

Less than three weeks after President Donald Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” on Truth Social, representatives of the United States—the only country to ever deploy nuclear weapons on another country—took the mic at the United Nations headquarters to lecture the rest of the world about nuclear-weapons safety. As the US-Israeli war on Iran actively unravels 50 years of progress toward nuclear nonproliferation, this moment perfectly captured the backwardness of international nuclear policy.

From April 27 to May 22, representatives of over 200 countries and diplomatic organizations convened at the UN headquarters in New York City for the 11th review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Signed in 1970, the NPT remains the pièce de résistance of international nuclear policy, and poses three main rules: States that do not have nuclear weapons will not seek to acquire them; states that do possess nuclear weapons will commit to disarmament instead of engaging in arms races; and all states have the right to utilize nuclear energy. These conferences are held by the UN roughly every five years to ensure the treaty’s tenets are upheld and encourage debate on any possible updates.

This year’s conference, if not the NPT itself, was a farce from the beginning thanks to the United States and Israel. Within the first three hours of the first meeting on April 27, the United States condemned Iran—a country it was actively attacking—for pursuing peaceful enrichment of uranium, the right to which it is guaranteed under the third tenet of the NPT.

From that point on, the contradictions only became more embarrassing. The United Kingdom and France, two other nuclear-armed states, immediately joined the United States in condemning the representative of non-nuclear Iran who had just been elected a vice president of the conference.

When the Africa Group—composed of 54 African nations—used the NPT conference as a platform to call for a new nuclear-free zone for the Middle East, that should be seen as perhaps the most promising proposal to come out of the conference.

When they attacked Iran in February, the United States and Israel sent a clear message to the world that utterly extinguishes any legitimacy of the NPT: The treaty-defined right to peaceful enrichment is a myth, and nuclear-armed states like the United States and Israel will wage wars of aggression and destruction to ensure the nuclear balance of power remains in their favor.

This message is just a reiteration of what the world has known since the beginning of the War on Terror, if not before: As long as the United States is involved, diplomacy is dead. Colin Powell killed it with his speech to the UN Security Council about fictitious WMDs in Iraq. Barack Obama killed it by bombing and seizing $30 billion from Libya, which had already abolished its nuclear weapons program and signed the NPT. And now Donald Trump has killed it again by attacking Iran’s civilian infrastructure, including nuclear facilities which are protected under the NPT.

With the United States as the presiding power, treaties and territorial sovereignty can be torn up at any time. These are the exact political conditions that led a country like North Korea to avoid signing the NPT altogether and develop nuclear weapons. If there is no incentive of safety for following the rules, then it becomes perfectly rational to not follow them.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the United States-based nuclear watchdog that hosts the famous “Doomsday Clock,” quickly responded to the fact that the legitimacy of the NPT was disintegrating in real time at the UN. Before the conference ended, they published the bluntly titled report Iran’s Positions at the NPT Review Conference Are Rational. Ignoring Them Would Weaken the Treaty. With this report, the international nuclear experts at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are practically begging on their knees for the United States to adopt a nuclear policy that isn’t hellbent on illegal wars, mass punishment of civilians, and nullifying of international treaties.

There was good news at the NPT conference too. Although the illegal, bloodthirsty US-Israeli war on Iran has threatened the survival of the nonproliferation policy pushed by the UN, some non-nuclear states used the conference to propose more modest nuclear treaties that may ultimately prove to be more reliable.

In addition to the NPT, there are international treaties establishing “nuclear free zones” in five regions: Latin America and the Caribbean, signed in 1967; the South Pacific, signed in 1985; Southeast Asia, signed in 1995; Africa, signed in 1996; and Central Asia, signed in 2006. The Treaty of Tlatelolco, covering Latin America and the Caribbean, even predates the NPT by three years. These nuclear-free zones have arguably outperformed the NPT in producing nuclear-free outcomes in their respective sections of the globe.

Simply put, these treaties are underrated. Over the past 50 years, the United States has spread its nuclear arsenal to NATO allies including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. And just earlier this spring, Japan’s prime minister floated the possibility of hosting nuclear weapons on behalf of the United States too. Likewise, Russia stations nuclear weapons in its neighbor Belarus. This form of proliferation, dubbed “nuclear sharing,” is essentially a violation of the NPT—it puts nuclear weapons in states that otherwise wouldn’t have them. But while nuclear powers have destroyed the legitimacy of the NPT by engaging in nuclear sharing arms races, non-nuclear countries have shown real leadership on nuclear policy by establishing these nuclear-free zones that effectively and reliably curtail proliferation.

So when the Africa Group—composed of 54 African nations—used the NPT conference as a platform to call for a new nuclear-free zone for the Middle East, that should be seen as perhaps the most promising proposal to come out of the conference. With this suggestion, the Africa Group is stating the obvious: The United States and Israel, with their land-theft operation in Lebanon and their war of terror on Iran, are starting and escalating conflicts in the Middle East faster than the rest of the world can keep up with. The international community might as well try to keep nuclear weapons out of these conflicts.

