Friends,

I thought I couldn’t be more shocked and sickened than I already was, but what’s happened this week is truly horrifying.

In the Oval Office, before cameras and journalists, Trump openly lied to the president of South Africa about alleged violence against white South Africans. The Trump regime has also granted refuge to white South Africans while continuing to bar or deport people of color who desperately need refuge.

The regime told Harvard it can no longer enroll foreign students and that its existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status in the United States.

Trump auctioned off a personal dinner to foreigners who poured money into his own crypto business. He has also accepted Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “flying palace” (it’s also just for him — no other president in future years can use it).

At Trump’s insistence, House Republicans have passed a giant bill that would, if enacted, be the largest redistribution of income and wealth in American history — from the poor and working class to the rich and super-rich. The bill includes a poison pill that eliminates the power of courts to hold officials in contempt for disregarding court orders.

In recent days, according to Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of The New York Times, Trump or his team have charged, investigated, or threatened with investigation New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, the city of Chicago, and the Kennedy Center.

"The more Trump's tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash."

Trump seems to have entered into a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds. Rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt.

If you’re also horrified by all this, know that most other Americans are, too (if polls are to be believed).

Resistance is more important than ever.

I feel enormous gratitude to the judges who are trying to stop this. Most have shown themselves to be principled, steadfast, and courageous.

We should also be grateful to the public servants still in their jobs who are standing up to this.

And to everyone else who is pushing back.

Grateful to all communities that are protecting their residents and neighbors from Trump’s vicious dragnet.

Thankful to all the people fighting his attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. Teachers, public employees, workers, and grassroots groups fighting his attacks on the poor.

To the professors, administrators, and students joining together to fight his attacks on higher education.

Appreciative of all who are planning to protest on June 14. It’s Trump’s birthday, on which he’s trying to justify a huge military parade using the pretext of the 250th anniversary of the start of the Continental Army that fought against King George III.

On that day we will join together to tell the world and affirm for ourselves that we do not abide kings.

The more Trump’s tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash. The crueler and more vicious his regime becomes, the more powerful the alliances being formed at every level of society to stop him.

We will sweep vulnerable Republican lawmakers out of office in 2026 or before.

We will support groups like the ACLU that are taking Trump to court.

We will spread the truth.

Tyrants cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to them. We will not submit. We will emerge from this stronger than we were before, and more committed to the common good.

Be safe. Be strong. Hug your loved ones.

A person escapes slave labor, torture, rape, and murder, and illegally crosses a border to a land where such crimes are outlawed, to a land where people have the right to work for wages and are protected by the law. Anyone in this “Free Land” who harbors or aides such an escapee is subject to federal prosecution, fines, and imprisonment. Yet to turn them over to federal authorities returns these people to a life of wanton violence and suffering.

This was the United States in 1850 when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, legislation requiring that all escaped slaves be returned to the slave owner and that officials and citizens in free states must cooperate. Aiding or harboring a slave meant prison and steep fines. Habeas corpus was suspended under this law. Citizens were required to return a runaway slave to the chains of bondage or face the wrath of the federal courts.

Americans in 1850 had to decide where they stood, with the newly passed federal law or with their conscience. The risk was great, for both the runaway slaves and those Americans who might help them.

Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.

Today, the Republican Party, the very party which grew from the outrage over the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Act, now seeks to criminalize every aspect of helping a person who has fled a life of torture, violence, and suffering. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has been updated and amended for the fleeing refugees of 2025.

On April 25, 2025, U.S. officials arrested Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, and charged her with helping a man in her court evade immigration authorities. It is alleged she hindered immigration agents who appeared in the courthouse to arrest the man without a judicial warrant. She faces numerous federal charges.

We are only four months into Trump’s Second Term of Cruelty. Where will we be a year from now? Two years from now? How draconian will the laws be then?

Americans living in the border states of the 1850s were called upon to answer the question of what they would do when a runaway slave appeared in their community. Would they violate federal law and help, or would they turn the desperate families back over to the slaveholders, to the “manstealers,” as the bounty hunters were then called.

Many in the border state of Pennsylvania—Quakers, Amish, Brethren—followed their faith and funneled these runaways to freedom. In Lancaster County, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens allegedly hid slaves in a cistern in his backyard as he facilitated their road to freedom. He was an oathbound member of Congress violating U.S. law to save lives.

In retrospect, it is easy to know what the right thing to do was in the case of slavery and The Underground Railroad. That issue today is clear for us. We know where we would stand: for freedom, for those fleeing slavery. But back then the issue was not so clear. Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.

Will we help or hinder a person in need?

Will we violate immoral law to save a life?

Will we risk fines and imprisonment?

These questions were asked and answered by many Americans in 1850. How will we answer them today?

So often we wish to be part of a moment of great historical importance, a moment when we have to take a risk to save another, to take a stand when others wouldn’t. We feel certain we would know the right thing to do. If only such a moment would come our way.

Today, that moment comes not in the form of storming a beachhead or taking a hill in battle. It is not marching for civil rights in Birmingham or Selma. And it is not hiding a runaway slave in your attic, though the similarities to that particular act of conscience are striking. Today it is whether to provide shelter and safety to a refugee fleeing violence in their home country, a person illegally in the United States.

How will we respond this time? In this century? In this historic moment?

Is a refugee illegally entering this country to flee institutional violence different than a slave illegally entering a free state to escape slavery? Especially when that institutional violence has been precipitated by the U.S. repeatedly intervening and destabilizing the home country of the refugee?

In 1958, legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan asked a youth retreat group the following question: “What's it going to be with you? Are you going to go through life playing both ends against the middle, playing cozy, not committing yourself, sitting on the fence?”

That question is as potent, and as dangerous, today as it was then. For us, and for the victims in the breach.

Federal unions are facing a do-or-die moment: President Donald Trump is trying to stomp out worker power by destroying federal labor rights and firing federal workers. The best tool organized labor and workers have for saving themselves—as well as everything from school funding and racial equity to cancer research and social security—is to shut things down.

At the end of March, Trump signed an executive order intended to eliminate federal unions and retroactively cancel collectively bargained contracts for nearly a million federal workers. Without their union protections, even more workers will be fired. Those who remain will be at constant risk of the same fate. Black workers and women, who make up a large proportion of the federal workforce (particularly entry-level positions), stand to lose the most. On May 16, a federal appeals court lifted the temporary block on Trump’s order, allowing Trump to deny collective bargaining rights to federal workers while the matter is litigated in the courts.

Many people ask, “Can Trump legally do that?”

A better, more urgent response is: “Will we let Trump do that?”

“If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?” Recent history says yes.

Trump’s order is a massive overreach of presidential authority, and federal unions have already filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s action. More egregiously, the order is a blatantly illegal attempt at retaliation. The White House’s own statement verifies that Trump took away labor rights because the unions “declared war on President Trump’s agenda” by publicly disagreeing with the administration’s policies and continuing to file employee grievances. To be clear, this is their legal right.

It is a positive sign that unions immediately decided to fight back, unlike some of the other institutions targeted by Trump. The universities and law firms that preemptively surrendered to Trump’s shakedowns have tarnished their reputations and credibility while forfeiting massive sums of money. This has only emboldened Trump to demand more control and sent shockwaves through our democracy. Belatedly, those institutions have begun to follow the example set by unions, though the outlook is still grim. Lawsuits, rallies, and petitions are necessary and important tools of resistance, but they have not been sufficient to stop Trump’s authoritarianism and dismantling of government.

Federal workers have a unique, nonviolent, and powerful tool at their disposal: withholding their labor.

Strikes, slowdowns, sickouts—workers have many ways to withhold their labor to protest injustice in the workplace. Federal employees have no legal right to strike, which is why they have generally avoided this tactic. The last time there was a major strike by federal workers was in 1981. President Ronald Reagan crushed the strike by firing and replacing air traffic controllers who walked off the job, a moment widely viewed as the beginning of the labor movement’s decline.

But there is much that separates the strike under Reagan from what federal workers face today under Trump. Reagan had both public sentiment and the law behind him when he fired over 11,000 federal workers. As of April 2025, Trump had the lowest approval rating compared to the same period of any other second term president since polling began. Moreover, Trump’s retaliatory order to strip the rights of federal workers is not supported by legal precedent, and he has fired over 279,000 federal workers to much public outcry.

