My Mamanbozorg, or maternal grandmother, died on Monday, January 5, 2026 in Iran.

My family and I hadn’t seen her in roughly four years. We didn’t get to care for her or help with her adjusting to life in a nursing home. We didn’t witness her dementia in person. We said our goodbyes from afar. We watched her burial over video footage and photos. We grieved as a family together on FaceTime.

This is not unusual for Iranian families outside of Iran, to not feel safe to return to their birth country, not even during times of grief. The Iranian government is unpredictable. They may hold passports under false accusations of espionage.

This is a layer of grief of being an immigrant that no one really talks about. To be an immigrant, especially one in exile, is to grieve not just the loss of homeland, but the loss of loved ones. Some believe that seeing the body after death helps the living with the grief process. What about the immigrant mother who doesn’t get to hold her dying mother’s hand on her death bed?

Iranians, like any other nation, deserve full human rights. They deserve dignity and freedom, and the right to choose their government. What they don’t need is a Western savior.

As I write this, Iran is once again in the headlines. Mainstream headlines are calling out the number of protester deaths. A hypocrite media is the perfect match for a hypocrite government. They assume the position of caring for the Iranian people and their human rights. When it comes to Iran, democracy and freedom matter to American media and politicians. Meanwhile, they have no problem with the slaughter of Palestinians. Palestinians’ freedom and democracy are never considered.

Everyone on the internet has an opinion on Iran. Leftists, conservatives, monarchists, liberals, Zionists: a collision of beliefs on what’s right for the future of Iranians and Iran.

I was born and raised in Iran and lived there for 11 years. I moved to the US in 1999. My family has suffered and endured unimaginable grief and cruelty under both governments: the Pahlavi Kingdom and the current Islamic Republic. No version of the Iranian flag resonates with me. I can sit here on my comfortable couch in suburban America and write about my dreams and visions for the Iranian people.

Instead, I sit with the reality that I have no idea what Iranians really want. I don’t know what they go through day to day. I haven’t been on the ground. I haven’t spoken to them. I have a general sense from reports from friends and family and the diaspora, but I don’t know. I don’t have the right to pretend that I do. I don’t have the right to dictate to my Western audience that I am writing on behalf of all Iranian people.

I write from the position of being an Iranian immigrant woman in my late 30s, grieving the loss of my beloved Mamanbozorg, calling my mother daily to hold her grief and to fill the gaping hole in her heart with love. I am heartbroken to see Iranians dying on the streets, their voices yet again repressed. I am angry at Western politicians who pretend to care about Iranian life for their own interests and agendas in the region. I am angry at the Iranian government who continues to kill, repress, and quash dissent. It feels isolating to want to speak on this grief, but knowing that I must do so carefully or my words will be taken out of context.

Iranians, like any other nation, deserve full human rights. They deserve dignity and freedom, and the right to choose their government. What they don’t need is a Western savior.

CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans call on TikTokers across the world to flood the platform for Palestine to #TakeBackTikTok from billionaire Larry Ellison, the media mogul soon to control TikTok’s US app.

“We don’t have Ellison’s billions, his private Hawaiian island, or his cushy ties with Trump, but we do have people power on a platform with two billion users worldwide who warn against suppressing posts for Palestine,” said Benjamin, who has nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok.

“Time to school the billionaire yachtsman in uncharted waters,” said Evans, who organized a picket in front of Paramount, an Ellison family asset, to protest subsidiary CBS hiring Israel flack Bari Weiss to head the network’s news division.

The elder Ellison, 81, chair of the board at Oracle, may think he’s the smartest guy in the virtual room come January 22, when US-TikTok busts out of the social media gate to detach from TikTok globally. Ellison may be gloating about the fact that the new stand-alone consortium—prompted by China-phobic legislation—will center Oracle and UAE investors with AI at the ready to suppress pro-Palestinian content on a platform that LOVES Palestine. Ellison, who has donated over $26 billion to the Israeli military, may—when CODEPINK isn’t looking—even wink across the ocean to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza, someone in the Zionist camp had to call 911 to overhaul the narrative on a platform with 170 million fans in the US.

These guys go back.

In 2021, Ellison offered pal Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle Board and a lounge chair on Ellison’s island of Lanai in Hawaii. That same year in Jerusalem, Oracle built a $319 million underground data bunker—hardened against a missile strike—to provide Netanyahu and the Israeli military with cloud services for intelligence on Palestinians and integration of information from drones and satellites for Israel’s killing fields.

At first glance, Ellison has much to celebrate as Israeli state propaganda prepares to saturate the new US TikTok with its official tourism tagline, “Israel, Exactly Like Nowhere Else." If the propaganda on TikTok mirrors advertising on other social media platforms, one can expect to hear denials in multiple languages that Israel is starving Gaza. Such claims, however, contradict United Nations findings (December 2025) that over a million people still face crisis levels of hunger, with over 100,000 children expected to suffer extreme malnutrition.

With Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza, someone in the Zionist camp had to call 911 to overhaul the narrative on a platform with 170 million fans in the US.

For Israel flag wavers, this was an emergency.

TikTokers Rock for Palestine

TikTokers in the United States favor Palestine vs. Israel posts 17-to-1, according to Northeastern University research conducted from 2023-2025. TikTok posts of orphaned Gaza amputees wandering amid apartments turned to rubble make Israel a tough sell to Gen-Z and younger millennials scrolling the app to witness Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in between ads for panda drums and shimmering lipsticks.

Netanyahu, facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Gaza’s mass starvation, openly acknowledges the importance of counteracting the images of carnage on social media. “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are on social media, “ Netanyahu said during a September 2025, huddle with US social media influencers who might be willing to promote Israel’s image for $7,000 a post. During the meeting, Netanyahu identified TikTok as the No. 1 influencer of global public opinion of Israel.

In June, 2025, the Pew Research Center, noting a dramatic shift in public opinion, found that 60% of those surveyed in 24 countries did not favor Israel over Palestine; in the US, Israel’s biggest weapons supplier, 53% expressed a “somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel,” with 69% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans turning thumbs down on Israel. In what should be a wake-up call to Israel shills in the White House and Congress, Pew spotlights younger Republicans under 50, who are now about as “likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one.”

Background

In 2024, Congress passed legislation to force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, launched by Chinese entrepreneurs, to sell off its US app or face a ban in the land of the not-so-free US. President Donald Trump, Ellison’s chum, then issued an executive order to delay the sale of TikTok’s US platform until Oracle and ByteDance could work out the kinks to enable Oracle to host US data on its cloud server and retrain the algorithm leased from ByteDance for US auditors to police. Lots of moving parts here.

Under the US joint venture, majority ownership will rest in the hands of Oracle, MGX, (UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund), and Silver Lake, a US private equity firm with ties to UAE investors. Existing ByteDance investors (General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Soft Bank, and more) will be among the minority owners, along with ByteDance founders and employees. The Congress that kicked and screamed about foreign influence, imagining Chinese spies behind every TikTok post, barely shrugged when the UAE surveillance state teamed up with Ellison to siphon off US TikTok.

Follow the Billions and the Acquisitions… If You Can

The Ellison family holds an estimated 40-41% of Oracle’s outstanding 1.16 billion stock shares in a family trust controlled by patriarch Larry Ellison. Through the trust, the elder Ellison provided a $40.4 billion guarantee to finance the merger of Skydance Media, owned by son David, with the Paramount entertainment conglomerate. With the Ellisons’ shares in Oracle, Skydance Media, and Paramount, the family’s media dynasty can—left unchallenged—propagandize for Israel and Trump at CBS, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Pluto TV, and Paramount+—and soon TikTok.

TikTok content creators and users could outsmart the Ellisons by flooding the platform with pro-Palestinian posts and comments in “algospeak” or coded language.

CODEPINK, hardly new to media activism, ramps up for the challenge.The LA chapter recently joined Entertainment Labor 4 Palestine to demonstrate outside Paramount-CBS studios in Hollywood. Activists waved signs that read, “CANCEL PARAMOUNT” and “PARAMOUNT/CBS BLACKLISTS PRO-PALESTINE WORKERS” and “BARI WEISS CENSORS TRUTH” as Evans and the crowd tried to deliver a petition in objection to the CBS News editor’s cancellation of an expose on CECOT, the Salvadoran torture prison where Trump sent migrants—beaten by batons—to languish in windowless cells.

“You cannot stay on the property… Back on the sidewalk,” ordered the guards to CODEPINK.

Flood the platform

TikTok content creators and users could outsmart the Ellisons by flooding the platform with pro-Palestinian posts and comments in “algospeak” or coded language, some of which is already popular on TikTok. A Palestine demonstration becomes a “music festival.” Israel’s genocide becomes “Isrel G-side.” Gaza becomes “G@za.” Dead becomes “unalived.” Palestine become P*l3stine, with symbols and numbers replacing letters.

“Flood the platform for Palestine” was the message that the #TakeBacKTikTok campaign projected one December night onto the building of Oracle’s UK headquarters. The “Keep Posting, Keep Talking, Keep Sharing” call to action wrapped up a bold three-minute projection of life-sized images of tortured half-naked Palestinians, cratered apartment buildings, and terrified children in Gaza.

Also projected were images of Ellison, Netanyahu, Trump, and pro-Palestinian social media influencer Guy Christensen, 19, “yourfavoriteguy” who has amassed 3.5 million TikTok followers and endorsed the US #TakeBackTikTok campaign to flood the platform for Palestine in the run-up and emergence of US TikTok as a stand-alone app. While months ago ByteDance hired a former Israel Defense Forces instructor to monitor content at TikTok, Christensen views the new US joint venture as an attempt to double-down on censorship.

”What will it take for Americans to rise up against Israel’s blatant takeover of the last remaining major social media platform?” Christensen asks on his Substack.

Benjamin shares his outrage after receiving TikTok messages that read, “Not eligible for recommendation” when her posts are presumably deemed too controversial or sensitive for wider distribution. “TikTok has already been blocking our content when we simply call for an end to genocide. Enough! The new owners must stop, not escalate, the censorship,” said Benjamin.

Options for organizing

1. Building a strategic partnership: MGX, the UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund, and Silver Lake investors are, like Oracle, intent on deployment of AI across social media, much to the chagrin of US-based TikTok workers in California, New York, Washington, and Texas who fear losing their jobs to AI. Unlike TikTok proletarians in the UK, workers based in the US are not unionized—yet. Seeking union representation from United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) and Communication Workers of America (CWA), TikTok content monitors and e-commerce sales reps, some of whom may be offered stock in the emerging US spin-off, are likely allies to buck the bosses and outsmart the algorithm to keep Palestine alive on TikTok.
2. Skirting US TikTok to go global: Should the new US TikTok hide or ban most pro-Palstine posts, even those with coded language and watermelon emojis, savvy TikTokers may skirt around the ban, opening up accounts on Private Virtual Networks to access the TikTok seen by much of the world—particularly Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—where TikTok is most popular. Such VPN’s can place content creators in another region of the globe—not in Los Angeles or Dallas where they may live, but in Cairo or Tokyo, beyond the reach of a customized and sanitized US TikTok with Pinocchio-type ads that scream, “Israel is not starving Gaza” while Palestinians boil weeds for dinner.
3. Abandoning TikTok to encourage a hostile take-over: TikTokers could abandon the platform for Upscrolled, a pro-Palestinian site; Bluesky, a decentralized open source platform; RedNote, a Chinese version of Instagram; Reddit, a discussion platform for niche communities; or Facebook and Instagram, provided owner Meta drops its habit of rigging the algorithm to suppress Palestine posts. There could also be a migration of TikTokers to YouTube reels, although that, too, would present challenges in the wake of Google, YouTube’s owner, signing a $45 million deal with Israel to run ads that show thriving food markets with the message, “There is food in Gaza.”

Content creators abandoning US TikTok could trigger an exodus of advertisers in search of the migrating Gen Z demographic. Advertiser flight could, in turn, undermine or bankrupt a platform that generated $39 billion in revenue for ByteDance in 2024.

With users and advertisers abandoning a highly censored platform, TikTok could go to the graveyard with MySpace, an early social networking platform that alienated users with wall-to-wall advertising. Even UAE sheiks would hate to lose money in the long run on a hollowed-out US spin-off that cost the consortium $14 billion to buy from ByteDance.

Would the UAE or others with beaucoop bucks ever encourage US counterparts to launch a hostile takeover to purge Oracle from US TikTok? It could happen. Look at the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) battle, in which Paramount launched an unsuccessful hostile bid to block Netflix’s acquisition. Although TikTok is not publicly traded, Oracle trades on the NYSE and could be vulnerable to internal pressure and shareholder activism.

Bidding wars, platform censorship, and billionaire media ownership could also amplify demands on Congress to outlaw media consolidation under a future US administration sympathetic to regulation.

Larry Ellison may not be the smartest guy in the room, after all.

Multiple things can be true at once. The Iranian people are engaged in a legitimate popular struggle against an entrenched political elite that has failed to meet their material needs and has answered demands for freedom and dignity with unconscionable violence and repression. At the same time, the US has no political, legal, or moral basis to intervene in Iran. The dire state of the country, as is true of Venezuela and Cuba, the two other nations targeted by the latest neo-neoconservative regime change enthusiasts blinded by imperial hubris and a fetishization of military power, is in significant part the result of Washington’s own policies.

Since 1979, the US has pursued policies aimed at ensuring the failure of the Iranian Revolution. In the decades that followed, and with particular acceleration under the Trump administration, this effort crystallized into a sanctions regime designed not to promote democracy or human rights but to drive ordinary Iranians into a state of immiseration. This strategy, deployed against governments that Washington unilaterally deems problematic, occasionally for defensible reasons but far more often for refusing to subordinate themselves to US imperial and corporate power, has been linked to an estimated 38 million deaths worldwide since 1971.

In Iran, as elsewhere, this policy has rested on the cynical belief that mass suffering will produce political unrest advantageous to the interests of the United States and, in this case, of Israel as well. The quiet part was said out loud by Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who mocked the government’s recent inability to quell economic discontent through modest financial inducements and celebrated this as “a testament to how our nation and Israel broke Iran.”

The disregard for international law, democratic principles, and human life that underpins this slow violence (see for example Madeleine Albright’s 1996 insistence that sanctions killing as many as half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”) is more evident today than ever. The hypocrisy of an administration that has enabled a genocide in Gaza, decapitated a government in pursuit of oil, threatens to militarily seize the territory of a sovereign country, and condemns repression in Iran while defending public execution of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not lost on anyone.