There’s one problem with this proposal, and it’s not Iran’s alleged nuclear program.

Israel is reported to possess at least 90 nuclear warheads. Unlike Iran, Israel is not a cooperating party to the NPT, so its nuclear arsenal is not monitored by international watchdogs like the International Atomic Energy Agency. To this day, the United States does not acknowledge that Israel’s weapons exist at all.

A nuclear free zone in the Middle East will not be actualized any time soon because Israel is already violating it. But with this proposal the Africa Group is forcing the hand of the US and allies regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal. This isn’t an adversarial action at all; it’s a necessary, good-faith move toward nuclear policy that is honest and proven to work. That same week, 30 members of Congress signed a letter demanding the United States acknowledge Israel’s warheads.

Even as the United States falsely claims to be eliminating a nuclear threat in the Middle East, it is simultaneously creating a new nuclear threat by proposing to station warheads in Japan, escalating toward a new war with China. Every single one of these escalations brings the world closer not only to all-out nuclear war, but also to imperialist wars of aggression backed by nuclear arsenals, such as the imperialist wars on Iraq, Libya, and Iran.

In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a member of the Zionist parliament for the Likud party, warned that Iran may develop a nuclear bomb within three to five years. The United States, its media, and its allies have believed and peddled these lies for over 30 years, but the rest of the world has caught up.

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

Today we discuss:

• Trump officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money to design a $250 bill featuring Trump’s portrait, in what would be the first appearance of a living person on U.S. currency in more than 150 years.

•  A former senior CIA official is accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth more than $40 million and stashing them in his home. From November to March, David Rush requested and received a “significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” according to the FBI.

• A Kenyan court has suspended US plans to open an Ebola quarantine facility for American citizens. The 50-bed isolation centre is to be staffed by US medics and was due to begin operations today. In its court petition, rights group the Katiba Institute warned that the arrangement posed “grave and imminent risks” to public health. Now Trump wants to send Ebola patients to Europe.

• Under the US-brokered ceasefire in October, the Israeli army withdrew to a demarcation line which gave Israel direct control of 53% of Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu says he has given orders to the IDF to seize control of 70%, imperiling the deal.

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

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The post The Buck Stops Here | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Remember wishing your toys could really talk? Well, now they can—and it’s not pretty. A slew of AI-driven toys are on the market today, designed to hold conversations with very young children. Dolls, plushies, and action figures—toys that traditionally encouraged creative play—now come as embodied chatbots marketed as safe and trustworthy companions for young children. Yet they are anything but.

AI toys intentionally attract and prolong children’s attention in order to collect intimate biometric data, either to hone a particular toy’s interactions or to sell to marketers, or both. They can also put children’s privacy at risk. Researchers recently found that audio recordings of tens of thousands of children’s conversations with the AI toy Miko were easily accessible to absolutely anyone.

It’s worrisome that AI toys marketed to young children use the same chatbot technology and persuasive design elements known to have harmed teens by encouraging dangerous behaviors, including self-harm and suicide. Young children are especially vulnerable to this type of manipulation. Toddlers and preschoolers are naturally more trusting than adolescents, and their capacity for judgment is less developed. In addition, they have a harder time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Finally, because AI toys carry on conversations and simulate empathy, they encourage children to develop deep attachments to them. In doing so, they can undermine young children’s real-life relationships with caring adults, displace play with peers, and deprive children of the benefits of creative play.

The problems associated with encouraging children to rely on AI toys for companionship become increasingly evident as studies emerge that document how kids actually interact with them. Researchers at Cambridge University observed children ages 3-5 using Gabbo, a popular AI toy from Curio Interactive, Inc. When Joshua, age 3, repeatedly asks Gabbo, “Are you sad?” Gabbo eventually replies, “I’m feeling great. What’s on your mind?” When Joshua answers, “I’m sad.” Gabbo says, “Don’t worry! I’m a happy little bot. Let’s keep the fun going. What shall we talk about next?”

When, as kids, we wished our toys could talk, we were wishing for them to say what we imagined, not what toy companies programmed them to say.

It’s troubling that, despite Joshua’s repeated efforts to talk about sadness, first by attributing the feelings to the toy, then by expressing his own feelings, Gabbo shuts him down. In doing so, Gabbo deprives him of an opportunity to verbalize and explore his feelings and sends the message that feelings like sadness should not be discussed. In contrast, interactions with caring adults can offer nuanced validation and encouragement to talk about what children are feeling.

As their technology becomes more refined and sophisticated, AI toys will likely get better in simulating understanding and empathy. This is, however, likely to make them simultaneously more compelling and, therefore, more harmful. A more empathic AI toy is not the solution. As the toys become more adept at replicating human conversation, their potential to displace actual human interactions—both with adults and other children—will increase.