A strike by federal workers has high stakes. It risks the union being dissolved and striking workers being barred from working for the federal government in the future. But, with Trump’s mass firings and revocation of basic rights for federal workers, federal unions (and many workers’ middle class jobs, pay, and benefits) may disappear anyway.

This raises a follow up question: “If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?”

Recent history says yes.

Public school teachers in West Virginia went on a nine-day strike in 2018 over abysmally low wages and rising healthcare costs. Strikes by public teachers have been illegal in West Virginia for decades, explaining why even their union leaders did not support the strikes initially. Undeterred, rank and file teachers took matters into their own hands by launching a “wildcat strike” (a work stoppage not authorized by the union). Even though the state attorney general declared the strike “unlawful” and threatened legal action, he never took steps toward enforcement, likely because of the heavy public support for the strikes. Even though the strike shut down schools across the state, parents and students viewed striking teachers as fighting for the common good against dysfunctional government leadership. The teachers won pay raises and a freeze on increases to health insurance premiums. Despite not having a legal right to strike, teachers took action anyway—and they won resoundingly. This inspired teachers in other red states to go on strike for better funding and conditions in their schools.

Essential federal workers provide another example from 2019. In a failed effort to secure funding for a border wall, Trump shut down the federal government for more than a month. Without a federal spending bill in place, federal workers were either furloughed or forced to work for 35 days without pay. What ultimately ended Trump’s shutdown was a small group of air traffic controllers. Throughout the ordeal, the air traffic controller union leadership strongly disavowed any idea of striking, both publicly and privately, worried that it would trigger serious legal consequences for the union. But after performing high stress jobs for a month without pay, and once other labor movement leaders began to call for a general strike, air traffic controllers started to call in sick, grounding flights in major metros. Within hours of the sickout, Trump reached an agreement on a new spending bill. If coordinated with the intention of creating a work stoppage, these sickouts ran the legal risks described previously. But support for ending the shutdown was high, and the public blamed Trump for causing the crisis.

An act of civil disobedience is not a risk to be taken lightly. But when government employers took deeply unpopular actions that hurt workers and communities, teachers and federal employees braved the legal risks and found a way to win.

As federal workers and their unions consider the path ahead, these words of a striking West Virginia teacher echo even louder today: “We understand this was a do-or-die moment. If we didn’t do it, there might not be a tomorrow to fix it. If we didn’t do it, we would have failed our kids, our schools, and our community.”

On January 1, 2025 I published a report called “Defending Society Against the MAGA Assault: A Prospectus for Action.” I am happy to say that many of the proposals I made there for what I called “social self-defense” are already being initiated. Recent and upcoming Strike! Commentaries take stock of what has been accomplished so far and lay out strategic perspectives on the next phase of the struggle to protect society against MAGA devastation.

What We Can Expect

U.S. President Donald Trump and his enablers are conducting an “administrative coup” against Congress, courts, and civil society. This assault is being conducted on multiple fronts. It seeks unlimited power; the demolition of any possible base to restrict its power; unlimited accumulation of wealth for its followers; and a cultural revolution to enshrine autocracy, repression, racism, sexism, hatred, cruelty, and disinhibition as internalized values of the American people. So far it has met significant but spotty resistance.

Trump’s actions have been and will most likely continue to be unpredictable, ill-considered, self-contradictory, and often self-destructive. The sheer incompetence and vacillation of Trump’s behavior make his future actions likely to have effects that contradict their intentions. Furthermore, his actions go out into a world order that was already deeply enmeshed in what has been called “the polycrisis,” marked by great power geopolitical struggle over control of lesser countries and global economic networks. Trump’s erratic behavior and the chaos of the polycrisis render any predictions uncertain. At most we can identify a range of possibilities that we must prepare for. Even then, the timelines for the manifestation of such possibilities remain for the most part obscure.

Growing opposition may develop the power to limit and ultimately overcome Trumpian tyranny.

A Trump presidency that successfully creates a new national and international order is one of the least likely outcomes. Also unlikely is a basic course correction that changes the overall thrust of the Trump administration so far. More likely is that Trump, in the face of declining power and support, will increasingly utilize repression and violence. Internally this would mean a fuller suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law; a more brutal war on dissent; martial law; use of the military in domestic conflict; and a mobilization of violent MAGA supporters for direct vigilante action. Internationally it would mean escalating use of violence, leading to accidental or deliberate wars—not excluding accidental or intentional nuclear escalation. This is all happening in a context of global economic chaos that is already widely expected to lead to significant recession with the looming possibility of stagflation or depression.

Trump’s actions are already having harmful effects on a wide range of people. Some of these are specific, like the firing of federal employees and the destruction of the programs they administer that are depended on by tens of millions of people. Others affect almost everyone, like the stagflation emerging from tariff gyrations and the suspension of the rule of law that is making everyone, including everyday people who are law-abiding citizens, vulnerable to arbitrary targeting and arrest. Given reasonable expectations about the future, these harms are destined to rapidly escalate.

Where will all this lead? Trump may establish a lasting fascist dictatorship that demolishes all bases of effective opposition—the very definition of totalitarianism. Certainly this is possible if potential opposition forces are sufficiently intimidated and submissive.

Conversely, growing opposition may develop the power to limit and ultimately overcome Trumpian tyranny. This could happen in any of several ways.

1. Growing opposition could interfere by a variety of institutional and direct actions that would make it difficult or even impossible for the Trump regime to implement its objectives, creating a situation of deadlock or dual power.
2. If democratic institutions remain sufficiently robust, Trump’s supporters could be voted out of office in 2026 or thereafter; this could be followed by legislative reversal of Trump’s actions or even impeachment of top officials.
3. Unpopular dictatorial regimes have often been swept from the stage of history by mass “people power” uprisings or “social strikes” mobilizing the whole collective power of the people against the regime. We have seen this most recently in South Korea, where the president’s attempt to establish a dictatorship was rapidly defeated by mass mobilization of the people in the streets, supported by trade unions, parliament, and the courts.

Social Self-Defense

The goal of social self-defense is to make a persistent fascist dictatorship less likely and its restriction and elimination by direct counteraction, electoral repudiation, or social strike more likely. Because of pervasive uncertainties, we can’t know precisely what process will achieve that objective. Fortunately, while different tactics can at times lead to tensions, efforts to change the balance of power in various ways are for the most part synergistic. We know that a chain will break at its weakest link, even if we don’t know what link that will be. Thus the overall strategy for social self-defense is to change the balance of power by strengthening the forces opposing the regime and putting increasing pressure on the regime and its allies.

A variety of polls around the end of Trump’s first 100 days show that popular repudiation of Trump has begun. Trump’s overall approval ratings, already low on election day, have fallen sharply, especially among independents and non-MAGA Republicans. More important, two-thirds of respondents view the Trump regime so far as “chaotic” and think Trump is engaging in “overreach” of his legitimate powers in area after area. While a majority still support the deportation of “illegal immigrants,” large numbers oppose the many publicized Immigration and Customs Enforcement abuses of due process. Large majorities say Trump must obey the courts. A majority fear the impact of Trump’s tariffs on inflation. Many fear or are already feeling the impact of Trump policies on them personally.

As detailed in the previous two Strike! commentaries, over the course of 100 days participation in anti-Trump demonstrations has increased from hundreds to millions. The demands echoed broad popular concerns, drawing together fear of autocracy, opposition to billionaire domination of government, and direct personal impacts through gutting of government services and economic chaos. These mobilizations combine the specific concerns of specific constituencies, concerns shared by multiple constituencies, and broad, widely shared concerns about the destruction of democratic governance.

These days of action have been coordinated in two ways. Two very similar coalitions involving about 200 organizations initiated and promoted the Hands Off! And Mayday mobilizations. The 50501 actions and the Tesla Takedowns were organized on Reddit and other social media by self-organized groups. Leadership for all of them primarily took the form of setting dates, framing raps, and communicating with local groups and activists. So far coordination has focused on specific days of action. While individual organizations have more extensive programs of action, so far the social self-defense movement as a whole is only beginning to develop means of continuous coordination and planning. Local groups, often drawing together or cutting across distinct national organizations, initiate and recruit for both nationally and locally initiated activities.