US intervention would both co-opt the movement and almost certainly foreclose any real possibility of justice or democracy.

Beyond sanctions, the template for deeper US involvement in Iran appears poised to follow a familiar, troubling playbook. If Washington moves toward directing regime change under the guise of “supporting” Iranian freedom, the most likely beneficiary would be the exiled son of the former Shah, who has not lived in the country for decades. Such an intervention would amount to a second US-backed ouster of an Iranian government to reinstall a member of the Pahlavi dynasty.

The Shah’s son, who has cultivated warm ties with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and has been rebuffed by Iranian human rights activists, does not represent a pathway toward Iran’s democratization. The pursuit of US intervention today then might well produce consequences as calamitous and as unpredictable as those unleashed in 1953. This broader history must therefore remain central to any serious assessment of the current crisis in Iran.

The Oil Curse in Iran

Before Venezuela possessed the largest proven oil reserves in the world, that distinction belonged to Iran. More than a century ago, a weak, illegitimate, and cash-strapped Qajar Dynasty sold the rights to petroleum prospecting to British mining magnate William Knox D’Arcy, a speculative venture in a country with no existing oil industry and no guarantee of viable deposits. At the time, petroleum had not yet come to grease the wheels of the West or serve as the engine of its industrial and military power.

As a result, the 1901 oil concession was not met with the same resistance that had greeted earlier attempts by the Qajars to treat the country as their personal fiefdom, outsourcing development and selling national resources to the highest foreign bidder. The Iranian people had long resisted such Western encroachment, repeatedly forcing their government to retreat from foreign contracts. Yet popular pressure failed to materialize for what would become the most consequential concession of all, one that laid the foundation for decades of imperial intervention in Iran.

The discovery of a vast sea of oil in 1908 prompted the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (rebranded the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1935 and again as British Petroleum in 1954). By 1914, citing financial uncertainty for the company and a desire to modernize the British naval fleet from domestic coal to more efficient foreign oil, the British government moved to acquire a majority stake in APOC. The timing proved decisive. The world war that followed fueled a global oil boom, and Iranian production expanded rapidly, with APOC supplying a substantial share of Britain’s wartime needs.

After the war, in 1925, a coup ended Qajar rule, and Minister of War Reza Khan crowned himself Shah, inaugurating the Pahlavi Dynasty. He renegotiated the oil concession on marginally better terms, but the increased revenues enriched the Pahlavi elite far more than ordinary Iranians. The result was a growing inequality that fed a revived anti-imperial consciousness.

British control, combined with a failure to defend national sovereignty, radicalized Iranians across social classes. Nowhere was this discontent more acute than among exploited oil workers, who lived and labored in squalid, dangerous conditions, excluded from advancement and constrained by a rigid colonial hierarchy that starkly contrasted with the privileged lives of foreign staff.

The Rise and Fall of Mohammad Mossadegh

That the Shah served at the pleasure of British commercial interests became evident in 1941, when London, and Moscow, deposed him, citing his perceived closeness to Germany, and installed his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to secure oil for the war effort and keep it from falling into German hands. For good measure, British and Soviet forces occupied the country for the next five years.

After the war and occupation, Iranians renewed their demands for sovereignty, beginning with reclaiming what they saw as their inalienable birthright: control of the natural wealth beneath their soil. Mohammad Mossadegh embodied this struggle. A European-trained lawyer and leader of the National Front coalition, he became the first fully democratically elected prime minister in 1951, sidelining the authority of the Shah and riding a wave of widespread popular support. His ascent was so significant to both Iran and to broader geopolitics that it prompted Time Magazine to name him “Man of the Year” and hail him as the “Iranian George Washington” by 1952.

The events of 1979, shaped by the blowback from 1953, also set the US on a trajectory of deeper imperial entanglement.

Yet he committed what, in the early Cold War, was an unforgivable offense: He nationalized Iran’s own natural resources. This move was wildly popular. The depth of exploitation was evident in that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more in profits in 1950 than it had paid Iran in royalties over nearly the entire previous half century. Mossadegh insisted he was willing to compensate the company, a practice consistent with recent nationalizations, not only in places like Mexico but in Britain itself, which had nationalized its coal industry under the Labour government in 1947. The British nonetheless refused any negotiated settlement.

London instead responded with economic warfare, imposing a de facto embargo designed to starve Mossadegh’s government, obstruct his reform agenda, and grind the population into submission, not unlike more recent sanctions regimes. The campaign only intensified nationalist fervor; some of Mossadegh’s allies declared it preferable for Iran’s oil to be destroyed “by an atom bomb” than to remain under British control. When economic coercion failed, London turned to overthrowing the government, a plot Mossadegh uncovered, leading to the expulsion of British personnel from the country.

In Washington, Downing Street found willing accomplices. The pretext for intervention was that the economic turmoil, engineered by British policies, might in turn create a political vacuum that the Soviets or domestic communists would exploit. In reality, CIA documents acknowledged that Mossadegh was not a communist but a committed nationalist, and that Iran’s communist party was marginal, among the population and within the military. Despite this intelligence, the United States turned toward regime change, establishing the first ever model for covert coups that would follow around the world.

In 1953, after the CIA fomented an artificial uprising and Mossadegh was arrested by a US-backed military loyalist, the Shah, who had fled the country in anticipation of a failed plan, was restored to power. For their trouble, American oil companies were granted a 40% share in the new consortium that controlled Iranian oil, while another 40% went to British Petroleum.

The Last Shah of Iran?

Lacking popular legitimacy, the Shah depended heavily on US backing to maintain control. His rule was enforced through the expansion of the secret police, SAVAK, which functioned as an instrument of state terror rooted in surveillance, repression, and torture. US arms transfers helped sustain this coercive order. By the end of the Shah’s reign, US weapons sales to Iran were in the billions annually, with cumulative purchases over the decade perhaps as high as $20 billion.

As the regime poured staggering resources into armaments, it failed to adequately provide for the well-being of its population. The economic shocks of the 1970s drove millions into the slum-like peripheries of cities like Tehran. These dispossessed joined a broad coalition of women, religious clerics, merchants, laborers, students, and activists who mobilized against the monarchy. Political ferment deepened as President Jimmy Carter, in a display of strategic myopia, publicly toasted the Shah, praising Iran as an “island of stability,” and crediting his “great leadership,” asserting that he had the “respect and the admiration and love” of his people.

That the revolution which soon followed would assume an Islamic character, or culminate in the creation of a theocratic state, was not predetermined. It drew on the influence of the exiled religious figure, soon to be Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as an Islamic political vocabulary shaped by Ali Shariati, whose synthesis of Marxism, Iranian history, and Shi’a Islam resonated widely. Yet it was driven above all by a general popular discontent. As in revolutions everywhere, ideology supplied meaning, but material conditions set the stage. Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi captures this reality in his observation that “Khomeini may not have led a revolution for the price of melon, but many of his followers thought they did.”

If there was a shared ideological thread running through the protests then, it was anti-imperialism. Demonstrators rejected the forced Westernization and authoritarian secularism of the Pahlavi state and rallied behind the slogan “Neither East nor West,” an expression of Third World nationalism and assertion of self-determination. So too did the memory of Mohammad Mossadegh animate the uprising. His figure, representing a crushed experiment in democracy and an anti-imperialist past, remained deeply embedded in Iranian political consciousness.

The Pahlavi government met this movement with escalating violence. This repression, historian Ervand Abrahamian writes, “placed a sea of blood between the Shah and the people,” ensuring the monarchy could not survive and hastening the defection of the military. The revolution soon set in motion events that culminated in the student seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran over fears that Washington intended to rehabilitate, and reinstate, the Shah after admitting him for cancer treatment. The result was a prolonged 444-day standoff that institutionalized mutual hostility and cast a long shadow over both countries and the region.

This animus deepened as the US backed Iraq in its invasion of Iran soon after the revolution. The eight-year war killed roughly 1 million people and revealed Washington’s willingness to bleed regional powers to maintain its geopolitical influence. Continued US support for Israel and the Islamic Republic’s resistance further solidified the adversarial relationship.

The events of 1979, shaped by the blowback from 1953, also set the US on a trajectory of deeper imperial entanglement. These moves included a tightening partnership with Saudi Arabia, a more direct response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and laid the foundations for the Gulf War. Taken together, they created the conditions for the catastrophic, mass murderous “War on Terror” that was to come, revealing a direct line from US policy toward Iran to the wider architecture of American empire across the Greater Middle East.

“We’re Looking at Very Strong Options”

The popular protests in Iran are just, and the exceedingly violent response is an affront to the most basic principles of human rights and dignity. But rolling back the regime through US intervention, rather than through the actions of the Iranian people themselves, cannot plausibly be described as support for democracy. It represents the opposite. It is an attempt to reimpose a former client state and reclaim a strategic foothold lost in 1979, in service of a broader ideological project aimed at reasserting US hegemony in the region and beyond.

The Iranian people deserve freedom, and have the right to determine their own political destiny. The horrific slaughter of protesters and imprisonment of dissidents must end. Yet US intervention would both co-opt the movement and almost certainly foreclose any real possibility of justice or democracy.

The precedent here is unmistakable. There was once what was presented as a compelling case for removing Saddam Hussein, given his record of atrocities. But regime change in Iraq, pursued under the ulterior aims of an imperial America; carried out through lies, deceit, and illegality; and urged on by an exile elite with no local legitimacy, became one of the defining crimes of the century. To follow a similar course in Iran today would not only risk replicating those failures. It would reopen wounds that remain painfully fresh, even as they are all too easily forgotten.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  The presumption that the FBI can be trusted to investigate the killing of activist Renee Good by ICE agent Jon Ross fairly has been all but destroyed by White House statements, freezing out local authorities, and  the DOJ’s refusal to allow its civil rights experts to weigh in. Does it matter if the government abandons all pretense of objectivity?

•  As if life didn’t suck enough for Gazans who have survived the genocide, severe storms are ripping away the tents of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

• Western analysts are eagerly hoping for revolution in Iran.

• Malaysia and Indonesia block Grok over deep-fake porn. Even Renee Good has been virtually undressed.

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The post The Fix Is In | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

“Tom, I got nothin’.” That’s all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He’d called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, “I’m staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I’m a damp ball of grief, and I’ve got nothing useful to say about any of it.” Furthermore, I wanted to add, “Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else.” That “someone else” includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like the Washington Post and even the New York Times.

People with nothing to say would generally be wise to shut up. Unfortunately, the wisdom to choose to remain silent has never been my most salient characteristic, something even strangers seem to notice about me. Years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a party. Before I’d even opened my mouth, she said, “Oh, good, another short, pushy Jewish dyke from New York!” Must be something in the way I move.

In any case, having nothing for Tom this time around led me to think about all the times I have had something to say and how grateful I am to have had TomDispatch as a place to say it.

So, feeling stuck, I decided to examine my output over all these years. As it happens, there’s a lot of it, 98 pieces in all. I began during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe my reaction to the first year (and counting) of Trump 2.0.

It was far too much to read through in one sitting, but not surprisingly, a few general themes did emerge. Most of them had to do with the importance of working to discern—and tell—the truth about the world we live in.

Thinking about Epistemological Anarchy…

My first TomDispatch piece appeared in 2014. It marked the beginning of an oddly personal chronicle of a time that the poet W.H. Auden might once have called “a low dishonest decade.”

That’s the phrase Auden used to describe the period leading up to September 1, 1939, the day Adolf Hitler’s German army invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. I think we can fairly say that the Trump years, and even those preceding his first election, constitute a low, dishonest decade.

Of course, Trump himself is an avatar—a human embodiment—of the principle of dishonesty. Indeed, the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” he made during his first four years as president. This time around, most media outlets have given up counting, although several marked his first 100 days with reports on his 10 (or more) most egregious lies. The purpose of “flooding the zone with shit,” as right-wing podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once put it, is not really to convince anyone that any particular lie is true but, as I wrote during Trump’s first term, to convince everyone that it’s impossible to know whether anything is true. As I argued then:

We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. ‘In fact,’ as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, "the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.”

Back in 2019, I was writing about “totalitarian propaganda” in the past tense, speaking of 20th-century authoritarian regimes. But I was already worried about what Trump’s wild epistemological anarchy portended. “Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been,” I wrote, “however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world.” For many Americans, it was no longer worth the effort to discern the truth. “When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody—or even a significant chunk of everybody—believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic.”

In fact, I suggested, “this popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.” Trump 2.0 has confirmed that intuition.

“September 1, 1939” was the title of W. H. Auden’s most famous poem, the one that began with a reflection on the previous “low, dishonest decade.” It also contained these lines about what he then imagined was to come:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
…And Memory Holes

That first article of mine was about the evil done by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was not a surprising topic for me, since I had recently published a book on the subject, specifically about institutionalized state torture as practiced by the United States during what came to be known as the “War on Terror.” It was pretty much all I was thinking about in those days.

In that piece, I pointed out that we had never gotten a full accounting of the torture committed in our names in Afghanistan, Iraq, and globally at CIA “black sites” (their secret torture arenas). I blamed that reality in significant part on President Barack Obama’s “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and pointed out that not “one of the senior government officials responsible for activities that amounted to war crimes has been held accountable, nor were any of the actual torturers ever brought to court.” When, through a 2009 executive order, Obama finally closed those black sites, he argued that, “at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

Of course, that “need to look forward” (not over one’s shoulder) effectively tossed the history of torture under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into an Orwellian memory hole. And to this day, there has never been a full accounting of the Bush torture program. As a result, I pointed out then, “the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished,” which meant that the next time an administration chose to invoke and weaponize a public fear of dark, foreign others, we could well see torture’s resurgence.

Of course, that is indeed what happened under Donald Trump. Beginning with his first campaign speech in 2015, in which he inveighed against Mexican migrants as rapists bringing drugs and crime into this country, he has continually escalated his attacks on the foreign-born, particularly those from places he infamously called “shithole countries.” By his third campaign for the presidency in 2024, he (along with his running mate JD Vance) was routinely telling his followers that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were dining on other residents’ cats and dogs. In his second term, eschewing earlier euphemistic dog whistles, President Trump has been making it very clear that what distinguishes the migrants he characterizes as “garbage” (Somalis) from good migrants (“nice Scandinavians”) is their color.