Ensuring that children have time and space to play with other children is also essential to healthy development. Play with AI toys doesn’t have the same benefits as play with peers. One problem is that, like most chatbots, these toys are designed to avoid and smooth over conflict and offer unconditional support to their users. Yet encountering and resolving conflict is a necessary component of how young children learn how to live in relationship with other people. The process of resolving a disagreement over a ball, for instance, helps kids develop life skills such as self-regulation, turn taking, sharing, and negotiation.

Not only do AI toys fail as companions, they also fail as playthings. Given the chance, children naturally use play to give voice to their deepest hopes, fears, and dreams, and to make sense of their life experiences. The true value of play with dolls, stuffed animals, and any inanimate creature is that their silence invites children to bring them to life; imbue them with distinct personalities; and transform them as needed into friends, adversaries, champions, and more. They encourage the kind of creative play that is crucial to healthy development.

When algorithms instead of children give voice to toys, kids lose the wide-ranging benefits of imaginative play. By controlling half of any conversation, AI toys deprive children of opportunities for the kind of play that nurtures creativity, enables self-expression, and encourages kids to act rather than merely react, all of which help kids learn to cope successfully with the inevitable challenges of being human.

Despite these potential harms, the manufacture and marketing of AI toys for young children continues to proliferate unregulated. According to Market Research Future, the global AI toy market—currently valued at almost $35 billion—is projected to reach $270 billion by 2035, especially as toy giants such as Mattel and Hasbro build out their product lines. Already, almost half of parents of children ages 0-8 have purchased, or are thinking about purchasing, AI toys.

When, as kids, we wished our toys could talk, we were wishing for them to say what we imagined, not what toy companies programmed them to say. Despite tech industry marketing, the reality is that children don’t need talking toys. What kids really need is for us to hold AI companies accountable. Children need pediatricians, early childhood educators, and anyone who cares about young children to take a strong stand for child-driven play and against AI toys for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. They need legislators to pass laws that regulate how and to whom AI products are marketed.

Working toward those kinds of systemic changes is essential, but making them happen takes time. There is, however, something we can do right now to send AI companies an important message while protecting children’s privacy, preserving their human relationships, and encouraging their creative play. Let’s just say no to AI toys for young children.

Three years behind schedule, the US House of Representatives passed a Farm Bill last month. Despite thousands of independent, humane farmers sounding the alarm that American livestock production is hurtling toward a breaking point, Congress chose to ignore those voices in favor of propping up corporate profits with more handouts to industrial agriculture.

America prides itself on supporting small and local businesses, yet decades of agricultural policy decisions signal nothing but disdain for our small and local farms. The overwhelming majority of taxpayer dollars in the House Farm Bill will funnel directly into the hands of the largest farms and agricultural corporations, while neglecting the needs of the small, independent producers who make up over 85% of all farms in our country. As a result, since the most recent Farm Bill in 2018, over 158,000 farms have had to close their gates, while shareholder value has skyrocketed for the few meatpacking monopolies that maintain a vertically-integrated vice grip on our nation’s meat supply.

Here’s the real kicker—even with access to the endless handouts industrial agriculture has received for decades, we have an increasingly fragile food system. Far from the safe, abundant, and affordable food supply their taglines promise, the factory farming of animals in confinement systems is responsible for major public health threats, the degradation of our soil and waterways, and the hollowing out of our rural communities. Cancer rates in industrial ag-heavy states are rising at alarming rates, and once-thriving small towns are falling victim to corporate capture.

The House Farm Bill includes a provision that independent farmers have made clear drives meat-packer consolidation and robs us of markets that voters in several states demanded: the “Save Our Bacon” (SOB) Act, which, far from saving any bacon, would further entrench a fragile system that profits from cruel confinement and extreme overcrowding of pigs. When our current food system faces extreme stressors like the pandemic or bird flu, these supply chains break down and supermarket shelves quickly empty of meat, eggs, and dairy products. Meanwhile smaller independent farmers like us who use more humane, resilient practices that prioritize the welfare of animals, people, and the environment are able to continue feeding our communities without disruptions.

The Senate now has the opportunity to right the House’s Farm Bill wrongs, restoring and expanding funding for local and regional food systems, and removing favors to industry lobby groups like the Save Our Bacon Act.

What we know is that consumers are fed up, and no longer buy the tired argument that more humane and healthy farming methods are unrealistic, or that smaller farms can’t feed America. Consumers know that pasture-raised animals are healthier for both themselves and the environment, and that resilient local farms are critical for their communities.