Historical experience has repeatedly shown that unified opposition from civil society institutions plays a critical role in the resistance to authoritarianism. Trump’s agenda is totalitarian in that it aims not only to devastate the constitutional order, but to destroy all bases of potential opposition in civil society. He has targeted universities and other educational institutions, medicine, law firms and the American Bar Association, media, courts, organized labor, and virtually every other institutional sphere of civic life. The response of these institutions has been vacillating and ambivalent—exemplified by Harvard’s effort to submit to Trumpian demands, followed by its statement of refusal and suit against government interference, then followed by its proposed new restrictions on freedom of expression. There are stirrings of collective resistance, however. For example, faculties at Big 10 universities have voted for a Mutual Defense Compact to jointly resist and support each other. Business has been ambiguous, divided, and largely paralyzed, initially swinging to support Trump, then backing away, especially after the tariff debacle. Future developments will depend on the balance between outrage at Trump’s attacks on civil society and fear of his vengeance against those who oppose him.

The governance system has so far provided important but limited protection of society against the MAGA assault. Many rulings by lower courts have forbidden, or at least stayed, illegal and unconstitutional Trump initiatives. Supreme Court decisions have been ambiguous, attempting to limit blatant illegality without providing a consistent defense of constitutional governance, perhaps out of fear of opening the door to outright defiance and a serious constitutional crisis. The Republican-controlled Congress has forcefully abetted Trump’s attacks on law, the Constitution, and people, with only a handful of legislators opposing even the most extreme measures and many more playing attack dogs on those who Trump targets.

Most Democratic politicians have followed the dubious advice to try to work with Trump rather than take him on. A few members of Congress have started making serious efforts to encourage a mass opposition to Trump and MAGA, exemplified by the massive rallies held by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). A slowly increasing number of Democratic politicians, under substantial pressure from enraged members of their own party, are starting to join them. Similarly, a few blue state governments have taken significant initiatives to challenge Trump’s depredations, while many of them and nearly all red states have acquiesced or furthered Trump’s agenda.

A Movement-Based Opposition

If there is one thing we can confidently assert, it is that Trump is unlikely to voluntarily remove himself from power. He is unlikely to abdicate, and his allies are unlikely to purge him. Even his growing unpopularity and self-inflicted wounds will not automatically lead to his removal from office. That will require an opposing force that can take what steps are necessary to diminish and eventually terminate his power.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has so far proven not to be such a force. Despite exceptions, most of its leadership has deliberately acquiesced in Trump’s juggernaut. The Democrats’ deep dependence on corporate and fossil fuel monied interests has impeded any effort beyond rhetoric to appeal to the interests of ordinary Americans, let alone to stand up to the likes of Trump and Elon Musk. The result is that, as polls demonstrate, most people regard the Democratic Party with scorn. A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of Americans view the Democratic Party as out of touch “with the concerns of most people”—a higher share than said the same of either Trump or the Republican Party. Just 40% of Democrats approved of the way their leaders in Congress were handling the job, compared with 49% who disapproved, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. In a Harvard survey, only 23% of the young Americans polled who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris approve of congressional Democrats’ performance.

The Democratic Party, unless and until it makes significant changes, will be a poor vehicle for the anti-Trump resistance. But given the structure of America’s legally enforced two-party system, a progressive third-party challenge in the electoral arena, if it drew significant support, would most likely split and thereby weaken the anti-MAGA vote.

There is a natural synergism between large national actions that draw public attention and demonstrate broad public support and frequent or continuous small actions that show the opposition to be more than occasional flashes in the pan.

A possible solution to this predicament might be a “movement-based opposition” rooted in civil society. Sometimes called a non-electoral or independent opposition, such a movement-based opposition would be a convergence of social movements that performs some of the classic functions of an opposition party without the goal of taking power in government. It would draw diverse constituencies out of their silos to combine their power but use direct action rather than electoral politics as its means to exercise that power. Like a political party, it would bring together different constituencies around common interests, expose existing leaders and institutions, and present alternatives. Such a non-electoral opposition played an important role in blocking Trump’s attempted coup in January 2021.

The movement for social self-defense is already performing in a rudimentary way the functions of such an opposition both nationally and locally. It draws together different constituencies, defines common interests and concerns, pools their power, and coordinates joint actions. So far it does so only intermittently, with reluctance to define itself as the leading protagonist of the struggle to defeat Trump’s assault on society. It is positioned, however, to acknowledge what it has become and start to act like a continuous opposition. That movement-based opposition would include all those who participated in and those who called and coordinated Hands Off!, 50501, Mayday, and similar actions locally and nationally.

The elements of the movement-based opposition already include a significant infrastructure of communications, research, publicity, training, and member mobilization. These have proven effective in the early 2025 days of action. These groups cooperated with each other and developed an effective division of labor, for example with some providing de-escalation training; some guidance to local groups for media outreach; some training on legal dimensions of protest; and others helping with the nuts and bolts of posters, picket signs, food, water, and porta-potties.

Such cooperation can be extended and made continuous. For example, different partners can produce materials and organize actions focusing in rotation on their concerns and constituencies, with the other partners featuring or joining them. This is in large part what happened with the May Day days of action, with the wider movement turning out for events that were focused on workers and immigrants, as well as on the whole MAGA threat to democracy and human well-being. Partners can form a “shadow cabinet” of spokespeople from each participating sector who could amplify the concerns of each sector while providing a common voice for the movement-based opposition as a whole. All the activities of the movement-based opposition can support its individual elements while unifying them into a coordinated bloc.

Expanding the movement-based opposition is crucial for amassing the power to effectively counter MAGA. The starting point is to focus attention on the harms that are being done to individuals, constituencies, and the people as a whole. This was central to the message of Hands Off!, 50501, and Mayday actions, which called out specific harms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients; veterans; federal employees; and other MAGA-targeted groups while relating them all to the MAGA attack on constitutional governance.

An important next step is to convey why supporting and joining the movement-based opposition is an effective way to fight against that harm. That involves developing the mass power needed to counter MAGA and to block particular harmful initiatives. The opposition needs to encourage and support harmed constituencies to organize themselves and participate in the wider movement. Such self-organization is already under way, for example the federal workers cross-agency, cross-union organization Federal Unionists Network; the lawyers National Law Day of Action; and military veterans’ “Unite for Veterans, Unite for America” rally planned for June 6; and the outreach to workers growing out of the May Day day of action. These constituencies are already to a considerable extent organized, such as the large proportion of veterans who are linked online through social media organized by military units and the seniors linked through senior centers and senior residence facilities.

The movement-based opposition aims to halt and undo the harm that has been done by the Trump regime, but it is not directed toward returning to the world as it existed before Trump.

There is a natural synergism between large national actions that draw public attention and demonstrate broad public support and frequent or continuous small actions that show the opposition to be more than occasional flashes in the pan. Some of these have been emerging locally, like regular small weekly demonstrations and large signs regularly displayed on highway overpasses.

The extraordinarily peaceful demonstrations for social self-defense have projected power and discipline while discouraging attempts at governmental or vigilante repression. Carefully designed civil disobedience actions, like those by union members in Philadelphia on May Day and those planned by a climate coalition for this summer, can escalate the pressure without arousing public fears of even more chaos. Such actions can be a way of influencing and recruiting harmed constituencies. For example, sit-ins by present and future Social Security recipients could help mobilize large numbers of others to write letters, make phone calls, take part in demonstrations to protect Social Security, and join the wider movement.

While intended to increase his power, many of Trump’s actions have actually undermined it. To take one example, his threats to Canada have led to majority disapproval in the U.S. electorate while provoking a wave of anti-U.S. nationalism and the unexpected election of a prime minister dedicated to freeing Canada from U.S. domination. At some points combined opposition from courts, powerful institutional actors, and the public have forced him to back down. Examples include withdrawal of the nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general; the retreat of Elon Musk in the face of massive unpopularity and the economic harm done to Tesla by anti-MAGA protests and boycotts; the unexpected freeing of Mohsen Mahdawi; and Trump’s repeated backdown on parts of his tariff proposals in the face of massive business and consumer opposition. With sufficient mobilization and good targeting, social self-defense can defeat further Trump initiatives by mounting opposition that undermines his “pillars of support.” It can make his supporters quail and threaten to withdraw their support if he doesn’t back down. This process does not need to wait until Trump is removed from office. What is necessary is to make his initiatives undermine instead of increasing his power.

Trump’s plunging popularity means that if there are fair elections they are likely to end Republican dominance of Congress in 2026 and defeat Trump’s successor in 2028. The current electoral system is highly unequal, however, and MAGA is working hard to further distort it, among other things adopting measures that will simply exclude millions of citizens from the vote.