As a result, this year I found myself reflecting again on the scourge of Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, writing that:

“t’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.

Honestly, though, I don’t think any of us could then have imagined a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) run by Kristi Noem. She’s the Trump appointee who posed in her DHS baseball cap and $50,000 Rolex watch in front of hundreds of half-naked prisoners like the ones she’d illegally dispatched to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran “Terrorist Confinement Center.” In ordering the deportation of immigrants to a penal institution well-known for torturing its inmates, Noem was reprising the Bush-era crime of “extraordinary rendition,” a practice that is, of course, illegal under US and international law.

Because of excellent reporting by outlets like the Guardian, we know that those men, now thankfully freed and repatriated to Venezuela, “suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault.” We also know that the Trump administration tried to tip the whole episode into its capacious memory hole by successfully preventing CBS’"60 Minutes" from airing a segment on the abuse of US deportees at CECOT. (That segment ran briefly in Canada; however, and a full transcript of it is now available, courtesy of The Nation magazine.)

Extrajudicial Killings (Also Known as “Murder”)

Another theme I’ve returned to over the years is the US penchant for murder-at-a-distance. Indeed, our country pioneered what now appears to be a significant part of the future of warfare: remotely directed attacks on individual human beings. In 2016, I wrote about the increasing use of military drones and the implications for military ethics:

The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved—whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone—the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.

I was still writing about the subject six years later. In 2022, TomDispatch published my piece about the push to develop LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems). This US goal had first emerged in the previous century during the US war in Vietnam with the (expensive and largely unsuccessful) automated battlefield. Half a century later, such automation, including the use of so-called artificial intelligence to make kill decisions, is now available in cheap, easily replaceable drones. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the United States has over the years resisted any attempt to outlaw autonomous weapons. “The European Union, the UN, at least 50 signatory nations, and (according to polls), most of the world population believe that autonomous weapons systems should be outlawed,” I wrote in 2022. “The US, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Russia disagree, along with a few other outliers.” I hardly expect the second Trump administration to take a different position.

In fact, despite what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might think, contemporary American soldiers probably don’t need to do pull-ups. They only need to sit down—in front of a screen—to cause mayhem globally.

Today, we take our ability to kill at a great distance for granted, as the Trump administration’s actions have demonstrated. We accept with disturbingly little question the now routine murders by drone of more than 100 people in small boats off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Only when it emerged that one of those unpiloted aerial attacks on defenseless human beings included a “double-tap”—a second strike to kill two survivors floating in the water by their devastated boat—was there widespread objection, including from members of Congress.

Hope in Strange Times

Before the 2016 election, I wrote a piece about how the rest of us needed to learn to claim our victories. “In these dismal days,” I said, “of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope.” How could that be, I asked. “Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers, who have been ‘rebuilding’ for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game.”

At that moment, however, I did find one thing especially encouraging: “We seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important.” Or so I thought.

Calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers didn’t do it. Promising to bring back waterboarding and commit assorted other war crimes didn’t do it. Flirting with the white supremacist crowd and their little friend Pepe the Frog didn’t do it. But an 11-year-old audio tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy" seems to have been the drop of water that finally cracked the dam and sent even stalwart Republican leaders fleeing a flood of public revulsion.

Well, even Cassandra can get things wrong once in a while and I was certainly wrong about that one. Today, Trump no longer simply “flirts” with white supremacism. He’s all in. And I’d be surprised now if even a demonstrated association with Jeffrey Epstein’s many predatory crimes will be enough to bring him down. In any case, there’s a solid backbench of genuine fascists—Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and of course Vice President JD Vance—to take over, should Trump take one nap too many and fall off his gilt-edged chair.

A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”

I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me—or any of us—back in that bottle.”

I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle.

Auden concluded his poem with the following lines. Almost a century later, they still remain an apt response to our contemporary confrontation with fascism and our latest night terrors:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Maybe I still have something to say after all.

None of us should have to watch videos of our fellow citizens and neighbors being killed to get factual information about what happened. Yet the way President Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, described the moment an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a 37-year-old mom and American citizen in broad daylight was so blatantly far off from what happened that I fear we will need to keep seeing for ourselves.

I never watch videos of people being killed on purpose. Yet, I clicked on a video of a woman in Minnesota in her SUV who seemed to be in a heated verbal exchange with an ICE agent. I saw her try to pull away from an agent who was reaching into her car, only to be shot at close range as she was trying to leave. It happened so quickly I hoped that she got away and the bullet did not hit her, but my hopes gave way to a nauseating pit in my stomach as her car veered off and hit a pole, the way one does when a driver falls asleep. Only, I knew she didn’t fall asleep because moments earlier, I saw an angry man in ICE uniform shoot at her. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and she was an award-winning poet, wife, and mom of three, her youngest child only 6 years old.

Surely everyone would condemn this killing, I thought to myself. I immediately sought out comments sections on the internet and official accounts of various politicians hoping for a solidarity and decency that has eluded us since Donald Trump arrived on the political scene. I just knew that everyone—regardless of political party or support for Donald Trump—and perhaps even those in the current administration, would condemn this brazen murder by an ICE agent who was filmed losing his temper, shooting, and killing a woman as she tried to drive away. At the very least, I thought politicians who support ICE would call it a tragic accident. Admittedly, I especially thought this would be true when I learned that the victim was white, a citizen, and a mother—identities that have often provided cover from the deadliest encounters with those across law enforcement entities.

Instead, I read a statement on Instagram from The Department of Homeland Security that insinuated Renee Good was a rioter. They said that she used her Honda as a weapon and began to weave together a familiar narrative that amounts to: ICE was blameless, and the mom in her car was part of an organized movement that should be considered domestic terrorism. The comments were divided. Some people expressed their deepest sympathies and outrage that she was killed that way. But far too many others repeated the story from Homeland Security’s written statement and from Kristi Noem’s testimony. I’d seen comments like those before. “She should have complied” and “FAFO” (fuck around and find out).

We must fervently resist the attempts made by this current administration to gaslight and pacify us in the face of deadly injustice, and we must challenge those who seek to override the best of our humanity with their institutionalized and wildly funded cruelty.

In the past six years we've watched the American right-wing push narratives that encourage the general public to support police officers when they kill unarmed Black people and squash any suspicions of their wrongdoings. The same messages that were used to criminalize Philando Castile and paint Trayvon Martin as an aggressor, the same messages that were used to try and excuse away Breonna Taylor’s murder, are the talking points we are hearing now about what happened to Renee Good in Minnesota. And they are yielding the same divided responses, only this time in response to the killing of a white mom as we live out the cautions in the famous “First They Came” poem.

Right-wing leaders have spent years telling people that, to put it simply, there are good guys and bad guys and law enforcement officials, including ICE, are always the good guys and anyone opposing them are always the bad guys. They have also convinced too many that “bad guys” deserve to be executed on the spot, no trial necessary.

Now, most alarmingly, they are trying to convince all of us that what we saw on video with our own eyes was not actually what we saw, and for far too many, it seems to be working.

We must fervently resist the attempts made by this current administration to gaslight and pacify us in the face of deadly injustice, and we must challenge those who seek to override the best of our humanity with their institutionalized and wildly funded cruelty. It starts by recognizing the predictable playbook they have been using since George Floyd died crying for his mama and saying, “I can’t breathe.” We must work to restore these bipartisan basics:

• Shooting people is not an acceptable resolution to misbehavior and nonviolent confrontation;
• Trained professionals should know how to deescalate and remain calm, not shoot when they feel threatened (or more accurately, angry);
• Protests are not inherently riots and are a constitutional right;
• Rather than playing “good guys or bad guys,” we must acknowledge good actions vs. bad ones, legal actions vs. illegal ones, and use due process to determine guilt and consequences when things go wrong; and
• No matter what a government official or even the president says, what you see with your own eyes is more trustworthy than a story they concoct to spin events to serve their agendas.

Renee Nicole Good should still be alive to mother her children, love her wife, and write poems. We will not allow them to distract us from that with lies.

At the same time agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol are swarming into Minnesota and other states and cities, President Donald Trump is planning bombing raids on other countries.

Domestically and internationally, he is putting America on a war footing.

ICE is reportedly investing $100 million on what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed. Its recruitment is targeting gun and military enthusiasts, people who listen to right-wing radio, who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races. It’s calling for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”

Meanwhile, Trump has announced that he’ll ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year—a 66% increase over the 2026 defense budget Congress just authorized.

Trump is putting America on a war footing because war is good for him as it is for all dictators.

There’s coming to be no difference between Trump’s foreign and domestic policies.

Both are based on the same eight maniacal ideas:

1. Might makes right.
2. Law is irrelevant.
3. America is at war with the world’s “radical left,” who are defined chiefly by their opposition to Trump.
4. Fear and force are better weapons in this war than hope and compromise.
5. The US stock market is the best measure of Trump’s success.
6. Personal enrichment by Trump and other officials is justified in pursuit of victory.
7. So are lies, cover-ups, and the illegal use of force.
8. Trump is invincible and omnipotent.

These ideas are at such fundamental odds with the norms most of us share about what America is all about and how a president should think and behave that it’s difficult to accept that Trump believes them or that his White House thugs eagerly endorse them. But he does, and they do.

Rather than some “doctrine” or set of principles, they’re more like guttural discharges. Trump is not rational, and the people around him trying to give him a patina of rationality—his White House assistants and spokespeople—surely know it.

The media tries to confer on Trump a coherence that evaporates almost as soon as it’s stated. The New York Times’ breathless coverage of its recent Oval Office interview with Trump—describing his “many faces”—is a model of such a vapidity.

According to the Times, Trump “took unpredictable turns” during the interview. But instead of seeing this unpredictability as a symptom of Trump’s diminishing capacities and ever-shorter attention span, the Times reported it as “a tactic he embraces as president, particularly on the world stage. If no one knows what you might do, they often do what you want them to do.”

Attempts to show inconsistencies or hypocrisies in Trump’s domestic or foreign policies are fruitless because they have no consistency or truthfulness to begin with.

Nor is it possible for the media to describe a “big picture” of America and the world under Trump because there is nothing to picture other than his malignant, impulsive, unbridled grandiosity all the way up and all the way down.

Trump has unleashed violence on America’s streets for much the same reason he has unleashed violence on Latin America and is planning to unleash it elsewhere: to display his own strength. His motive is to gain more power and, along the way, more wealth. (On Sunday, he even posted an image referring to himself as the “Acting President of Venezuela.”)

“Policy” implies thought. But under Trump, there is no domestic or foreign policy because it is all thoughtless. It is not even improvised. It is just Trump’s ego—as interpreted by the toadies around him (Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem) trying to guess what his ego craves or detests, or fulfilling their own fanatical goals by manipulating it.

We must stop trying to make rational sense out of what Trump is doing. He is a ruthless dictator, plan and simple.

All analyses of what is happening—all reporting, all efforts to understand, all attempts at strategizing—are doomed. The only reality is that an increasingly dangerous and irrational sociopath is now exercising brutal and unconstrained power over America and, hence, the world.

Trump is putting America on a war footing because war is good for him as it is for all dictators. War confers emergency powers. It justifies ignoring the niceties of elections. It allows dictators to imprison and intimidate opponents and enemies. It enables them to create their own personal slush funds. It distracts the public from other things (remember Jeffrey Epstein?).

War gives dictators like Trump more power and more wealth. Period.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in a Minneapolis suburb has prompted a familiar debate over civil disobedience and government policing of the sort that typically follows these incidents, in which justification of the use of force, or lack thereof, depends on your political stance. There is, however, an aspect here that everyone ought to be able to agree about regardless of where they stand on the libertarian-to-authoritarian spectrum: ICE behaves highly unprofessionally.

All you have to do is look at them. Cops wear matching uniforms. So do soldiers. Cops identify themselves and drive clearly marked vehicles. Soldiers even identify themselves to the enemy if they’re captured in battle. ICE agents—assuming the unidentified, masked dudes terrorizing cities are actually ICE and not rapists and kidnappers masquerading as government deporters—wear a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf vests and insignia, cruise around in rented vehicles, and illegally change their license plates daily to avoid accountability.

ICE’s defenders argue that Jonathan Ross was justified in using deadly force because she was a “domestic terrorist” who had “weaponized her vehicle,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and had to defend himself. Policing experts who have examined videos of Good’s death point out that a properly-trained law enforcement officer never should have been standing in front (or behind) her car in the first place—in other words, he shouldn’t have been in a position to make that determination. Noem’s intemperate description of a dead American, a mother of three, reminds us that her administration only cares about U.S. citizens who voted for Trump and support his policies.

Other aspects of the videotaped encounter point to an organization for whom professionalism appears to be an alien concern.

Ross and his colleagues rapidly escalate a situation that, let’s bear in mind, begins with an unarmed woman sitting in her car, smiling. Sure, she’s sarcastic. Sure, her car is parked diagonally, partly impeding traffic. It’s easy to see why ICE agents might feel irritated—that, after all, is one of the goals of a passive-resistance tactic like ICE Watch—but law enforcement officers are supposed to calmly refrain from reactions based on feeling triggered or provoked. Good may have been annoying. She certainly wasn’t dangerous.

Multiple agents race toward Good’s car. Why the urgency? She hasn’t moved in minutes. They shout. Why not talk normally? They shout conflicting commands—one tells her to leave, while Ross orders her to “get out of the fucking car!” One agent should do the talking, to avoid confusion and to avoid a fight-or-flight response. Cursing conveys hostility and raises the temperature. Federal officers should not swear at the public who pays their salary.

Inexplicably, because Ross was injured last year when he did the same thing and police are trained never to do it, he reaches through Good’s car window to try to open her door. Good does what many people would do in such a situation, especially if one is a woman and the intruder is a heavily-armed masked male—she pushes the gas. Never mind Good; Ross endangered himself and others with his reckless actions.

As a coda to an episode epitomizing unprofessionalism, someone—Ross or another agent—is heard shouting “fucking bitch” as Good begins to move.

This sound is captured on video that should not exist. Ross was holding his personal cellphone to record the encounter. His other hand holds his gun. But he was wearing a body camera. “Now that we can see he’s holding a gun in one hand and a cellphone in the other [hand] filming, I want to see the officer training that permits that,” Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, told NPR. Why did Ross constrain himself, unless it was to create images he could control and edit?