Government policy chooses what food gets to be accessible and which types of farms survive, and we must start making better choices. Expanding investment into independent, local meat processing; ensuring the regulation of dubious and misleading label claims; and increasing fair funding opportunities and access to capital for pasture-based farms are just a handful of commonsense reforms that would help level the playing field. The Senate now has the opportunity to right the House’s Farm Bill wrongs, restoring and expanding funding for local and regional food systems, and removing favors to industry lobby groups like the Save Our Bacon Act.

We already know how to raise healthy animals in more humane, pasture-based systems. That these farms are better for all involved than factory farms is clear to anyone on the ground in farming communities across America. And we believe it would be obvious to legislators in Congress if they took the time to come see them, which is why we have joined with other pasture-based farmers across the country to form the FACE Ag Network (Farmers for Animals, Communities, and the Environment).

We may not have the deep pockets of industrial agriculture interests, but we have power in the real stories of how our farms in Delaware County, Iowa, and St. Helena Parish, Louisiana are feeding our communities and revitalizing our local economies. In a recent letter to House and Senate leadership, we outlined a Farm Bill policy platform that would help uplift thousands of farmers, inviting lawmakers to visit our farms and witness firsthand how pasture-based farming systems are building a more resilient food system. And we have a message for the lawmakers about to decide our future in the Farm Bill:

Agribusiness interests have had their chance to design farm policy, and it isn’t working. It’s time to listen to independent farmers who know what their communities, animals, and land need. It’s time to rethink the way we invest federal dollars, and finally support farms producing the kind of food Americans want and deserve, rather than subsidizing products that actively harm our communities.

We invite you to come stand in our pastures and learn first-hand why backing the farms that produce the most humane, healthy, and high-quality food is the soundest investment you could make in our nation’s food system.

Early in my career as a primary care physician, I found myself steering my car through driving rain around downed power lines and fallen tree branches for a shift in urgent care. I was already nervous about my new role. Having a hurricane didn’t help. I remember feeling overwhelmed and inadequate when I had to refer a patient to the already overburdened ER. The deep wound a roof shingle had carved in their scalp was too much for me. Hurricane Bob was a Category 3 hurricane and it took 18 people’s lives and caused today’s equivalent of ~$3.5 billion in damages. The fear, the injuries, and the losses all fell on the local community.

That was decades ago. Nowadays—from Texas floods, to Western wildfires, to deadly heatwaves across the Midwest and Northeast—communities across the country are paying the price. Severe storms are more frequent because of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Extreme weather events are causing traumatic injuries, post-traumatic stress disorders, medication shortages, and death. Heatwaves are more frequent and more dangerous, causing heart attacks, asthma attacks, kidney failure, and death. Floods are ravaging our towns, roads, bridges, and farms, overwhelming local businesses and thinly stretched municipal budgets. Public health and infrastructure costs from these crises are mounting. And fossil fuel air pollution—accounting for ~95% of total air pollution in the state—currently kills over 2,700 residents each year in Massachusetts through heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, and chronic lung illness.

Meanwhile, the petrochemical corporations—who’ve knowingly fueled the climate crisis and spent tens of millions of dollars to sow disinformation—got off scot-free.

As a doctor, I can treat people for asthma from air pollution and dehydration from heatwaves, but if the root cause is not addressed, countless more will suffer. The enormity of this threat to public health led me to retire from primary care and join with those fighting for clean energy. We urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels, but we must also invest in resilience and adaptation projects, to safeguard Massachusetts communities against the climate harms they are already experiencing—from the flooding and erosion threatening residents and businesses in Boston and along the coast, to the droughts facing farmers in Western Mass, to the record-shattering heatwaves hitting the entire state this month.

In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic.

Passing the state Climate Superfund Act is one step we must take, following in the footsteps of our Vermont and New York neighbors and coalition partners in the nationwide movement to hold big polluters accountable and keep our communities safe from climate harm. Passing a superfund in Massachusetts would allow us to build resiliency in our communities using funds from Big Oil’s checkbook. This act would require the biggest polluters to pay, based on their historical emissions, for projects across the Commonwealth—upgrading stormwater drains, protecting our coasts, installing energy-efficient cooling for seniors who swelter without AC, and offering preventive healthcare programs to treat those sickened by climate change. We desperately need these measures, and this gives us a fair way to pay for them. If you made a mess, you need to clean it up.

In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic. Big Oil has known for more than 60 years about the harms their products were causing, but instead of putting people over profits, they have spent tens of millions to cover it up and lie to the public about the damage they were creating.

We can no longer afford to be complacent. It’s time for the Massachusetts legislature to stop “studying” this problem and start protecting its people with this legislation that the majority of its residents support. It’s financially and morally imperative that we pass the Climate Superfund Act. It’s time to make polluters pay for the health of our Commonwealth.

Given how Congress remains obsessed with redistricting (gerrymandering) rather than the problems of the American people, it seems the only promise they are making is to make it impossible to unseat them if we ever decide to hold them accountable.

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