The weakness of electoral opposition is further augmented by the failure of the Democratic Party to mount an effective opposition that would mobilize large numbers of people and institutions to ensure fair elections and the defeat of all candidates who continue to support Trump. Although it does not run candidates for office, the movement-based opposition can have a major impact on the electoral process. It can dramatize the harmful effect of MAGA actions on millions of people. It can encourage them to register and vote. It can pressure Democrats to court their support by forcefully opposing MAGA. And it can dramatize and resist efforts to exclude people from voting and make the electoral system more unequal. Ending Republican control of even one house of Congress in the 2026 elections would put a significant brake on the Trump juggernaut.

In many parts of the world, when institutional democracy has been unable to overcome dictatorial regimes, people have turned to what has been variously called “people power” uprisings, general strikes, or as I will call them here, “social strikes”—strikes by society as a whole against the forces that threaten it. These involve mass withdrawal of acquiescence manifested in general strikes, occupations of capital cities, shutdowns of commerce, and other disruptions of everyday life. In cases like Poland, Tunesia, Brazil, and most recently South Korea these have successfully brought down dictatorial regimes.

Popular uprisings have recently been broached by such mainstream figures as New York Times columnist David Brooks and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. In the event that electoral and direct action techniques are not sufficient to defend U.S. society against the MAGA assault, such social strikes may be necessary. A movement-based opposition can play a critical role in laying the groundwork for such actions. It can draw in mass participation from people in all walks of life; cultivate an understanding of the need for cooperation and solidarity; develop the ability to coordinate action; and organize escalating actions that can culminate in social strikes.

The movement-based opposition aims to halt and undo the harm that has been done by the Trump regime, but it is not directed toward returning to the world as it existed before Trump. That is clearly not what the people want, and it offers little hope of solving our real problems. The movement-based opposition includes many different groups with different visions of the future. It is based on agreement about the immediate aim, plus agreement to disagree about other things. It should encourage discussion of areas of disagreement while bracketing them when they might interfere with immediately necessary collaboration. The process of working together and defining common interests itself can help identify new areas of agreement and encourage mutual acceptance of differences. Social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut can be the starting point for creating the world we want beyond MAGA. As Abraham Lincoln said of the Civil War, it can become the means for a new birth of freedom.

This is part of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut. It originally appeared on the Labor Network for Sustainability website on January 21, 2025.

What does mowing the lawn have to do with world events?

Well, one of my life skills is the ability to make minimal and possibly absurd connections, linking the trivial and the profound. Thus, a few years back (when I still mowed my own lawn), I wrote this poem. It’s called “Buddha’s Lawn”:

I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?

You know, value everything, including the disposables of life. I guess I’ve always had this wacky inner protest going on, not against order and cleanliness per se, but against the clank of the trash can: “throwing stuff away,” then assuming it’s permanently gone from our universe, rather than floating in a river somewhere or buried in a landfill.

Is it possible, I quietly (secretly) ask myself, to actually value... somehow... trash, weeds, mice, bugs, or anything—everything—else that doesn’t fit into a properly civilized, middle-class universe? This secret question is mixed with confusion, even shame, because, well, I’m sort of a slob, indifferent to dust and disorder and the like, but also, at the same time, a participant in and benefactor of humanity’s exploitation of Planet Earth.

So, I tell myself: Just mow the damn lawn, toss out (or maybe recycle) the litter, and do your best to fit in. I try, I try, but my strange, soul-deep uncertainty persists. And a larger, far more troubling question quickly emerges. Where do we draw the line between valuing and dismissing... whatever?

And my uncertainties turn social. They turn political. I grew up in the Christian church, and heard its values espoused: “Do unto others as you would have them do un o you.” And, oh yeah: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Could anything resonate more clearly? This was deep, unyielding: Don’t submit to simplistic anger but dig, when you are hurt and offended, for understanding, for healing. Love is not a simple concept—a sploosh of kumbaya and the problem’s solved. It may well be life’s deepest challenge.

But as Christianity became a world religion, its cross got turned upside down and became a sword. And along came the Crusades. Let’s retake the Holy Land, man! Loving thy enemy apparently meant killing him—and his family, his children. Millions of people died. And the wars rolled on and on. Conquest and dehumanization became fully embedded as the religious values of the powerful. Human ingenuity—scientific progress—mostly fed the urge for war, culminating in the creation, and use, of the atomic bomb. And 12,000 or so nuclear bombs now sit here and there around the planet, continually upgraded, patiently waiting to end the world.

But even as ending the world remains on hold, non-nuclear wars continue, making the news virtually unbearable to read. For instance, over 50,000 Palestinians,—maybe 100,000 or more—have died in Israel’s genocidal assault.

And, as Truthout reports:

Many Palestinians say that the starvation is even worse than Israel’s bombardments, having been starved by varying levels of Israel’s blockade for 19 months and with food costs constantly on the rise. The total aid blockade ushered in the worst conditions of the genocide so far; one Palestinian reporter said in March that children in the region are so hungry that they’re drawing pictures of food in the sand.

...According to an assessment by the United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, nearly 71,000 children are expected to experience acute malnutrition in the next year due to Israel’s blockade.

This is humanity’s flow of indifference to much—or all?—of life. I can’t let go of it. And I can’t stop noticing it at the miniscule level of “weeds” and “litter” and every other aspect of nature that doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is not, oh gosh, be good to the weeds, be good to the discarded cigarette butts and plastic straws—but rather, notice them and ponder, with deep wonderment, the meaning of nature, the meaning of life.

What if we started collectively seeing that discarded plastic straw not as simply an assault on our sense of order—clean sidewalks!—but as a minute particle of the living planet? How far upward might this awareness flow?

Live 12 noon Saturday and available via streaming afterwards:

Tune into “DeProgram” with fiery political cartoonist Ted Rall and brilliant CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, diving headfirst into the expanding war between President Trump and Harvard University over Kristi Noem’s ban on foreign students, which account for 27% of the student body. Trump’s moves to block international students from Harvard and other elite universities has sparked a fierce debate, with the administration arguing it’s a matter of national security and economic protection. Critics, including Harvard, slam it as xenophobic, claiming that it guts academic freedom and global collaboration. The policy, tied to Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, has led to lawsuits, with Harvard alleging the ban stifles its First Amendment rights and unfairly targets students from the Middle East and Asia. Protests have erupted on campus, and faculty are pushing back. Rall and Kiriakou unpack the legal, cultural, and political fallout of this high-stakes showdown, cutting through the noise with their no-BS analysis. Will Harvard’s defiance crush the White House, or will the school succumb to pressure? Tune in for a raw, unfiltered take on a fight shaking the nation’s intellectual core. Plus:

Art Spiegelman claims PBS censored him over anti-Trump content, raising free speech alarms.
Five years post-George Floyd, police killings continue to climb, fueling calls for reform.
Tensions spike as Israel eyes a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear program, risking regional chaos.

The post DeProgram: Trump vs. Harvard! Plus Art Spiegelman, Police Killings and Israel vs. Iran appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On November 7, 1938, Polish Jew Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris.

Grynszpan’s family had been made stateless by German and Polish governments, and were stranded in miserable conditions along with thousands of Jewish refugees at the Polish-German border.

The shooting of vom Rath provided the trigger for the Nazi pogrom across Germany of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”—attacks of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. This date is thought to mark the progression from German persecution of Jews to the beginning of the Holocaust.

The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims.

Today’s moment, the murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of 2 millions residents of Gaza, and the rest of occupied Palestine.

Just as with Grynszpan’s crime, the effect of this killer’s decision will be out of his hands, and the cause of his desperation will only matter to those who already care.

The wretched, amoral lunatics who have command of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will have a clear field to “investigate” the curriculum of universities that host Palestinian studies, and criminalize the slogans “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”

We can count on crimes being committed by Pam Bondi (DOJ) and Kash Patel (FBI) in exploitation of this moment. The crocodile tears of this Proud Boy-aligned Christian nationalist government as they express solidarity with Jews against “antisemitism” will challenge our gag reflex.

The conflation of protesters for Palestine with “terrorists,” already in full force by the Departments of State and Education with expulsion of international students who have spoken out and organized, will be untrammeled by due process. Or due process will be twisted with the power of a state unbound by ethics in their determination to “make an example.”

The day following the Washington shooting, the AJC’s Ted Deutch was on MSNBC’s afternoon “Dateline White House” program, instructing that permitting campus demonstrations for Gazans’ right to live allows us to “tolerate hatred and antisemitism that leads to this violence.” Deutch made the rounds of Fox and CNN also.