Adding to the chaotic impression created by manic, masked, armed men running around the suburbs in unmarked vehicles in search of anyone who looks vaguely Latino, the ICE paramilitaries allowed Ross to flee the scene.

As Good sat in her car dying, they refused to allow a physician bystander to attend to her.

“It’d be unprofessional to comment on what I think happened in that situation,” border czar Tom Homan, a former ICE director, initially told CBS News. Noem, as well as the president and vice president, stated within hours of the shooting that Good was at fault and a “domestic terrorist,” and that the ICE agent was blameless. A few days later, official government social media feeds were calling for citizens to defend ICE.

That the Trump Administration falls short of basic standards of professionalism is beyond dispute. The question is, are Trump’s hiring managers incompetent? Or is the deprofessionalization of government an intentional tactic deployed by the first president to have neither political nor military experience? If ICE—the agency receiving the biggest pay increase and hiring the most new workers­—is an indication, the answer is clearly yes. Just about any thug over age 18 with a pulse can get hired by ICE: drug addicts, gangsters, white nationalists, criminals, illiterate morons.

As the Nazis learned in the 1930s underqualified workers, especially very young ones and those on the margins of legality, are likelier to be malleable. They’ll probably be willing to bend the law. Knowing that they’re overpaid and given more responsibility than they deserve—and that they’d never find as good a job anywhere else—ICE recruits may not be intelligent or kind or thoughtful, but they will be loyal. They’ll do what they’re told, no matter how violent or unethical.

The Trump Administration will require this blind obedience as they segue from imprisoning illegal immigrants to jailing American citizens.

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

 

The post For Trump, Deprofessionalizing Government Is a Feature appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Please take five minutes to watch these two videos.

First, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross’ video:

Then watch this New York Times compilation of bystanders’ videos prepared before officer Ross’ video was publicly available

The Facts

Renee Nicole Good was a US citizen, the mother of three, an award-winning poet, and the widow of a military veteran. On Wednesday morning January 7, she dropped her six-year-old son at school and proceeded in her Honda Pilot down Portland Avenue—a one-way residential street in south Minneapolis. Around 10:40 am, she had a brief encounter with ICE officers during which she smiled at officer Ross, who was filming the episode on his smartphone.

“That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” she told Ross.

Another officer yelled at her to “get out of the f*cking car” and grabbed her door handle. By then, Ross was standing near the front driver’s side of the Honda. Attempting to avoid him as she drove away, Good turned the steering wheel sharply to the right. Ross fired three shots, and the Honda careened toward a parked car before crashing into it.

ICE officers receive CPR training, but none went to Good’s aid. A physician nearby tried to help, but ICE officers blocked him.

Fifteen minutes later, medics arrived. Shortly thereafter, she died at Hennepin County Medical Center.

The Lies Begin

An hour later, Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a statement defending Ross and demonizing Good.

According to DHS, “[R]ioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”

The statement continued:

An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement, and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. Thankfully, the ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called that description of the event “bullsh*t.”

With her press release, Noem had launched a preemptive strike on the truth.

Trump Doubles Down on the Lies

Three hours after DHS’ statement, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social a 13-second clip showing Good’s vehicle smashing into the parked car. It revealed nothing about the events that had led to the shooting.

But that didn’t prevent Trump from embellishing Noem’s false narrative. He said that “the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”

Noem and Vance Double Down on the Lies

It’s worth noting that Noem can ill afford the publicity of an ICE officer committing a potential homicide. In December, The Bulwark reported that Trump was considering three candidates to replace her, although the White House denied it.

At 6:00 pm, Noem held a press conference. She said that Good was among a “mob of agitators,” had “weaponized her vehicle,” and committed an “act of domestic terrorism” that justified ICE officers responding with deadly force.

The following morning, Vice President JD Vance—who oozes ambition—called Good a ”deranged leftist who tried to run [the officer] over” and was certain that she had broken the law. He said that the officer was protected by “absolute immunity.” Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, knows better.

Will Patel’s FBI Seal the Deal?

Trump’s Justice Department then excluded Minnesota officials from participating in the FBI investigation into the killing. Noem said that the FBI has “exclusive jurisdiction,” which is incorrect. Minnesota has jurisdiction over state crimes, including potential homicides.

But following the launch of the Trump administration’s false narrative of the killing, barring an objective investigation is the second phase of the preemptive strike against the truth. FBI Director Kash Patel is a fierce Trump loyalist who has likened Trump to a king. But like Noem, he has been the subject of recent reports that his position is precarious. He will fall in line behind the Trump-Vance-Noem false narrative of the event.

Evaluating the Evidence

Vance said that Ross was “doing his job.” Noem insisted that he “followed his training.” Let’s test those claims.

DHS requires its officers to follow these guidelines on the use of force:

1. Respect human life;

2. Deescalate confrontations;

3. Use safe tactics that minimize the risk of personal and property damage; don’t put yourself in a situation where your only alternative is using deadly force;

4. When feasible, give a warning before using force and give the subject a reasonable opportunity to comply;

5. As soon as practicable, obtain appropriate medical assistance for anyone injured;

6. Don’t fire warning shots solely to disable moving vehicles;

7. Use of deadly force must be reasonable in lights of the facts and circumstances confronting the officer;

8. Use deadly force only when you have a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to you or another person; “reasonableness” is an objective standard (“what would a reasonable person in that position do”);

9. Do not use deadly force solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject, unless you have a reasonable belief that the subject poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm to you or others and such force is necessary to prevent escape;

10. Discharging a firearm against a person constitutes the use of deadly force and shall be done only with the intent of preventing or stopping the threatening behavior that justifies the use of deadly force; and

11. Do not discharge firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle… unless the use of deadly force against the operator is justified under the standards articulated elsewhere in this policy. Before using deadly force under these circumstances, you must take into consideration the hazards that may be posed to law enforcement and innocent bystanders by an out-of-control vehicle.

To the same effect are Justice Department guidelines.

In light of the Trump administration’s preemptive strike on the truth, the odds of getting a credible federal probe are slim. Officer Ross fired three shots; each was a use of deadly force. How many guidelines did he violate?

Watch The Minnesota Star Tribune’s analysis that incorporates five videos of the tragedy and decide for yourself.

For most of us, Friday, February 6, 2026, is likely to feel no different than Thursday, February 5. It will be a work or school day for many of us. It might involve shopping for the weekend or an evening get-together with friends, or any of the other mundane tasks of life. But from a world-historical perspective, that day will represent a dramatic turning point, with far-reaching and potentially catastrophic consequences. For the first time in 54 years, the world’s two major nuclear-weapons powers, Russia and the United States, will not be bound by any arms-control treaties and so will be legally free to cram their nuclear arsenals with as many new warheads as they wish—a step both sides appear poised to take.

It’s hard to imagine today, but 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the US and Russia (then the Soviet Union) jointly possessed 47,000 nuclear warheads—enough to exterminate all life on Earth many times over. But as public fears of nuclear annihilation increased, especially after the near-death experience of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the leaders of those two countries negotiated a series of binding agreements intended to downsize their arsenals and reduce the risk of Armageddon.

The initial round of those negotiations, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I, began in November 1969 and culminated in the first-ever nuclear arms-limitation agreement, SALT-I, in May 1972. That would then be followed in June 1979 by SALT-II (signed by both parties, though never ratified by the US Senate) and two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and START II), in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Each of those treaties reduced the number of deployed nuclear warheads on US and Soviet-Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.

In a drive to reduce those numbers even further, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in April 2010, an agreement limiting the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side—still enough to exterminate all life on Earth, but a far cry from the START I limit of 6,000 warheads per side. Originally set to expire on February 5, 2021, New START was extended for another five years (as allowed by the treaty), resetting that expiration date for February 5, 2026, now fast approaching. And this time around, neither party has demonstrated the slightest inclination to negotiate a new extension.

After the expiration of the New START agreement, neither Russia nor the United States will be obliged to limit the numbers of nuclear warheads on their strategic delivery systems, possibly triggering a new global nuclear arms race with no boundaries in sight and an ever-increasing risk of precipitous nuclear escalation.

So, the question is: What, exactly, will it mean for New START to expire for good on February 5?

Most of us haven’t given that a lot of thought in recent decades, because nuclear arsenals have, for the most part, been shrinking and the (apparent) threat of a nuclear war among the great powers seemed to diminish substantially. We have largely escaped the nightmarish experience—so familiar to veterans of the Cold War era—of fearing that the latest crisis, whatever it might be, could result in our being exterminated in a thermonuclear holocaust.

A critical reason for our current freedom from such fears is the fact that the world’s nuclear arsenals had been substantially diminished and that the two major nuclear powers had agreed to legally binding measures, including mutual inspections of their arsenals, meant to reduce the danger of unintended or accidental nuclear war. Together, those measures were crafted to ensure that each side would retain an invulnerable, second-strike nuclear retaliatory force, eliminating any incentive to initiate a nuclear first strike.

Unfortunately, those relatively carefree days will come to an end at midnight on February 5.

Beginning on February 6, Russian and American leaders will face no barriers whatsoever to the expansion of those arsenals or to any other steps that might increase the danger of a thermonuclear conflagration. And from the look of things, both intend to seize that opportunity and increase the likelihood of Armageddon. Worse yet, China’s leaders, pointing to a lack of restraint in Washington and Moscow, are now building up their own nuclear arsenal, only adding further fuel to the urge of American and Russian leaders to blow well past the (soon-to-be-abandoned) New START limits.

A Future Nuclear Arms Race?

Even while adhering to those New START limits of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, both Russia and the United States had taken elaborate and costly steps to enhance the destructive power of their arsenals by replacing older, less-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and nuclear bombers with newer, even more capable ones. As a result, each side was already becoming better equipped to potentially inflict catastrophic damage on its opponent’s nuclear retaliatory forces, making a first strike less inconceivable and so increasing the risk of precipitous escalation in a crisis.

The Russian Federation inherited a vast nuclear arsenal from the former Soviet Union, but many of those systems had already become obsolete or unreliable. To ensure that it maintained an arsenal at least as potent as Washington’s, Moscow sought to replace all of the Soviet-era weapons in its inventory with more modern and capable systems, a process still underway. Russia’s older SS-18 ICBMs, for example, are being replaced by the faster, more powerful SS-29 Sarmat, while its remaining five Delta-IV class missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs) are being replaced by the more modern Borei class. And newer ICBMs, SLBMs, and SSBNs are said to be in development.

At present, Russia possesses 333 ICBMs, approximately half of them deployed in silos and the other half on road-mobile carriers. It also has 192 SLBMs on 12 missile-carrying submarines and possesses 67 strategic bombers, each capable of firing multiple nuclear-armed missiles. Supposedly, those systems are currently loaded with no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads (enough, of course, to destroy several planets), as mandated by the New START treaty. However, many of Russia’s land- and sea-based ballistic missiles are MIRVed (meaning they’re capable of launching multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) but not fully loaded, and so could carry additional warheads if a decision were ever made to do so. Given that Russia possesses as many as 2,600 nuclear warheads in storage, it could rapidly increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons at its disposal beginning on February 6, 2026.

That Russia is keen to enhance the destructive capabilities of its strategic arsenal is evident from Moscow’s drive to augment its existing nuclear weapons by developing new, longer-range ones. Those include the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered, intercontinental-range, giant nuclear torpedo to be carried by a new class of submarines, the Belgorod, meant to hold up to six of them. Reportedly, the Poseidon is designed to detonate off the coasts of American cities, rendering them uninhabitable. Following a round of tests now underway, it is scheduled to be deployed by the Russian Navy in 2027. Another new weapon, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, is being installed on some of Russia’s existing SS-19 ICBMs. After being boosted into space by the SS-19, the Avangard should be able to travel another 2,000 miles by skimming along the atmosphere’s outer surface while evading most missile-tracking radars.

The United States is engaged in a comparable drive to modernize its arsenal, replacing older weapons with more modern systems. Like Russia, the US maintains a “triad” of nuclear delivery systems—land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched SLBMs, and long-range bombers, each of which is now being upgraded with new warheads at an estimated cost over the next quarter century of approximately $1.5 trillion.

The existing New START-limited US nuclear triad consists of 400 silo-based Minuteman-III ICBMs, 240 Trident-II SLBMs carried by 14 Ohio-class submarines (two of which are assumedly being overhauled at any time), and 96 strategic bombers (20 B-2s and 76 B-52s) armed with a variety of gravity bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. According to current plans, the Minuteman-IIIs will be replaced by Sentinel ICBMs, the Ohio-class SSBNs by Columbia-class ones, and the B-2s and B-52s by the new B-21 Raider bomber. Each of those new systems incorporates important features—greater accuracy, increased stealth, enhanced electronics—that make them even more useful as first-strike weapons, were a decision ever made to use them in such a fashion.

When initiated, the US nuclear modernization project was expected to abide by the New START limit of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. After February 5, however, the US will be under no legal obligation to do so. It could quickly begin efforts to exceed that limit by loading all existing Minuteman-IIIs and future Sentinel missiles on MIRVed rather than single-warhead projectiles and loading the Trident missiles (already MIRVed) with a larger number of warheads, as well as by increasing production of new B-21s. The United States has also commenced development of a new delivery system, the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N), supposedly intended for use in a “limited” regional nuclear conflict in Europe or Asia (though how such a conflagration could be prevented from igniting a global holocaust has never been explained).

In short, after the expiration of the New START agreement, neither Russia nor the United States will be obliged to limit the numbers of nuclear warheads on their strategic delivery systems, possibly triggering a new global nuclear arms race with no boundaries in sight and an ever-increasing risk of precipitous nuclear escalation. Whether they choose to do so will depend on the political environment in both countries and their bilateral relations, as well as elite perceptions of China’s nuclear buildup in both Washington and Moscow.

The Political Environment

Both the United States and Russia have already committed vast sums to the “modernization” of their nuclear delivery systems, a process that won’t be completed for years. At present, there is a reasonably broad consensus in both Washington and Moscow on the need to do so. However, any attempt to increase the speed of that process or add new nuclear capabilities will generate immense costs along with significant supply-chain challenges (at a time when both countries are also trying to ramp up their production of conventional, non-nuclear arms), creating fresh political disputes and potential fissures.

Rather than confront such challenges, the leaders of both countries may instead choose to retain the New START limits voluntarily. Indeed, Vladimir Putin has already agreed to a one-year extension of this sort, if the United States is willing to do likewise. But pressures (which are bound to increase after February 5) are also building to abandon those limits and begin deploying additional warheads.

In Washington, a powerful constellation of government officials, conservative pundits, weapons industry leaders, and congressional hawks is already calling for a nuclear buildup that would exceed the New START limits, claiming that a bigger arsenal is needed to deter both a more aggressive Russia and a more powerful China. As Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the National Security Council, put it in June 2024, “Absent a change in the trajectory of the adversary arsenal, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required, and we need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision.”

February 6 is likely to bring us into a new era—not unlike the early years of the Cold War—in which the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear war-fighting capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever.

Those who favor such a move regularly point to China’s nuclear buildup. Just a few years ago, China possessed only some 200 nuclear warheads, a small fraction of the 5,000 possessed by both Russia and the US. Recently, however, China has expanded its arsenal to an estimated 600 warheads, while deploying more ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear-capable bombers. Chinese officials claim that such weaponry is needed to ensure retaliation against an enemy-first strike, but their very existence is being cited by nuclear hawks in Washington as a sufficient reason for the US to move beyond the New START limits.

Russian leaders face an especially harsh quandary. At a moment when they are devoting so much of the country’s state finances and military-industrial capacities to the war in Ukraine, they face a more formidable and possibly expanded US nuclear arsenal, not to mention the (largely unspoken) threat posed by China’s growing arsenal. Then there’s President Donald Trump’s plan for building a “Golden Dome” missile shield, intended to protect the US from any type of enemy projectile, including ICBMs—a system which, even if only partially successful, would threaten the credibility of Russia’s second-strike retaliatory capability. So, while Russia’s leaders would undoubtedly prefer to avoid a costly new arms buildup, they will probably conclude that they have little choice but to undertake one if the US abandons New START.

Racing to Armageddon

Many organizations, individuals, and members of Congress are pleading with the Trump administration to accept Vladimir Putin’s proposal and agree to a voluntary continuation of the New START limits after February 5. Any decision to abandon those limits, they argue, would only add hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal budget at a time when other priorities are being squeezed. Such a decision would also undoubtedly provoke reciprocal moves by Russia and China. The result would be an uncontrolled arms race and a rising risk of nuclear annihilation.

But even if Washington and Moscow were to agree to a one-year voluntary extension of New START, each would be free to break out of it at any moment. In that sense, February 6 is likely to bring us into a new era—not unlike the early years of the Cold War—in which the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear war-fighting capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever. That comfortable feeling we once enjoyed of relative freedom from an imminent nuclear holocaust will also then undoubtedly begin to dissipate. If there is any hope in such a dark prognosis, it might be that such a reality could, in turn, ignite a worldwide anti-nuclear movement like the Ban the Bomb campaigns of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. If only.

On January 7, Renee Nicole Good was murdered by Jonathan Ross, an “experienced” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent with more than 10 years with the agency.

This tragic event was recorded from multiple angles. This includes a video recorded by Ross himself during the confrontation. If you ask me, these videos, alongside detailed frame-by-frame breakdowns produced by the media, clearly show that Good had no intention to hit Ross. She had no malice toward him. She literally says, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Ross was not in any danger. He didn’t need to shoot, let alone shoot three times. It was not self-defense. He murdered Good—or, as he saw her, a “fucking bitch.”

Yet, many conservatives saw things completely differently. At a press hearing on January 8, Vice President JD Vance remarked, "Everybody who has been repeating the lie that this was some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves, every single one of you.” This viewpoint was shared by Republicans in Congress, like Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) and Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), conservative commentators like Jesse Watters and Steven Crowder, and, of course, the world’s most chronically online billionaire Elon Musk.

We have no obligation to follow unjust laws. Our duty, as those who believe in democracy and freedom, is to challenge authoritarianism and injustice anytime and anywhere.

It may be tempting to argue that these people are all simply lying. However, that response overlooks that it’s not just political commentators and politicians—across social media, people are seeing what Vance and others claim.

Here it is important to remember that perception is not neutral. The world we see is very much shaped by our beliefs, values, and our commitments. This doesn’t mean that everything is relative. For instance, it’s clear that Ross fired after he was no longer in the path of Good’s car. But, while some like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem are blatantly lying, others really are seeing something different here. The question then is: why? What is the basis for these discrepancies? And what does it tell us about where we’re at as a society?

The murder of Renee Nicole Good is a political Rorschach test. At the heart of this test lie two irreconcilable viewpoints: those who align themselves with armed agents and the task of protecting America from the “enemy within,” and those who embrace compassion for others and support their diverse communities. Between those with the guns, and those with the whistles. Between those who think that what happened to Good could never happen to them, and those who see in Good’s death their own vulnerability.

These opposing viewpoints reflect deep divides regarding how Americans think about defiance, vulnerability, and community.

A Test of Defiance

For those who immediately see Good as “a domestic terrorist,” the issue is not about criminality. ICE agents are not police officers. They can only lawfully detain citizens under very narrow circumstances, such as if they interfere with an arrest or assault an agent. None of these conditions applied to Good. She was, by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) own standards, outside the scope of their limited authority.

The issue is not about criminality, malice, or citizenship. It’s about defiance. This sentiment is captured in an op-ed written by the conservative New York Post Editorial Board. They place “full blame” for Good’s death on the Democrats for “cheering law-breaking protesters, calling for resistance to ICE as if it weren’t a duly constituted law enforcement agency.” They emphasize that, “anyone who doesn’t like how the law is enforced is free to work to elect different leaders, and to advocate for different laws. If you absolutely must object, then employ genuine, orderly civil disobedience and go peacefully off to jail afterward.”

For the board, those of us critical of ICE, DHS, and the Trump administration have two options: obey, or protest and go to jail. Though ideally, in their view, everyone should simply allow ICE agents to do their work unimpededly. As they write, “If the civilians had just left the law enforcers alone, Renee Nicole Good would still be alive.” Without explicitly saying so, the board blames Good for her death.

Central to this view are two key assumptions: first, “law-breaking protesters” are always in the wrong; and second, that legality alone makes law enforcement legitimate. The board is wrong on both fronts. We have no obligation to follow unjust laws. Our duty, as those who believe in democracy and freedom, is to challenge authoritarianism and injustice anytime and anywhere. The government is no exception.

We should also all be mindful that immigration enforcement officers have a long history of putting themselves in danger to justify violence. For instance, a 2013 review of US Border Patrol by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum found that agents “have intentionally and unnecessarily stepped in front of moving cars to justify using deadly force against vehicle occupants.”

A Test of Vulnerability

This is a test about vulnerability. Dan McLaughlin, a fellow at the conservative National Review Institute, argues that Good “had to actively try to make herself a target for an ICE agent. That was her choice, not ICE’s.”

Many of Ross’ supporters see the situation similarly—ICE poses no immediate threat to citizens. If an ICE agent gives a citizen an order, they have no reason to refuse. They implicitly trust that ICE will respect their status as Americans. On this view, Good put herself in danger; she made herself vulnerable to police violence. Thus, she is at fault.

Yet, as has been widely reported, ICE have surveilled, approached, assaulted, arrested, and detained US citizens. For Muslims, people of color and immigrants alike, citizenship offers no protections. Some of us don’t have the privilege to forget about the ways in which we are different.

When I see video from that day, I see Good being murdered. I see a version of America that betrays its most cherished ideals. I see community resilience and the attempts by armed officers to silence it.

Even if an act of injustice does not directly impact us, that’s not a reason to do nothing. Yet this is precisely what some believe. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh, for instance, posts: “This lesbian agitator gave her life to protect Somali scammers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her. The most disgraceful and humiliating end a person could possibly meet.”

Walsh’s comment is both homophobic and racist. It also demonstrates something very true about the nature of bigotry. The homophobe is always a racist; the racist is always a sexist; the sexist is always a xenophobe. Bigotry is inherently irrational and irrationality knows no bounds. As a woman in a same-sex marriage, Good likely understood this. As a Christian, she acknowledged her duty to help others in need.

A Test of Community

Finally, this is a test about belonging and community. For some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), ICE agents “are under unprecedented siege by radical leftist open border activists. This video […] shows you the danger our ICE agents are under.” But I would argue that it’s the exact opposite. American communities are under siege by federal agents empowered by an administration openly hostile to its own citizens.

When I see video from that day, I see Good being murdered. I see a version of America that betrays its most cherished ideals. I see community resilience and the attempts by armed officers to silence it.

But, in the aftermath, I see hope in the form of nationwide anti-ICE protests. I see a public that will not be gaslit by lies and falsehoods from those in power. I see that, despite the best efforts of the Trump administration, we haven’t yet lost what makes America great.

The beginning of 2026 falls into a period of increasing global social destruction. Multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe OSCE are being systematically destroyed. Countries such as the US and Russia are withdrawing from these institutions or attempting to obstruct them through blocking behavior.

Rich and Undemocratic ‘elites’ Are Appropriating the State

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are political leaders who are dismantling or destroying the remnants of democracy in their countries, increasing repressive pressure on their populations, and acting aggressively toward the outside world. They find international law rather annoying, ignore it, and develop a right-wing and authoritarian nationalism, within the framework of which the ruling circles in the US and Russia enrich themselves excessively and disregard everything that previous values in terms of decency and justice demand.

This goes hand in hand with a publicly declared shift in the definition of terrorism. People who demonstrate by peaceful and legitimate means against the excesses of the system and the policies of the corrupt and enriching class are not seen as opposition figures with a legitimate claim, but are increasingly classified as terrorists and criminals. This is the case, for example, in the US, Russia, and Turkey. The aim is to intimidate people and, once they are caught, to lock them up without a fair trial.

The self-enrichment of people who are already rich, multimillionaires and billionaires, goes hand in hand with the widening of the social divide in the countries affected. The lower social classes are deprived of what the super rich acquire. The USA is one example among many: Taxes have been drastically reduced for the rich, while at the same time the government is trying to withdraw healthcare support from millions of people.

The World Does Not Consist Only of the West

Certainly, only a few selected aspects can be addressed here.

The Global South is trying to organize itself and is pushing for a say in decision-making and an end to unfair economic exchange relationships. However, huge Western corporations continue to seek contact with regional despots and corrupt African leaders in order to gain access to Africa's mineral resources. South America is also affected by the eco-imperialist encroachments of the US. The US government even openly admits that its aggression in Venezuela, for example, is motivated by a desire to secure and exploit the world's largest oil reserves there.

Even if the pendulum has swung in the wrong direction so far, only gradual and internationally coordinated disarmament could enable an effective peace dividend that could be used to combat world hunger and the climate catastrophe.

China's role in the world is not yet clear. The People's Republic of China is attempting to gain economic access to the global economy and is particularly focused on its own interests in this regard. Step by step, internal social surveillance and repression are also being intensified. Ultimately, the assessment of China will be decided by the development of the Taiwan issue and China's behavior in Southeast Asia, particularly with regard to territorial issues in the South China Sea with other Southeast Asian neighboring countries.

Israel's government, which is in part right-wing extremist, has reacted completely disproportionately to the terrible attack by Hamas. Approximately 60,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children, were killed and the Gaza Strip was almost completely destroyed. It will take generations to overcome the hatred resulting from these murders and killings.

In Sudan, a civil war supported by foreign powers is raging, with mass rape and killings. Over 10 million people are fleeing Sudan.

Massive Armament Programs Promise a Deceptive Sense of Security

The eco-imperialist and geostrategic wars instigated by right-wing nationalist governments are also coming closer and closer to the center of Europe. Concerns about being drawn into a war over Russia's attack on Ukraine are spreading there as well. At the same time, almost all European countries are arming themselves militarily, incurring massive debt, and wasting the resources of future generations on the destructive production of increasingly dangerous weapons.

This leads to substantial returns for the owners and shareholders of the arms industry. The political-military-industrial complex is functioning and is becoming increasingly accepted by society through media influence, growing fear of war, and the creation of jobs.

The new weapons systems below the nuclear threshold are becoming increasingly dangerous. Hypersonic missiles in particular pose a major threat, as they are capable of carrying out "decapitation strikes" that are difficult to intercept due to their high speed and maneuverability. The planned deployment of hypersonic missiles and cruise missiles under US command in Germany in 2026 is a provocation that the peace movement is trying to resist.

The ever-evolving drones with increasingly dangerous warheads are also changing the war situation not only on the front lines, but also for civil societies at home. No one is safe from the drones lurking in war zones anymore. Drone operators, hidden in the hinterland, can kill and destroy with relatively little risk.

Nuclear weapons systems are currently being modernized in all nuclear states with huge investments and developed to be increasingly dangerous. These states hope that the deterrent effect will provide security and also enable them to assert their geostrategic interests with the conventional weapons systems of a nuclear power. There are now also calls for a nuclear protective shield for Europe. But the security promise of a nuclear protective shield is an illusion. No country in the world is capable of reliably defending itself against attacking hybrid weapon systems, which also include hypersonic missiles with nuclear warheads.

But even without the use of nuclear weapons, modern society is extremely vulnerable. Drone and hacker attacks on critical infrastructure cannot be defended against in their entirety. They can lead to chaos in a society and the collapse of the social organization of life, combined with social unrest, violence, and looting.

Ultimately, societies can only be protected from these dangers by reorganizing and restructuring their multilateral relations in a cooperative direction. Even if the pendulum has swung in the wrong direction so far, only gradual and internationally coordinated disarmament could enable an effective peace dividend that could be used to combat world hunger and the climate catastrophe. This can only be achieved through a significant reform of the United Nations. In particular, the right of aggressive states such as Russia and the US to block decisions in the highest bodies of the UN, especially the UN Security Council, must be abolished. Overall, the United Nations needs to be strengthened and democratized.

AI Can Have Positive but Also Dangerous Effects

The further development of artificial intelligence (AI) in connection with newer weapon systems means that humans are increasingly losing control over weapons. AI information is difficult to verify when decisions must be made within minutes about whether a nuclear attack is taking place and a counterattack should be launched. In such cases, decision-makers are ultimately at the mercy of AI, which transmits messages based on information from hundreds of sensors. Misinformation cannot be clarified. There is a risk of accidental nuclear war.