In his morning MSNBC program appearance, he said, efforts must “double down” to insure that “what we saw last night never happens again and that words of antisemites, incitement that we’ve seen at too many places around the world, be treated as it is, that this could be the deadly result if we don’t act.”

The AJC, once fully cognizant of the dangers of turning the heterogenous Jewish people spread across the world in to a nationality, made sure in the aftermath of these pointless deaths that suppressing “delegitimization” of Israel was the focus, not Jewish rights to safety in their countries.

Since October 7, 2023, the world has watched the methodical torture of 2 million people in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces, month after month of civilian displacement; destruction; hunger; disease; and killing by bomb, artillery, drone, and bullet. U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, in February 2024, immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest America’s assistance in the misery. In December 2023 and September 2024 fatal self-immolations were enacted in front of Israel’s consulates in Atlanta and Boston.

The world watching—protesting, agonizing in helplessness—the horror of premeditated and systematic destruction of the people of Gaza has the obvious hazard of endangering Jews. A gossamer sense of object permanence is exhibited when Zionist advocacy at one moment proclaims Israel the state of the Jewish people, and the next decries hostility to Israel a symptom of some mysterious eternal human disease of antisemitism.

It is certain that the Washington killings will be used to maximize the sense of dread and siege in Jewish spaces, shaped to legitimize the Zionist stance that Israel is rational and her opponents crazed, irrational, bloodthirsty.

After the 9/11/2001 attacks, journalist James Bennett contacted Benjamin Netanyahu, then out of office.

That evening, I tracked down Benjamin Netanyahu, the once-and-future Israeli prime minister, to ask what the attack meant for U.S.-Israeli relations. “It’s very good,” he replied, with startling enthusiasm. Then he caught himself. “Well, it’s not very good, but it’s going to generate immediate sympathy.”

The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims. Today, Zionist partisans in the United States of America, in and out of government, have their “bloody shirt.” Mazel tov!

At the end of a rushed, chaotic process, House Republicans passed a bill early Thursday morning that fails the people they promised to help. It would raise costs on millions of families across the country, making it harder for them to meet basic needs and weather life’s ups and downs—while showering ever larger tax breaks on the wealthiest households.

The bill will drive up hunger and deepen poverty, including among children, and take access to life-saving healthcare away from millions of people. The Senate must reject it.

Congressional Budget Office data and other analyses make the House Republican agenda’s harmful impacts crystal clear: about 15 million people losing health coverage; millions losing food assistance or having their food assistance cut, including 2 million or more children; the 10% of households with the lowest incomes made worse off while the richest get richer by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each year; and trillions of dollars added to our debt over the decade, worsening our long-term fiscal picture and increasing the risk to our economy.

In 2027, it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts.

The bill’s SNAP provisions are so extreme that some states, faced with backfilling deep federal funding cuts that total billions of dollars a year nationally, could take steps to dramatically take food assistance away from large numbers of people and could even decide to end their SNAP programs entirely. Simply put, House Republicans are walking away from a 50-year, bipartisan commitment to ensure that children in families with low incomes get the help they need, no matter what state they live in—with potentially devastating impacts on their health, education, and future success.

The extreme health provisions would lead to an unprecedented drop in health coverage and drive up health costs for millions. Make no mistake—the main way the bill cuts more than $800 billion from healthcare is by taking away Medicaid and affordable marketplace coverage from people who are eligible.

The bill also makes higher education more expensive for millions by driving up the cost of student loans and reducing the level of Pell education grants for college students.

The bill directs some of its harshest cuts toward people who are immigrants and their families. House Republicans falsely claim that they are restricting access to basic needs programs for people who don’t have a documented status. But the reality is that people without a documented immigration status already do not qualify for these benefits. The cuts in federal benefits will fall entirely on immigrants in the country lawfully—including some pregnant women and children who need food assistance. Refugees, people granted asylum, and victims of trafficking—people who have had to prove that they face persecution in their home countries or have been victimized by sex or labor traffickers—are among those who would see their food assistance, Medicare benefits they paid into, and affordable health marketplace coverage terminated. And the bill will also take away the Child Tax Credit from millions of U.S. citizen children in immigrant families.

The House Republican bill showers more tax cuts on the wealthy, extending the highly skewed provisions of the 2017 tax law and adding permanent expansions for wealthy households, while leaving millions of children in working families with low incomes out of even the temporary increase in the Child Tax Credit. In 2027, it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts—even while these households bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and face higher prices due to the president’s tariffs, which the bill does nothing to address.

There’s a better path forward, but it requires the Senate to tear up this legislation and start again, rejecting any proposals that raise costs on families, take health coverage and food assistance away from families who need them, or drive up poverty and the number of people who are uninsured.

You probably saw the cringe-worthy spectacle a few months ago: U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. The Ukrainian president's pained expression as he described facing down Russian President Vladimir Putin—an authoritarian bent on destroying democracy and consuming land that isn't his—while Trump, who clearly identifies more with the aggressor than the victim, publicly humiliated him. Trump celebrated this awful spectacle as "good television." Once a desperate attention seeking reality show host, always a desperate attention seeking reality show host.

It's worth asking: Why would any world leader willingly walk into that gilded trap of an Oval Office—where, notably and ironically, "none of the items on the mantle in Trump's Oval Office were made in the U.S."—knowing they'll likely face an inept man-child who ignores shared reality and acts as though the universe revolves around him?

South Africa just gave every world leader a roadmap for navigating Trump without losing their dignity or falling into his reality TV traps.

Then South Africa's president showed up and delivered a masterclass in strategic diplomacy.

While it's important to talk about the falsehoods regarding "white genocide" that Trump kept repeating during this meeting—as many outlets are doing—I think we also need to examine the brilliance of how President Cyril Ramaphosa handled this, shall we use the very diplomatic language of, challenging leader.

Reading the Room (and the Racist)

This visit came days after the administration's theatrical welcome of white South African "refugees"—an absurd spectacle given that South Africa, where the white population at 7% of the total still owns 50% of the land and where a majority of crime impacts non-white South Africans, is hardly experiencing white genocide. The real genocide Trump ignores? Gaza, which the United States explicitly supports.

But rather than falling into the cruel trap Trump and Vance set for Zelenskyy, South Africa's president read Trump perfectly and knew exactly how to handle this obvious and simple man.

The Blueprint: Three Brilliant Moves

Move 1: Disarm with Humor

The South African president joked that he was sorry he couldn't bring Trump a plane, to which Trump replied, "I wish you would have." Any observer knows it would be a massive conflict of interest for a U.S. president to accept a plane from a foreign leader. Unfortunately, this isn't hypothetical, as Trump officially accepted a luxury plane gifted by Qatar's leader on the same day on May 21. But Trump, existing in his gold-plated self-centered universe, just enjoyed the joke. Brilliant—point out actual corruption while flattering the ego.

When an ABC reporter had simply asked about the Pentagon's announcement regarding this controversial Qatari gift, Trump unleashed his predictable (and with its frequency, less interesting but no less dangerous) attack on the press: "What do you have to do with the Qatari jet? They're giving the United States Air Force a jet. Okay? And it's a great thing… You are a terrible reporter. Number one, you don't have what it takes to be a reporter. You're not smart enough."

But humor? That disarmed him completely. The South African president got Trump to openly joke about foreign governments buying influence, something that would send any other president scrambling for damage control. All it took was the right tone and one luxury plane as a punchline.

Move 2: Bring the Right White Men

Recognizing Trump's racism (evident in everything from unlawful abductions that did not follow any due process and sent likely majority innocent people to El Salvador to the inconceivable resurgence of the Nazi salute in Trump's White House to the targeting students of color who speak out about the atrocities in Gaza) and sexism, the president knew he'd need white men to make Trump listen. But not just any white man—he brought golfer Ernie Els.

When Trump presented misleading clips and questionable papers (which reporters noted had nothing to do with his claims), he again predictably attacked the press: "If the news wasn't fake, like NBC, which is fake news, totally, one of the worst, ABC, NBC, CBS, horrible... if we had real reporters, they'd be covering it."

But Els? Trump actually listened to Els, who gently educated this president averse to historical realities: "It's been 35 years since the transition. President Ramaphosa was right in the middle of the transition time, 1990 and before that... There was a lot of stuff happening in the apartheid days. You know, we grew up in the apartheid era. But I don't think two wrongs make a right. President Mandela, when he came out of prison... didn't come out with hatred, you know, and really unified our nation with his sport."