In this context, it is also important to warn very clearly about the danger of superintelligence developing on the internet, AI that becomes autonomous. Superintelligence achieves cognitive performance that far exceeds human capabilities and intelligence. Such AI could have a disruptive or even destructive effect on critical infrastructure and, in the worst case, gain uncontrolled access to nuclear weapons systems.

AI can be used positively in many ways, such as in skin cancer screening or language translation. However, there must be no unrestrained AI development in the hands of large, profit-oriented tech companies. Instead, development must be controlled by ethically guided international rules and strictly sanctioned in the event of violations.

The World Is Increasingly on the Run

Millions of people, especially in the Global South, are currently fleeing the consequences of the climate crisis and wars that are destroying their livelihoods. At the same time, the countries of the Global North are trying to shield themselves from these refugee movements. This is also being done in the defense against right-wing extremist political movements and parties, which exploit the flight of these people for their political propaganda. Nevertheless, even countries that still seriously pursue democratic goals are threatened by right-wing extremist takeovers of their governments.

That is how things currently stand. It would be wrong to look away or gloss over the situation.

And yet: Perspectives for Positive Developments

Especially in this difficult global situation, it is important to pay attention to social countermovements and successful examples of social organization and social resistance against the destruction of civilization.

The pendulum may well swing back when the civilian population and parts of the ruling classes realize that war is not a solution to global problems, but only costs livelihoods, human lives, financial resources, and destroys our shared world.

The influence of those parts of the global economy that compete with the political-military-industrial complex and depend on peace and the undisturbed global exchange of goods and services should not be underestimated. They will try to assert their influence.

People in a society will not put up with decades of oppression and exploitation.

The trillions of dollars that will be spent in the future on measures to prevent and mitigate the approaching climate catastrophe will also give large sections of society pause for thought. The climate catastrophe will occur earlier than expected due to emissions from wars and military operations. If, in addition, social resources are invested in wars and states go into debt for this purpose, they will lack the financial resources and social energy to even begin to address human-made climate change.

Even if the world's largest fossil fuel dealers try to assert their interests by military means, their time will be up in the medium term. The development of technology based on renewable energy generation can no longer be stopped globally.

Furthermore, people in a society will not put up with decades of oppression and exploitation. They will reorganize themselves into civil society and begin to work together to bring about change, even in the face of pressure from authoritarian societies.

These are some weighty arguments as to why the current destruction can develop in a more constructive direction and the pendulum can swing back.

In addition to these economic, sociopolitical, and peace-ecological perspectives, there are other developments in which new ideas are already being tried out, new forms of community life and work are emerging, and civil society protest movements are evolving.

Thus, the new is already emerging from the old.

Even though many things are currently moving in the wrong direction, there are also reasons for hope and prospects for positive developments. I still believe that a peaceful and sustainably developed world is possible through a realignment of social conditions at the local, national, regional, and global levels.

But all those who see this and desire it must intensify and expand their efforts together. A social realignment can only come about if visions of social development based on precise analysis are thought through, then formulated in a way that is feasible and can be put into practice.

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Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Iran threatens to retaliate if the US follows through on its threat to militarily attack to defend protesters, while requesting negotiations with the White House.

•  Back home in the US, the Trump Administration characterizes anti-ICE protesters as domestic terrorists and threatens to send in more ICE forces.

• Trump threatens to veto extension of Obamacare subsidies.

• Trump to meet with Denmark over Greenland.

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With Congress overseeing the ending of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, enhanced premium tax credit, or subsidies, for Americans, hiking premiums for them to buy private healthcare insurance, consider such economics and politics in the context of $1 trillion in defense spending. Why? Context matters, economically and politically.

Against this backdrop, ACA subsidies are 3% or three-hundredths, of $1 trillion. To be sure, $30 billion is real money to the average US citizen. But $30 billion of federal spending for ACA subsidies is a drop in the bucket of a $1 trillion defense budget.

This policy priority reflects a political economy that weakens the healthcare of an estimated 22 million Americans facing ACA premium hikes of 114%, on average, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, and strengthens the profitability of military corporations such as Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics. Such federal spending priorities are a kitchen table issue affecting people who vote blue, red, or independent, or are non-voters.

Here’s the bottom line. Healthcare insurance is a necessity, not a luxury.

Thus, about 10 days of annual defense spending equals the $30 billion of expired Obamacare subsidies. Welcome to politics and economics in capitalist America.

In 2026, with ACA tax credits expiring, Renee Rubin Ross, a mother who lives in California and covers her family of four with Obamacare, is facing a big price hike. How big? Try $2,700 more each month to maintain healthcare coverage. That’s $32,400 more per year for Ross to buy ACA coverage. Where will she and millions of Americans like her find the money to pay their healthcare bills?

The out-of-pocket costs for mom-and-pop shops are also spiking. Shaundell Newsome is the founder of Sumnu Marketing in Las Vegas and co-chair of Small Business for America's Future. “Refusing to extend the Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits has abandoned us and added soaring healthcare costs to the economic crisis crushing Main Street this year,” he said in a statement. “We’re beyond disappointed that 5 million small business owners are now almost certain to see their premiums double.”

We return to the $1 trillion annual defense budget. That figure amounts to just over $2.7 billion of spending on defense every day of the year. Thus, about 10 days of annual defense spending equals the $30 billion of expired Obamacare subsidies. Welcome to politics and economics in capitalist America.

The US political economy reflects the money power of the top defense contractors to lobby Congress and the White House for a budget policy that drives increased military spending. There’s a bipartisan consensus, a blue and red marriage. You can’t blame only President Donald J. Trump. Visit opensecrets.org to see the proof of the spending parity in military contractors’ lobbying, a revealing blue and red party breakdown.

For the average US citizen, there is simply no equivalent force of politics and economics in their interests regarding health and warfare spending. Big money sways policy priorities, and the average US citizen is at a distinct disadvantage. That’s not a law of nature, just an indication of a disorganized American working class, politically speaking.

Healthcare spending is a constructive means of improving people’s living conditions. Think of regular check-ups, ranging in age from infants to seniors, who receive care from doctors and nurses. Think of mental health services, a crucial component of health and wellness, for those in need, from traumatized military veterans to sexual assault victims. There are also emergency room visits for accidents and unexpected medical situations such as strokes.

There are coalitions at the state level that do great work to improve funding for healthcare. One example is Health Access California. Its advocacy has in part resulted in lower-cost insulin via CalRX. This means $11 per pen for Californians.

Meanwhile, defense spending is a destructive force that worsens people’s lives at home and abroad. I close with a list, a partial one, of the foreign places where US armaments directly and by proxy lead to the loss of lives and limbs.

Just ask the relatives of Venezuelans maimed and murdered during the US early morning attack and kidnapping of the nation’s elected president and his wife recently. For that matter, ask the family members of the fishermen who lost their lives due to aerial strikes from US forces in the Caribbean over the past few months. Then there are families and friends of those injured and killed by US drone strikes in Somalia. US defense spending has been and remains despite a “ceasefire” a central part of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile, there is talk in the US Senate about resuming the expired ACA enhanced tax credits. Shifting federal spending from a $1 trillion defense budget to funding Americans’ healthcare is in all likelihood not a part of this political talk given the corporate-dominant political economy of the country’s military-industrial complex and imperialist foreign policy.

A solution to this destructive situation is movement politics, popular mobilization, and organization of working people in their interests as a class force for peace and social justice, domestically and globally. A few groups that come to mind are CodePink, the Poor People’s Campaign, Public Citizen, and Repairers of the Breach.

One word—plastics. That was the golden grail that Dustin Hoffman learned about from some well-wisher in the movie The Graduate. I remember watching the film as a farm kid and thinking about the updated version I was being told by my guidance counselors—one word: computers. We are now in the midst of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the latest mantra is: artificial intelligence. Such free advice, though, could really be a costly warning in disguise.

Granted, there is a lot of poverty in the “richest” nation on Earth, and marginalized US communities often have few choices for economic (mal) development. It becomes a twisted game of pick your own poison: supermax prison, toxic waste dump, ethanol facility, tar sands pipeline… Now, AI data centers have been added to the limited menu. Someone recently shared a map of looming AI data centers across the world. It reminded me of how a tumor spreads and Edward Abbey’s quote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

The fact that Big Data has targeted Rural America for its latest mastitis should be no surprise. We have lots of available land to grab, thanks to the legacy of settler colonialism and family-farm foreclosure. Back in August I remember driving past Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and watching bulldozers flattening over 800 acres along Hwy 151 and my first hunch was: data center. Sure enough, the secretive $1 billion deal with Meta was finally revealed in a November press release. Just north of Madison in the town of DeForest, Blackstone subsidiary QTS Realty Trust is aiming to build another $12 billion data center on close to 1,600 acres. And if we need to free up more land for AI, we quaint rural folks could just abandon growing real Xmas trees and force people to buy plastic ones instead, as one Fox News “expert” suggested over the holidays. Former President Joe Biden visited Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin in May 2024 to promote Microsoft’s new $3.3 billion 300+ acre AI campus on the former site of flat screen maker, Foxconn, that welcomed President Donald Trump for its groundbreaking back in 2018. Foxconn abandoned that $10 billion project and its 13,000 job promise, after getting millions in state subsidies and local tax deferrals.

The Microsoft AI complex in Mt. Pleasant will also require over 8 million gallons of water per year from Lake Michigan. We still have some clean water, though that may not last long thanks to agrochemical monocultures, CAFO manure dumping, and PFAS-laden sludge spreading. And AI certainly is thirsty—the Alliance for the Great Lakes noted in its August 2025 report that a hyperscale AI data center needs up to 365 million gallons of water to keep itself cool—that is as much water as is needed by 12,000 people! A recent investigative report by Bloomberg News found that over two-thirds of the AI data centers built since 2022 are in parts of the country already facing water stress. And it is really hard to drink data.

But is all the AI hype just another bubble about to burst? Rural communities (and public taxpayers) have been offered many “amazing” schemes in the past that ended up being just a “bait and switch”—another hollow promise.

In the Midwest we also have potential access to vast electricity (fracked natural gas, wind and solar farms, methane digesters), and relatively under-stressed high voltage grids (unlike California or Texas), though the loss of “cheaper” imported Canadian hydropower with the latest trade war could be a serious challenge. In 2023 the US had over a $2 billion electricity trade deficit vis-a-vis Canada. According to a recent Clean Wisconsin report, just two of our proposed AI data centers will require 3.9 gigawatts—1.5 times the current power demand of all 4.3 million homes in the state.

But, no worry, there are dilapidated US nuclear reactors with massive waste dumps that could be put back online such as Palisades in Michigan, despite opposition from environmental activists and family farmers. The Trump administration also just announced a $1 billion low-interest loan to reanimate Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania for the sake of AI. Until all that happens, though, regular ratepayers can expect a huge hike in their energy bills as Big Data has the market clout to siphon off what it needs first, especially as it colludes with utility monopolies. Many people in Wisconsin are already paying for $1+ billion in stranded assets—mostly defunct coal plants, as well as nuclear waste storage facilities—while utility investors continue to receive guaranteed dividends of 9-10%.

But is all the AI hype just another bubble about to burst? Rural communities (and public taxpayers) have been offered many “amazing” schemes in the past that ended up being just a “bait and switch”—another hollow promise. If we subsidize a massive data center, will the projected “market” for increasing algorithms actually come? Many within the AI industry don’t think so, and are now invoking the lessons we should have learned from the Enron scandal decades ago or the even worse sequel in the subprime mortgage-fueled financial meltdown. Corporate cheerleaders can be quite clever when it comes to inflating prices (and stocks) for goods and services that may not even exist, while hiding their massive debt obligations in a whole cascading series of shadowy shell subsidiaries and dishonest accounting shenanigans.

Many industry insiders are ringing alarm bells. "These models are being hyped up, and we're investing more than we should," said Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize, quoted in a recent NPR story about the current AI boom or bubble. OpenAI says it will spend $1.4 trillion on data centers over the next eight years, while Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are going to throw in another $400 billion. Meanwhile, just 3% of people who use AI now pay for it, and many are frantically trying to figure out how to turn off AI mode on their internet searches and to reject AI eavesdropping on their Zoom calls. Where is the real revenue going to come from to pay for all this AI speculation? The same NPR story notes that such a flood of leveraged capital is equal to every iPhone user on Earth forking over $250 to “enjoy” the benefits of AI—and “that’s not going to happen,” adds Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist who is now a research fellow at MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy. Morgan Stanley estimates AI companies will shell out $3 trillion by 2028 for this data center buildout—but less than 50% of that money will come from them. Hmmm...

Special purpose vehicle (SPV) may sound like a fancy name for a retrofitted tractor, but that is how Big Data is creating a Potemkin Village to hide their Ponzi Scheme. Here is one example from Richland Parish, Louisiana where Meta is now building its Hyperion Data Center—a massive $27 billion project. A Wall Street outfit, Blue Owl, borrows $27 billion, using Meta’s future rent payments for a data center to back up its loan. Meta’s 20% “mortgage” on the facility gives them 100% control of the purported data crunching from the facility. This debt never shows up on Meta’s books and remains hidden from carefree investors and shallow analysts, but, like other synthetic financial instruments such as the now infamous mortgage backed security (MBS), the reality only comes home to roost when the house of cards collapses and Meta has to eventually pay off Blue Owl.

In the meantime, as the Louisiana Illuminator reports, the residents of Richland Parish (where 25% live below the poverty level) are bearing the brunt of all the real costs of having an AI factory farm. Dozens of crashes involving construction vehicles; damage to local roads; and massive future energy demands (three times that required for the entire city of New Orleans), which will entail new natural gas power plants to be built (subsidized by existing ratepayers even as fossil fuel-induced climate change floods the Louisiana delta). Beyond the initial building flurry, AI data centers are ultimately job poor. It just doesn’t take that many people to tend computers once they are built. As Meta’s VP, Brad Smith, admitted, the 250,000 square foot Hyperion data center may need 1,500 workers to build but barely 50 to operate. Beyond all the ballyhoo, the main reason a particular community is chosen to “host” one seems to be based upon the bought duplicity of elected officials and the excessive generosity of local taxpayers. Not a good cost-benefit analysis—unless you are Big Data.

And then there are the questionable kickback schemes between the suppliers of the technology and those owning the data centers. If you are maker of computer chips, would you not be tempted to fork over capital to a major buyer of your own products to ensure future demand? Nvidia just announced a $100 billion stake in OpenAI to help bankroll the data centers. In turn OpenAI signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle to actually build the AI data centers that will require Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). OpenAI also signed a separate $6+ billion deal with former BitCoin miner, CoreWeave, which rents out internet cloud access (using Nvidia’s chips once again). This type of incestuous circular financing should raise eyebrows to anyone who studies business ethics—and perhaps remind others of how a toilet operates.

What is all this AI doing? Promoters will point to many innovations—faster screening for cancer cells, closer connection to far-flung relatives, precision application of fertilizers and pesticides, elimination of drudgery in the workplace through automation. A bright future indeed—or perhaps not?

The real issue is whether or not AI data centers are economically viable, socially appropriate, environmentally sustainable, and actually serve the public interest.

In August 2025, ProPublica reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had lost 20% of its staff devoted to food safety thanks to DOGE cuts. Inspection of food import facilities is now at a historic low even as our dependence on the rest of the world to feed us grows. But not to worry, the FDA announced in May that AI was coming to the rescue thanks to a large language model (LLM)—dubbed Elsa—that would be deployed alongside what’s left of its human staff to expedite their oversight work. Hopefully, Elsa knows melamine when it sees it. AI chatbots are also growing in popularity and available 24-7 to “talk or advise” people on all sorts of pressing issues—how to win more friends, how to cheat on this exam, how to make up fake legal opinions, even encouraging a teenager to commit suicide and suggesting to someone else that they murder their own parents.

But there is an even dirtier AI underbelly. Some have dubbed these AI slop, AI smut, and AI stazi—three 21st-century horsemen of the digital apocalypse. What is this all about? Well, a lot of these accelerating AI algorithms are actually devoted to selling “products” that many people do not want and would find objectionable, as well as providing “services” that undermine our basic freedoms. Slop (Merriam Webster’s word of 2025) is used to describe when AI generates internet content that is only meant to make money through advertising. Right now there are thousands of wannabe internet “creatives” all over the globe, watching “how-to videos” to manufacture AI social media to grab the eyeballs of US consumers. That cute puppy video you see on Instagram or that shocking “news” story you read on Facebook is not by accident—the goal is to monetize clicks per thousand (cost per mille, or CPM) where advertisers pay for how much their ad is viewed online. This is also why online content is often overly long (where is the actual recipe in this cooking blog?), since that increases ad scrolling. The average US consumer is now subject to between 6,000 and 10,000 ads per day—70% of which are online. For more on AI slop, visit: https://www.visibrain.com/blog/ai-slop-social-media.

An even worse virtual commodity is AI smut—literally algorithms creating pornography. This perverted version of AI scraps the internet for images (high school yearbooks, red carpet fashion shows, popular music concerts, street cam footage, etc.) and then uses “face swap” programs to create personalized hardcore rubbish. There is little if any accountability for this theft of public images and violation of personal privacy—at best those involved are “shamed” into taking down their AI sites after being exposed due to fears of liability and prosecution for child abuse. But that has hardly stopped this seedy AI subsector. Can you imagine your face or image being put into such a lucrative sexploitative scenario without your permission? At this point, there are hardly any internet police walking the beat in the virtual AI world. We don’t even have the right to be forgotten on the internet.

Which brings us to AI stazi—the updated version of the Cold War-era East German secret police. University of Wisconsin Madison just announced the creation of a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI), in part thanks to a $140 million donation from Cisco. Few Bucky Badger fans know that 30 years ago they were used as guinea pigs while cheering at Camp Randall Stadium to help create facial recognition technology through a UW-Madison grant from the Department of Defense Applied Research Agency (DARPA). Visitors to the UW campus today will no doubt “enjoy” the automated license plate readers (ALRPs) owned by Flock Safety. According to an August 2025 Wisconsin Examiner expose, there are hundreds of Flock cameras across the state in use by law enforcement agencies, including Wisconsin county sheriff departments with active 287(g) cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No warrant is needed for law enforcement agencies to browse the national Flock database. In fact, agents have used Flock to track peaceful protesters, spy on spouses, or just stalk people they don’t like. To see where Flock cameras are near you, visit: www.deflock.me. Of course, Flock Security has outsourced its AI programming to cheaper (and more secure?) Filipino contractors. Similar AI spying networks such as Pegasus have been widely exposed and have become “bread and butter” for authoritarian regimes from Israel to Saudi Arabia. China and Russia have their own versions (Skynet, SORM, etc.). Thanks to the cozy relationship between Trump and Peter Thiel, the US-based AI mercenary outfit, Palantir, is now being redeployed for domestic surveillance—first revealed by Edward Snowden back in 2017.

The latest executive bluster from Trump is that states’ rights are out the window when it comes to regulating AI data centers—such federal preemption of local democratic control is part of the larger neoliberal “race to the bottom” forced-trade agenda. But the cat is already out of the bag as dozens of communities have successfully blocked AI data center projects and others are poised to do the same based upon their winning strategies. Better yet, this is a bipartisan grassroots organizing issue!

What is the best way to keep out an AI factory farm? No non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)! These are massive development schemes that could not exist without the approval and support of elected officials, so any agreement should not be secret. They can hardly claim to be providing a public good if they are not subject to transparency and oversight. No sweetheart deals! Big Data is among the wealthiest sectors of our current economy and does not need or deserve subsidies, discounted electric rates, tax increment financing, property tax holidays, or other incentives. It is a classic move of crony capitalism to privatize the benefits and socialize the costs. No regulatory loopholes! Given their huge demands for land, water, and energy, Big Data should not be allowed to cut legal corners and needs to follow all the rules of any other normal enterprise—full liability coverage, no special economic zones, consideration of cumulative impacts, protections for ratepayers, no unregulated toxic pollution or illegal water transfer in violation of the Clean Water Act or the Great Lakes Compact, etc. How much water your data center demands is hardly a “trade secret.”

And most important, don’t let Big Data boosters belittle your legitimate concerns as “neo-Luddite!” Everyone uses technology—even the Amish. The real issue is whether or not AI data centers are economically viable, socially appropriate, environmentally sustainable, and actually serve the public interest. People have good reasons to be wary and oppose them on all those fronts.

For more info, checkout: Big Tech Unchecked: A Toolkit for Community Action

As well as the North Star Data Center Policy Toolkit

Under Article V of the NATO Charter, an armed attack against one NATO member is considered an attack against all members, including the United States itself. If the U.S. were to carry out its threat to attack Greenland—a Danish territory, and Denmark being a close NATO ally—this would create a highly bizarre and unprecedented situation.

The post Who Will Run Greenland Afterward? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In polling conducted on January 8, YouGov showed that American public opinion has turned sharply against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This polling was conducted on the same day Renee Good was killed during an ICE operation in Minneapolis, so it does not fully incorporate the public outrage generated by this event.

Fully 52% disapprove of how ICE is doing its job (42% strongly disapprove), while 39% approve. Furthermore, 51% say that ICE’s tactics are “too forceful," while just over 1 in 4 (27%) say they are “about right.” A 44% plurality (30% strongly approve) approve of “recent protests against ICE.”

Support for ICE’s work is clustered strongly among Republicans (53% strongly approve, 27% somewhat approve). Democrats give ICE failing grades by an overwhelming margin (72% strongly disapprove, 13% somewhat disapprove). The most significant finding in the YouGov poll is that a 56% majority of Independents (44% strongly, 12% somewhat) disapprove of ICE.

To put this issue in perspective, in February of last year YouGov polling found that ICE had a plus 16-point approval rating.

As more people see video from the Good killing, public opinion will continue to shift.

Axios points out that support for abolishing ICE has dramatically increased.

• In September 2024, just 19% supported abolishing the agency, according to survey data from research firm Civiqs, while 66% opposed.
• This month, 42% support abolishing the agency and 49.5% oppose.
• Abolishing ICE has become a consensus view among Democrats, per the Civiqs data, with 69% of Democrats now supporting the idea.

As more people see video from the Good killing, public opinion will continue to shift. In response to the White House reaction, we may see more Republican support for ICE. An equally likely conclusion is that ICE will hemorrhage support from Independents.

Despite what President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say, the polling data clearly shows that the majority of Americans are not on the side of ICE, but are with those putting their lives on the line to protest ICE’s aggressive actions.

For decades, Canada has carefully cultivated a global reputation for principle, human rights, and moral clarity. However, that image is now cracking, and cracking fast. For too long, Canada has cloaked its inaction and complicity, rather spectacularly, behind political correctness. But as the global crises grow more brutal—and more visible—it has become harder for Canada to maintain this facade.

Canadians and people around the world are catching on to the gap between what the country claims to stand for and what it actually does. That gap is just impossible to ignore when it comes to the situation in Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed over 80,000 Palestinians—and that figure represents only the confirmed deaths, excluding those trapped beneath the rubble. Experts have estimated that nearly 600,000 total Palestinians have lost their lives, including thousands of children, and nearly 2 million more have been displaced, an overwhelming portion of the strip’s population.

United Nations experts and international human rights organizations have increasingly raised alarms, calling this horrific massacre what it is: a genocide. Gaza now lies beneath 68 million tons of rubble, roughly the weight of 186 Empire State Buildings—enough debris to spread 215 pounds over every square inch of Manhattan. Meanwhile, the United States continues to ship to Israel, and Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.

The latest Arms Embargo Now report documents hundreds of shipments of Canadian-made fighter jet components, explosives, and propellants flowing through US facilities to Israel. Shipping data, contract records, ports of exit, and delivery timelines confirm that Canadian military goods are directly sustaining Israel’s assault on Gaza. Between late 2023 and mid-2025, over 360 shipments of Canadian aircraft parts reached Lockheed Martin's F-35 assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of commercially available shipping data revealed that at least 34 shipments were forwarded from US facilities directly to Israeli military bases and defense firms. Canadian explosives and propellants, including the M31A2 triple-base propellant and TNT, transshipped through the Port of Saguenay, Quebec, were routed through US munitions plants to produce bombs and artillery shells used in Gaza.

Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada?

The report further shows that many of these controlled military components were transported from Canada to the United States as cargo on commercial passenger flights, departing from major airports such as Toronto Pearson and Montréal-Trudeau. These components support both new aircraft production and ongoing maintenance, keeping Israeli F-35s operational during the Gaza assault, while the use of civilian airlines blurs the line between ordinary passenger travel and an active military supply chain. Every shipment appears to flow through a calculated, politically engineered pipeline fueling war.

This evidence exposes a stark truth: Public assurances by Canadian officials are incompatible with reality. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly promised that Canada would not allow “any form of arms or parts of arms” to reach Gaza, directly or indirectly. Her successor, Anita Anand, repeated similar commitments. Yet the shipments continue. Canada has not stopped sending arms; it has simply outsourced accountability.

The government’s defense relies on the so-called US Loophole: Military exports to the United States are exempt from Canada’s permit requirements and human rights assessments. Once in US hands, Canada claims no responsibility for where the arms go next. However, international law does not vanish because weapons cross a border. The Arms Trade Treaty prohibits authorizing transfers when there is a substantial risk of facilitating serious violations of humanitarian law. Knowledge, foreseeability, and contribution still matter.

The pattern of misrepresentation is clear. From December 2023 to January 2024, officials, including former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and GAC Assistant Deputy Minister Alexandre Lévêque, claimed no arms exports or permits had been issued to Israel, a statement contradicted by nearly $30 million in new export permits. Early 2024 saw a pivot to “non-lethal” exports, with night-vision goggles and protective gear cited to obscure lethal shipments of bomb accessories and explosives. Parliamentary motions and public statements claiming a halt to arms exports were largely symbolic, leaving the vast majority of existing permits intact.

By 2024-2025, claims that exports were restricted to “defensive” uses, such as the Iron Dome, or would not reach Gaza, were impossible to verify and did not prevent Canadian-made components from being incorporated into Israeli munitions. The government’s narrative meandered endlessly, offering Kafkaesque explanations that dissolved accountability into legalistic semantics.

If Canada were truly innocent, it would have promptly and publicly refuted the findings of the Arms Embargo Now report. Instead, it has responded with silence. Even after Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan introduced Bill C-233 in September 2025 to close the US loophole and impose meaningful parliamentary oversight on arms exports, the bill has been left to languish untouched. This legislation offers a straightforward safeguard to prevent Canadian weapons and components from being routed through the United States to fuel conflicts abroad, yet the government refuses to move.

If this were merely bureaucratic oversight, and if sending arms indirectly to Israel were not the objective, why has there been no momentum on a measure so clearly aligned with transparency and human rights? Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada? And why do weapon components and ammunition continue to flow even as Canadian representatives and humanitarian delegates are barred from entering the occupied West Bank, prevented from witnessing conditions on the ground themselves?

At this point, one can only wonder how much longer Canada’s moral facade can plausibly endure. As Aldous Huxley once observed, “The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.” This appears to be the goal here. The government has offered no coherent defense, only theatrical explanations in which responsibility dissolves into process and legality is reduced to paperwork. There is no counterstrategy, no rebuttal, and no attempt at persuasion. There is only silence, complexity, and delay.

Perhaps the unspoken calculation is that this response will be enough. After all, when public schools report alarming declines in reading and comprehension skills, critical engagement becomes harder to sustain. If citizens struggle to parse policy documents or follow supply-chain evidence, denial need not be convincing; it merely needs to be exhausting. In such an environment, ignorance becomes not a failure of governance, but a quiet line of defense.

In light of all this, recognition of the State of Palestine now reads like a scripted apology: Yes, we see your suffering, we hear your cries, but don’t worry, we’ll keep arming your oppressor through the US. Meanwhile, Canadian factories quietly churn out fighter jet parts, explosives, and munitions that fuel Israel’s assault on Gaza. As Joseph Heller observed in Catch-22, “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.” It is a brutal reminder that, regardless of what the government says, Canada’s military industry has reduced Palestinian lives in Gaza to expendable instruments, sacrificed to preserve contracts, alliances, and profit. Words without action are meaningless; they are a costume of virtue, while the violence continues unabated.

Canada’s reputation cannot survive on statements alone. It rests on the belief that credible evidence of mass harm would prompt action. That belief no longer holds. The facts are documented. The loopholes are exposed. The silence is deliberate.

History will not remember Canada for its statements or parliamentary motions. It will remember the arms it allowed to flow, the civilians killed with its components, and the moral compromise it has embraced. Canada’s rhetoric of principle is a veneer, one that is cracking as a majority of Canadians now demand recognition of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Behind this veneer lies complicity, deliberate and undeniable.