A white man who has captured Trumps attention because of golf, that colonial relic spread by the British colonial elites during the 18th and 19th centuries, became the vehicle for Trump to hear about South Africa's real issues rather than his fantasized "white genocide" narrative.

Move 3: Speak the Language of Wealth

Understanding that people who hoard wealth only hear from other wealth hoarders, President Ramaphosa brought South Africa's richest man, Johann Rupert. Surrounded by the Oval Office's imported gold, Rupert could speak Trump's language while delivering hard truths: "We have too many deaths. But it's across the board. It's not only white farmers. It's across the board... The crime is terrible, sir... but the biggest murder rate is in the Cape Flats. Gangs."

With a billionaire as messenger, Trump was momentarily forced to confront reality rather than his distorted fantasy of South Africa.

The Lesson Plan

So what can other world leaders learn from this diplomatic parkour?

1. Use humor to disarm while pointing out actual violations: it catches Trump off guard when reporters can't.
2. Bring a white man who does something Trump cares about: Your options are limited to golf, wrestling, or maybe real estate, but stick to sports
3. If possible, bring wealth: the ultra-rich can only hear from other ultra-rich

There you have it. South Africa just gave every world leader a roadmap for navigating Trump without losing their dignity or falling into his reality TV traps.

The question now is: Who will be smart enough to follow it?

Greenland does not, on the face of it, seem to be the kind of place that a superpower like the United States would regard as a vital component of its security. With fewer than 60,000 inhabitants in an area roughly one-quarter the size of the contiguous United States, it is the least densely populated nation on Earth. Its only industries of note are fishing and, to some extent, tourism, and its northernmost point is as close to the North Pole as Los Angeles is to Denver.

Yet President Donald Trump insists the United States needs Greenland “very badly,” to the extent that he won’t “rule out” using force to attain it.

Such covetousness almost certainly owes at least something to the prospect of access to the mineral resources, including lithium, that Greenland is believed to harbor. But Trump himself has suggested a different motivation, musing in an interview about “Russian boats and… Chinese boats, gunships all over the place… going up and down the coast of Greenland.”

A world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.

Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland is a confounding solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.

Moscow and Beijing undeniably have an increasing number of vessels operating year-round in Arctic waters. In Russia’s case, that’s hardly surprising: Russia accounts for 53% of the region’s coastline. But its interests, and indeed those of China’s, have little to do with Greenland and a lot to do with its own Arctic waters, specifically the seaway along its north coast that Russia refers to as the Northern Sea Route (NSR). As sea ice decreases in thickness and extent as a result of climate change, the NSR is slowly opening up. As a result, Moscow sees this passageway as a potential source of riches and national pride and even a way to reorder international trade.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that the NSR will ultimately “replace the Suez Canal” as the favored transit route between Atlantic and Pacific. It is presently a long way short of that: Just under 40 million tons of goods shipped through the NSR in 2024, almost exclusively on Russian and Chinese vessels, compared to 525 million tons that transited Suez. But it is far more than the 7 million tons that traveled the passage in 1987.

The Northwest Passage—the frequently narrow, shallow, and twisting pathway through the islands of Canada’s High Arctic—tells a similar story on a smaller scale. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, multiple expeditions perished in the ice of the Northwest Passage; after it was finally navigated for the first time in 1906, there were just 67 further transits over the course of the 20th century. Thanks to melting sea ice, there were 41 transits of the Northwest Passage in 2023 alone.

While both the Northwest Passage and NSR are more navigable than in the past, both are still challenging to sail through during all but the very warmest weeks of the year. Even as the Arctic heats up four times faster than the rest of the globe, its seas are unlikely to be consistently ice-free during summer before mid-century at the earliest. The anticipation of such an eventuality, however, has led to a jockeying for position and influence, and a rumbling discord among Arctic powers.

Canada and Russia regard the Northwest Passage and NSR respectively as their national waters, and they intend to dictate who can use them and when. Moscow requires any vessel that wants to transit the NSR to apply for permission up to four months in advance and mandates icebreaker escorts for most ships—often at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.

The United States chafes at such restrictions, arguing that both waterways are international straits, open to vessels from all nations.

“We’re concerned about Russia’s claims to the international waters of the Northern Sea Route,” said then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019, adding with a swipe at Canada that “we recognize Russia is not the only nation making illegitimate claims.”

Interestingly, China is broadly in accord with the U.S. position; but, as is its wont, the country is playing the long game. Notwithstanding Trump’s talk of Chinese gunships off Greenland, Beijing’s interest in the Arctic thus far appears to be entirely mercantilist. Particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China is the only country whose commercial vessels transit the NSR with some regularity. In 2012 the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long even explored the feasibility of crossing from Atlantic to Pacific across the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole.

It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent. While the rest of the world is not heating up as rapidly as the Arctic, it is still warming. And a world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.

It is, to put it mildly, unfortunate that Donald Trump continues to insist that climate change is a “hoax.” Because reducing emissions rapidly is a far better way to protect Americans than idle threats to invade an ice-covered island.

The left is in shambles everywhere while hard-right and far-right parties are riding high in polls across the world. I contend that globalization is at the heart of these developments, and thus it is critical that the left comes to terms with what has gone wrong with its approach to neoliberal globalization and develops in turn an alternative vision of world order.

Globalization came to be a dominant force in our lives sometime around the 1980s. It coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, although globalization is not a 20th-century phenomenon. The 19th century contained a huge burst of globalization. In fact, between 1850 and 1913, the world economy was probably as open as it became in the late 20th century. Tariffs fell, free trade agreements proliferated, trade flows skyrocketed, information flows accelerated, and migrants flowed to all corners of the globe. Neither Europe nor the U.S. had any restrictions on migration. In the U.S., no visas or passports were even needed to enter the country.

That wave of globalization was interrupted because of World War I, and the next wave of globalization did not occur until the early 1980s. In many ways, the new wave of capitalist globalization was more intense than the one that had preceded it as it was characterized by massive financial deregulation and the acceleration of capital flows while trade integration became more rapid than ever. By the 1990s, the new wave of globalization had reached such heights that the world was increasingly becoming a global village. Let’s call it the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.

The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable.

However, there was one huge qualitative difference between the 19th-century and the late 20th-century waves of globalization. While capital movements exploded during the late 20th-century wave of globalization and multinationals moved across the world in search of cheaper labor, labor migration was severely restricted. In contrast, migration became truly globalized in the late 19th century. And the late 20th-century wave of globalization, which was supposed to produce unrivaled benefits for all, also had another dark side: While it was not openly imperialistic as the 19th-century wave of globalization, it was based nonetheless on highly exploitative structures that were not much different from those of colonialism. After all, capitalism has always nurtured dependence, inequality, and exploitation.

Under the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, the Global North took advantage of the weakness of the Global South by trapping millions of its workers in a relentless cycle of exploitation while offshoring had dramatic impacts on the standard of living of average citizens back in the Global North as well-paid industrial jobs became few and far in between, wages stagnated, and the social safety net was torn apart, partly because of less government revenues due to neoliberal tax cuts for corporations and the rich and partly on account of simple ideological reasoning. Austerity for the masses but subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts for industry and the financial sector is a central aspect of the ideological agenda of neoliberalism. And while some developing nations did benefit from the great connectivity in the global economy that has been unleashed since the early 1980s, it is primarily the elites in the Global South, as much as it is in the Global North, that gained the most from the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.

Enter politics.

By the late 1990s, grievances over the direction of the capitalist world economy united people to demand change and an anti-globalization movement surfaced across the globe, protesting specifically against the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave. Protests and demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund became a common feature of the anti-globalization movement across a large number of countries from 1995 to 2018. The anti-globalization movement was inspired by left-wing ideologies and was impressively transnational. Latin America’s anti-globalization movement was especially successful, resulting in support and eventually electoral victory for left-wing parties in scores of countries in the region. Indeed, a database on political institutions reveals that in the early 1990s, 64% of Latin American presidents came from a right-wing party. But a decade later, that number had shrunk to half.

The anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movement was no less prominent in Europe. In the summer of 2001, more than 300,000 people from all over Europe gathered in Genoa, Italy to voice their opposition to the G8 Group, while the Italian police unleashed violence of a dimension unknown up to that point in postwar Western Europe. In the spring of 2002, more than half a million people in Barcelona mobilized against the European Union Heads of State and Government under the banner against Capital and War.