The Trump administration has suspended over $10 billion of federal childcare funds for five Democratic-led states over alleged fraud. So what if childcare in the United States is already outrageously expensive, much higher than in other developed countries? And why is it that childcare in the US is so expensive?

Socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre sheds light on these questions in the interview that follows by pointing out the various changes that have taken place over time in the organization of social reproduction and argues, in turn, that universal childcare, an idea that is becoming increasingly popular with voters across many parts of the United States, is very much needed.

Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

C. J. Polychroniou: You’ve written widely about the rising price of parenting. Despite concerns about a national birthrate that is now below replacement level, there seems to be relatively little public effort to increase economic support for parents and children in this country. Why?

Nancy Folbre: The undeclared wars the Trump administration is conducting include a brazen process of reducing public support for the next generation. This process began last spring when billionaire Elon Musk spearheaded budget cuts and layoffs in programs benefiting children and began dismantling the Department of Education. It escalated in the first week of 2026 when the administration used accusations of fraud from a partisan video of childcare centers in Minnesota as an excuse to freeze federal childcare funds to five Democratic states.

The strategy is transparent: Tar all social spending with a sticky claim of fraud and abuse. This includes spending on parents and children, already hurt by cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. These cuts have reduced the affordability of family care for all but the affluent, making a mockery of the Trump administration’s promises of prosperity for all.

An understanding of the deeper forces driving this strategy requires a deep dive into historical changes in the organization of our social reproduction.

A similar logic applies in a different direction to investments in us and our children—why risk them if they are not cost-effective? Robots may soon be cheaper, and they never go on strike OR vote.

Children are getting more expensive for parents even as investment in future workers is becoming less cost-effective for employers. Economic pressures became evident centuries ago when child labor was outlawed and technological change increased the demand for skilled labor. This shift in demand helped incentivize investments in public health and education that were financed by higher taxes. The need for future workers—and soldiers—also intensified the need for wages sufficient to support at least a modicum of family care.

While employers constantly sought ways to reduce labor costs, their need for an ample supply of skilled labor at least partially aligned their incentives with those of workers themselves through support for the so-called welfare state (better termed a “social investment” state) that helped develop and maintain the capabilities of the working population.

Fast forward to the present. The huge amounts of money being invested in artificial intelligence represent a new bet on reducing labor costs both directly (through reduced employment and wages) and indirectly (through reduced investment in health, education, and social services).

A recent Wall Street Journal headline put it this way: “AI Job Losses Are Coming, Tech Execs Say. The Question: Who’s Most at Risk?” The answer: most of us—because general artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to reduce private incentives to invest in humans rather than data centers. Elon Musk, who spearheaded efforts to cut federal spending in early 2025, is happily promoting Tesla’s new Optimus robot.

C. J. Polychroniou: You seem to be suggesting that class conflict affects public policies, which affect demographic outcomes (and vice versa). How do most economists think about these issues?

Nancy Folbre: Mainstream economists seldom pay much attention to collective identities or interests such as those based on class, gender, citizenship, or parenthood. Their general confidence in the efficiency of market forces makes them hopeful that that the labor market will adjust to changing prices—that new jobs will replace those rendered obsolete. However, college-educated, entry-level workers in the US are already experiencing diminished job prospects. Some economists predict that the “adjustment costs” will be high—a polite way of saying that the younger generation is in for an unpleasant economic shock.

Some ideological adjustment is also underway. The theory of “human capital” successfully promoted the view that the labor market would reward the skills represented by a college degree, reinforcing the claim that employees are generally paid according to the value of what they produce. The very term “human capital” suggests that there is no real distinction between capitalists and workers—everyone can be a capitalist by investing in their own earning power.

This utopian fantasy has long been countered by evidence that the environment people grow up in—including many factors well beyond their own control—shapes their economic trajectory. The fantasy is countered even more powerfully by evidence that the returns to a college education are now declining for individuals coming from low-income families. The surge of investment in AI raises the distinct possibility that the supply of “human capital” is likely to further exceed the demand for it, threatening downward mobility for a segment of the paid labor force once considered relatively secure.

Of course, even conservative economists recognize that a good education—from preschool to college--does more than merely increase lifetime earnings. It enhances the skills that people need to manage their own lives—skills like troubleshooting phones, making good decisions about what to buy, how to save, how to vote, and how to parent. Well-educated people live longer—and not just because they tend to earn more money.

But these benefits are not as profitable as increased productivity for a private firm.

Because they have characteristics of a public good, their economic contribution is difficult to measure, much less privately capture. Policies such as universal childcare, paid family or sick leave, and options to engage in employment from home yield significant economic returns, but these are not channeled directly to those who pay for them.

Standard economics textbooks note that firms have economic incentives to pollute the environment if this increases profitability, even if future inhabitants of the planet will pay a high price. A similar logic applies in a different direction to investments in us and our children—why risk them if they are not cost-effective? Robots may soon be cheaper, and they never go on strike OR vote.

C. J. Polychroniou: It sounds like you’re arguing that the theory of “human capital” no longer holds much water. But there are some economists out there who have articulated larger criticisms of capitalist institutions in general. How do these criticisms connect the rising private cost of children, fertility decline, and the possible obsolescence of the white-collar labor force?

Nancy Folbre: Kind of a long story, but I’ll keep it short! Economists like myself, influenced by socialist and feminist ideas, highlight the institutional arrangements that shape the distribution of the costs of raising children and the reproduction of human society itself. In many precapitalist societies, parents enjoyed at least partial payback for the costs of childrearing, as adult children contributed to family income and the support of their elders. Capitalist institutions encouraged labor mobility and reliance on individual earnings, weakening such family and community-based transfers.

Democratic engagement and bargaining over the role of the state gradually led to a different system of intergenerational transfers, taxing employers and the working-age population to help finance public education for the young and pensions and healthcare for the elderly.

This institutional compromise helped stabilize the process of “social reproduction” but also led to unequal distribution of its costs. It allowed employers to keep their contributions to the production of the next generation relatively low. It delivered fewer benefits to parents (those devoting time and money to producing new workers and taxpayers) than to non-parents. It also reinforced a gender division of labor that imposed a disproportionate share of the private costs of family care on women.

We can’t continue to treat care as a kind of expensive hobby rather than a productive contribution to our collective future.

These inequalities amplified increases in the private cost of raising children (for mothers in particular), encouraging efforts to limit family size. New technologies, increased demand for skills, and opportunities for employment outside the home also played an obvious role.

Until recently, fertility decline was considered an economic boon, allowing more women to enter paid employment and promoting the growth of Gross Domestic Product. As is now widely recognized, however, below-replacement fertility poses problems of its own. When women bear less than about 2.1 children over their lifetime, they don’t generate enough surviving children to “replace” their biological parents.

If this rate persists, the size of the youngest generation declines steadily over time, increasing the share of the elderly population relative to the employment-age, tax-paying population. The economic burden of increased old-age dependency increases political conflict over who should pay the costs—and can intensify the economic stresses of caring for younger dependents as well.

Reduction in the size of the global population offers some potential benefits, given current threats to the global environment (not to mention the dicey future of decent jobs). But if we prove unable to get back up to replacement levels of fertility at some point in the future, we will render ourselves extinct. I’d call that a pretty acute crisis of social reproduction.

C. J. Polychroniou: How can we avert such a crisis? Are you suggesting that we adopt pronatalist policies? How do responses in other countries differ from those in the US?

Nancy Folbre: No. We’re not in a state of demographic emergency and we don’t need to encourage a higher birth rate. Much of the global population is suffering from lack of decent employment. And the number of children in the US harmed by poverty makes investment in child health and education a much higher priority than increasing births here.

However, investments in child “quality” can help stabilize and strengthen private commitments. Many other countries are implementing policies designed to make family care more affordable. As is well-known, most affluent European countries have put such policies in place. South Korea began providing universal childcare services in 2013 and is now increasing parental leave allowances. Canada is a more nearby example, with its rollout of a new federal childcare system that will offer universal childcare services at a private cost of $10 a day. Within the US, both New Mexico and New York City are setting an example with new initiatives.

The US as a whole is lagging beyond for several reasons. Racial and ethnic divisions, regional differences, and exceptionally high levels of earnings inequality have weakened the solidarity needed to build a “pro-care” coalition. Imperialist rhetoric and illegal military actions have literally bloodied the water.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, Making Care Work, we need to do a better job explaining the public benefits of investment in human capabilities, including the care of people experiencing illness, frailty, or disability. We can’t continue to treat care as a kind of expensive hobby rather than a productive contribution to our collective future.

Let’s talk about how to move forward in another interview—I think that a universal basic income will be part of the solution, even though it will face vehement opposition. Will employers invest in our kids? Only if we can make them.

When US forces carried out a large-scale military operation in Caracas on January 3, 2026—capturing President Nicolás Maduro and transporting him to New York to face US indictments—Washington framed the moment as resolution. President Donald Trump declared Venezuela’s long crisis effectively over, announcing that the United States would “run” the country for a period of time and openly discussing the reinstallation of US oil interests. The language was casual, almost improvisational, as if Venezuela were an unruly subsidiary finally brought to heel.

What the operation revealed, however, was not strategic clarity but a familiar blindness. Once again, US power moved decisively while understanding lagged far behind. Leadership was removed, headlines were captured, yet the deeper structures shaping Venezuelan life—its history of extraction, its social networks, its hard-earned skepticism toward imposed authority—remained untouched. The episode fit neatly into a long pattern: Outsiders mistaking control for comprehension.

For more than five centuries, Venezuela has attracted this kind of attention. It has been treated as a resource cache, a geopolitical puzzle, a cautionary tale, or a problem to be solved. Rarely has it been approached as a society with its own internal logic. Again and again, external actors arrive convinced that this time, through capital, force, or expertise, they have finally grasped what Venezuela is and what it needs. The confidence never lasts.

The misreading begins early. When Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci reached the northern coast in 1499 and named it Veneziola, they imposed a European metaphor on a place already dense with meaning. Indigenous societies—the Timoto-Cuica in the Andes, Carib and Arawak peoples along the coast—had built complex agricultural systems, trade routes, and ecological knowledge. Spanish conquest dismantled much of this world, extracting pearls, gold, and cacao while concentrating power in Caracas, a city whose monumental architecture masked the fragility beneath it.

Venezuela has been misread repeatedly. Not because it is unknowable, but because powerful outsiders rarely bother to know it on its own terms.

Colonial Venezuela was never cohesive. Authority flowed downward; legitimacy never followed. The German Welser banking house, granted control of the territory in the 16th century, pursued gold through enslavement and violence. Later, the Guipuzcoan Company monopolized trade, choking local economic life. Periodic uprisings were crushed rather than resolved. The lesson repeated itself quietly but insistently: Wealth could be extracted, order imposed temporarily, but social trust could not be engineered from afar.

Independence did not resolve these tensions. 19th century unfolded through fragmentation, regionalism, and civil war. Simón Bolívar understood Venezuela better than most foreign admirers or critics since, yet even he struggled to translate military success into durable political unity. The Federal War left the country devastated and more unequal, reinforcing a pattern in which power was centralized while social cohesion remained elusive. European creditors and early oil prospectors took note, circling patiently.

Oil altered Venezuela’s position in the world but not its underlying dynamics. In the early 20th century, Juan Vicente Gómez offered foreign companies stability and access in exchange for political backing. Later, Marcos Pérez Jiménez presented a gleaming vision of modernization—highways, towers, civic monuments—that impressed visiting dignitaries. The spectacle worked. Venezuela appeared governable, even exemplary. Yet outside the frame, inequality hardened and participation narrowed. Development was visible; legitimacy was thin.

By the time the bolívar collapsed on Black Friday in 1983, the illusion was difficult to sustain. An economy tethered to oil rents proved dangerously exposed to global shocks, while political institutions remained distant from everyday life. The Caracazo riots of 1989 were not a sudden breakdown but a release, an eruption from a society that had absorbed decades of exclusion. International observers described chaos. Venezuelans recognized continuity.

Hugo Chávez entered this landscape not as a rupture but as a condensation of long-simmering forces. His rise drew on popular frustration with a system that had promised stability and delivered precarity. The brief 2002 coup against him, quietly welcomed in Washington, collapsed almost immediately, undone by mass mobilization. Power changed hands; legitimacy reasserted itself. Chávez’s social programs produced real gains while deepening reliance on oil, leaving unresolved the same vulnerability that had defined Venezuelan political economy for a century.

After Chávez’s death, Nicolás Maduro governed a system already under strain. Falling oil prices, hyperinflation, protest cycles, mass migration, and partial dollarization followed. External pressure mounted, sanctions, recognition battles, diplomatic theater, often treating Venezuela less as a society than as a message. Leadership was personalized; history flattened.

The capture of Maduro followed this script. It was decisive, dramatic, and legible to a US political culture that favors clear villains and clean endings. What it did not do was engage the complexity of Venezuelan life: the informal economies that keep neighborhoods fed, the communal networks that substitute for absent institutions, the cultural memory shaped by centuries of extraction and resistance. These dynamics do not disappear when a president boards a plane.

Venezuelan resilience rarely makes headlines because it lacks spectacle. It is found in Indigenous land stewardship, Afro-Venezuelan cultural traditions, cooperative food systems, remittance networks, and everyday improvisation. Migration, so often framed solely as collapse, has also become a form of continuity, extending social ties across borders rather than severing them.

Oil still looms over everything. The 1970s boom, including Saudi-Venezuelan cooperation, promised autonomy through abundance and delivered deeper dependence instead. Resource wealth invited intervention and centralization while postponing harder questions about participation and governance. The pattern has proven remarkably durable.

Venezuela’s history does not yield easily to slogans or interventions. It resists tidy moral arcs and quick fixes. Again and again, external actors—most recently the Trump administration—have approached the country as if force, markets, or managerial confidence could substitute for understanding. Each time, they discover too late that Venezuela is not an abstraction but a living society shaped by long memory and adaptive survival.

Venezuela has been misread repeatedly. Not because it is unknowable, but because powerful outsiders rarely bother to know it on its own terms. And so the cycle continues: decisive action, confident declarations, and, beneath them all, a society that endures—complex, unfinished, and stubbornly beyond control.