The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism.

The anti-globalization movement had come of age. The prospects for radical change had never looked more promising than they did during the first decade of the new millennium. The winds of change were still in the air in the second decade of the new millennium as the rise to power of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) party in Greece brought hope to leftist movements worldwide, although it was abundantly clear to anyone willing to pay close attention to Greek politics at the time that the leadership of the party had made a decision to switch its ideological profile from radicalism to pragmatism in anticipation of its coming to power.

There is indeed one impressive thing about the rapid and sweeping changes brought about by the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, and that is none other than the fact that the world now spins faster. Extraordinary social, political, and ideological changes can happen from one decade to the next. And, lo and behold, by the end of the second decade of the new millennium, not only did the radical left critique of globalization lose its appeal for the working class and huge chunks of youth, but anti-globalism emerged as a major ideological tenet of the extreme right.

However, the backlash against globalism by hard-right and far-right parties was not based on a scathing critique of neoliberal capitalism but was seen instead as a political project advanced by Marxism and the radical left with the double aim of destroying national culture and replacing the nation-state with institutions of global governance. This is of course an evasion of what capitalist globalization is all about, but it would be naïve to think that the backlash against globalism by the far-right does not have socioeconomic roots. The anti-globalist sentiment that brought President Donald Trump to power in the United States and scores of other authoritarian political figures across the world is driven by both cultural and socioeconomic factors and is nurtured by the “us versus them” mentality. The far-right of course is not anti-systemic and in fact enjoys the support of digital moguls like Elon Musk. As such, it is fooling voters on the economy with promises of a new order. The far-right’s anti-globalism stance begins and ends with the imposition of draconian measures against immigration and the creation of a culture of cruelty.

The anti-globalism of the far-right is perverse and irrational, and thus it may speak volumes of the need of a widely and publicly educated citizenry to sustain democracy, but it also calls attention to the gross political failures of the reformist left parties that came to power during the height of the anti-globalization period. Indeed, while the contradictions of neoliberal globalization led to electoral victories of left parties in scores of countries across the world during the last couple of decades, the shift to global neoliberalism was not countered by the parties of the reformist left that came to power. They may have criticized neoliberal hyper-globalization while they were in opposition, but they did very little once they came to power to combat its destructive effects. At the very best, they increased spending on social programs but did not try to diminish the spread of globalization on their economies and societies. Subsequently, by failing to tame, let alone shrink, capitalist globalization, they quickly saw their political fortunes decline and found citizens changing sides. This is the principal factor that has activated a turn to the far-right across the globe, including the United States, although Trumpism also needs to be considered in light of the peculiar social, cultural, and ideological features of the country.

The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable. In doing so, it leaves the field open for far-right populists to make inroads with disgruntled voters by appealing to their worst instincts as in the case of immigration.

We also know that pressure “from below” to tame or even reverse neoliberal globalization, a view that was held by the main body of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, is a flawed strategy. The way out of neoliberal globalization is by developing a new globalization that is free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation and operates through political processes in which democracy and globalization are in a symbiotic relationship and thus support and reinforce each other.

The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism. A world order where the rights of labor are at the pinnacle of human society and thus the means of production are collectively owned by workers while the exploitation of nature is seen as injustice.

In sum, systemic change for ending neoliberal hyper-globalization is a prerequisite but such a project mandates anti-systemic consciousness and a comprehensive political program for a new world order. If the left fails to develop the courage to engage itself economically, politically, ideologically, and culturally in the making of an alternative world order, capitalist globalization will continue to reign supreme, and the far-right will be its main political beneficiary.

By Ralph Nader May 23, 2025 The chronic lies of Der Führer Trump, hour by hour, day after day, are having deadly and costly impacts on the American people, with many more casualties in the pipeline of wreckage he and his henchman Elon Musk have wrought since January 20. Trump’s lies, threats, and fake promises…

Credit where due: I am ever impressed by the feral energy of U.S. President Donald Trump and his crew, who are able to do an extraordinary amount of damage every single damned day. And somehow their energetic cruelty seems to drain my own reserves: I want to stay in bed. But we fight as best we can, and so here’s my assessment of one dire day, and more importantly what we still might be able to do about it.

It began, early Thursday morning, with House passage of the budget bill, which somehow managed to get even worse in the wee hours. Among other things, a single sentence was amended in such a way as to potentially kill off most of the rooftop solar industry in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explains:

While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”

That arcane piece of language was enough to knock 37% off the share price of SunRun today, the biggest rooftop installer in the country. And it was only a cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, which would essentially repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Nuclear power gets a little bit of a reprieve, and of course ethanol (Earth’s dumbest energy source) does great. But it’s a wipeout far greater than anyone expected even a few weeks ago. Here’s how Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins and his team at REPEAT (Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Toolkit) sum it up:

• Increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 0.5 billion metric tons per year in 2030 and more than 1 billion metric tons per year in 2035.
• Raise U.S. household and business energy expenditures by $25 billion annually in 2030 and over $50 billion in 2035.
• Increase average U.S. household energy costs by roughly $100-160 per household per year in 2030 and roughly $270-415 per household per year in 2035.
• Reduces cumulative capital investment in U.S. electricity and clean fuels production by $1 trillion from 2025-2035.
• Imperil a total of $522 billion in announced but pending investments in U.S. clean energy supply and manufacturing.
• Reduce annual sales of electric vehicles by roughly 40% in 2030 and end America’s battery manufacturing boom.
• Substantially slow electricity capacity additions, raising national average retail electricity rates and monthly household electricity bills by about 9% in 2030—and as much as 17% in some states (including Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania).

In the midst of all this, the Senate—ignoring its parliamentarian—bowed to the wishes of the auto industry and told California (and the 11 states that had followed it) that it couldn’t demand the phaseout of internal combustion vehicles by the middle of the next decade. (This is among other things federalism in reverse).

“Attacking these waivers will devastate our ability to advance the use of electric vehicles in the state,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference after the vote, flanked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials. “We won’t let it happen, not when we’re facing an air pollution and climate crisis that’s getting worse by the day.”

The 1970 Clean Air Act permits California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency that enable the state to enact clean air regulations that go further than federal limits.

Oh, and then at day’s end the Department of Homeland Security told Harvard that 27% of its student body couldn’t study there beginning in the fall because they came from foreign countries.

If you add it up, this is all an effort to keep America precisely where it is now. It’s the Make America Immobile Act. Trump is doing his best to freeze things in place: on behalf of oil companies that want to keep pumping oil, on behalf of automakers that want to keep churning out SUVs. That depends, among other things, on shutting down research at universities, because they keep coming up with things that point us in a different direction, be it temperature readings demonstrating climate change or new batteries that enable entirely different technologies. If America lived alone on this planet that would be truly terrible; luckily for everyone else, there are other places (China, and the E.U.) that are not making the same set of stupid decisions. But if this stands it will kill the future for America.

It will also, of course, kill the present. I’m not bothering to talk about the deep cruelty of the Medicaid cuts (and the fact that they will destroy America’s rural hospital system). There’s also the not-small matter of the intense attacks on transgender people the bill contains. And I won’t bother gassing on about the utter grossness of handing over yet more money to the richest among us. (The top 0.1% of earners gain $390,000 a year on average, while Americans making less than $17,000 lose on average about $1,000. This is, among other things, Christianity in reverse).

So, our job is to do what we can to make it… less worse. The U.S. Senate still has to pass its own version of the bill. Given the GOP majority, they’ll pass something very bad. Perhaps, at Trump’s urging, they’ll rush it through in the next 24 hours; more likely it will take a little longer. We need to put as much pressure as we can on that process, in order to take out the most egregious parts of the bill. Here’s what Third Act sent out on Thursday, and here’s the link we want you to use to register your opposition with Senators. It comes from our very able partners at Solar United Neighbors, who have done as much as anyone in America to help people build clean energy. Fill it out so you can get a call script and the numbers to use. Again, here’s the link. If you want a little inspiration, check out Will Wiseman’s video of rural Americans talking about one particular part of the IRA that’s helping change their lives.

I’m not going to bother pretending that this is guaranteed to work. The bad guys here are riding hard and fast, and they’re trying to shock and cow us into submission. But—don’t go easy. If they can summon the feral energy to wreck the country, we can summon the humane energy to try and save it.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

On today’s “TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan,” we dive into the powder keg of the nuclear standoff between Iran, Israel and the U.S. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are throwing down the gauntlet, vowing a “devastating and decisive response” if Israel dares to strike their nuclear sites. This fiery warning follows U.S. intelligence reports hinting that Israel might be gearing up to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, escalating tensions as Tehran and Washington head into a critical fifth round of nuclear talks in Rome today. At the heart of the clash: Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment, now at 60% purity—way past the 3.67% limit set by the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump ditched in 2018. Iran insists its program is for civilian use, but the West and Israel see a clear path to nukes, raising fears of a preemptive strike that could spark a regional firestorm. With the IAEA meeting in June and the JCPOA’s October deadline looming, these talks are a global flashpoint. Will diplomacy work, or are we on the brink of a new war in the Middle East? Tune in for a no-holds-barred breakdown!

Plus:

• Harvard’s international student ban rocks the academic community.

• House Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” sparks Senate debate.

• The U.S. penny’s production ends.

The post TMI Show Ep 145: “Iran Warns Israel: Back Off!” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Last year, roughly 6 million American families used the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, to help pay their heating or cooling bills. LIHEAP is a program that helps people from Louisiana to Maine and has an amazingly bipartisan support. This support extends to energy providers.

In April of this year, the staff at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who run LIHEAP were fired by Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One of those fired employees was brought back last week to distribute the remaining LIHEAP funds for the current fiscal year.

Why would Collins thank Kennedy, or anyone else, for simply following the law?

This week Secretary Kennedy testified on HHS spending for the next fiscal year before the Senate Appropriations Committee chaired by Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. In fiscal year 2025, Maine received $41.6 million in LIHEAP funding.

At the hearing, Collins praised the Trump for administration for releasing the already appropriated funds and asked Kennedy, “Will you work with this committee in trying to restore LIHEAP so that we can avoid, literally, seniors and low-income families not being able to keep warm in the winter?” Kennedy responded:

Yeah, absolutely, and I’m from New England myself. My brother, for 40 years, has run Citizens Energy, which provides low-cost home heating oil to families in New England. And so many people have come to me over the years and said to me, thank you, your brother saved my life because I didn’t have to choose between food and heat. I was on the Navajo reservation three weeks ago, and Navajo President Buu Nygren said to me, at this point, if we cut LIHEAP, Navajo will die from it. So, I understand the critical historical importance of this program. President [Donald] Trump’s rationale and the [Office of Management and Budget]’s rationale is that President Trump’s energy policies are going to lower the cost of energy so that everybody will get lower cost heating oil, and in that case, this program would simply be another subsidy to the fossil fuel industry.

Kennedy went on to add that if there was not a drop in energy prices, he would spend the monies that Congress appropriated. Concluding his remarks, Kennedy said that “Do that, and I will work with you to make sure that those families do not suffer in that way.”

Collins’ advocacy for LIHEAP is positive, and she should be commended for raising the issue with Kennedy. However, her remarks fell drastically short of what is needed at this moment. Collins was pleased that the Trump administration released already appropriated funds and that Kennedy said he would spend any monies Congress appropriated. This is only doing what the law requires nothing more. Why would Collins thank Kennedy, or anyone else, for simply following the law?

In her remarks, posted on her Senate webpage, Collins did not challenge Kennedy and Trump’s assertion that the energy policies of the Trump administration are going to reduce energy prices to the level that LIHEAP will no longer be needed. Even if there is a major drop in energy prices (this is a big if), would that drop make such a difference that LIHEAP would not be needed in the next fiscal year? The answer is obviously no.

It was good that Collins spoke up for LIHEAP. However, in her questioning she did not challenge the nonsensical reasoning of the Trump administration. Instead, Sen. Collins, who certainly should know better, played along acting as if Trump was normal. As she had done many times throughout her career in the Senate, Collins asked for assurances and hoped for the best. When dealing with the Trump administration, this approach is simply not good enough.

The horrific images of children starving in Gaza, due to Israel's cruel, inhumane blockade of all humanitarian aid since early March, shock the world's conscience. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recently announced plan to distribute aid, while forcing Palestinians in Gaza to move yet again, is a spurious cover for his and U.S. President Donald Trump's ethnic cleansing scheme.

Yet concrete action to end this calamity is hard to organize. How does a genocide end? And specifically, how do people of conscience, acting with majority support of the U.S. public, organize to end it?

The lack of true democracy in the United States, so evident in domestic policy on many issues, is even worse in terms of foreign policy, especially regarding the mostly ironclad support for Israel. However, cracks are showing, and they must be exploited quickly.

Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people?

Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) brought his S. Res. 224, calling for an end to the humanitarian blockade on Gaza, to the Senate floor. The resolution had the support of all Democrats, except Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Angus King (I-Maine).

The resolution was predictably blocked from getting a vote by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair James Risch (R-Idaho), but was significant as no other legislative measure in the year and half since the war on Gaza began has garnered such widespread, albeit partisan support (no Republicans supported it, nor have any called for a cease-fire or cutting off U.S. weapons to Israel).

A companion resolution in the House of Representatives will be introduced very soon, and while both would be nonbinding, they represent progress in the long struggle to exert pressure on Israel, and Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are keenly aware of U.S. political developments. Additionally, the Senate will likely soon vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to stop specific U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. Sen. Sanders forced such votes twice since November, and while they failed, the upcoming votes should attract more support, and add to the pressure on the Israeli government, which of course is opposed by most Israelis.

Legislative initiatives are far from the only strategies and tactics being employed by peace and human rights activists. Other recent and upcoming events and opportunities include the following:

Activists led by Montgomery County, Maryland Peace Action showed up at new U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks' (D-Md.) "Sick of It" rally protesting the Trump-Musk cuts to health programs, and had a strong showing about also being sick of the Gaza genocide, including confronting the senator. It may have had some impact, as she later signed onto Sen. Welch's resolution, after having been largely silent on the genocide in Gaza, and voting against Sen. Sanders' most recent JRDs.

The impressive anti-genocide commencement speech by George Washington University student Cecelia Culver has received significant media coverage. She is now shamefully being investigated by the university. Similarly, New York University student Logan Rozos condemned the Gaza genocide in his commencement speech, and the university is withholding his diploma. Both students, along with other students similarly persecuted for speaking out for an end to the horrors in Gaza, deserve support and solidarity.

Reprising and expanding an effort from last year, New Hampshire peace activist Bob Sanders is conducting a cross-country bike ride to raise awareness of the dire situation in Gaza.

Veterans for Peace and other allies are supporting a 40-day fast for Peace in Gaza.

Groups in Philadelphia will hold a People's War Crimes Tribunal on May 31, building on the difficult but necessary advocacy aimed at Sen. Fetterman.

Lastly, Do Not Turn on Us is a new initiative calling on military and National Guard personnel to refuse unlawful, fascist orders. While more aimed at stopping fascism in the United States, it certainly is a contribution to the overall movement to establish peace, human rights, and the rule of law, domestically and internationally.

Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people? No one can know for sure, but all are worthy of support and persistence. As Ms. Culver stated, none of us are free until Palestine is free.

On Tuesday, after releasing a joint statement with France and Canada threatening “concrete actions” if Israel did not allow aid into Gaza, the U.K. government suspended talks on its upgraded free trade deal, summoned the Israeli ambassador, and imposed new sanctions on settlers in the occupied West Bank. While this might appear substantial for the goal of isolating the Zionist state, it amounts to little more than face-saving measures.

In his speech announcing these measures, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy couldn’t even bear to say these words without condemning the October 7 operation and maintaining Israel’s right to commit genocide. We can’t fall for these empty measures, even if they appear to be a positive push toward some justice. In reality, they are a distraction and feign action from a government supporting Israel as it accelerates its genocidal attacks. Each day, as Israel commits new massacres with American weapons, it is using the Royal Air Force Akrotiri, a British military base on Cyprus, to conduct surveillance flights and facilitate weapons transfers.

The government’s suspension of negotiations on its free-trade agreement is misleading. This is not the existing free-trade agreement in place between Britain and Israel, but a future plan to deepen relations. Known as the 2030 Roadmap, this was initiated under the previous Conservative government in 2022, and the Labour government continued negotiations immediately after entering government in July 2024. Stopping these negotiations is a good first step, but they must end their current free-trade agreement if Lammy’s words are worth their salt.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the world “won’t stop us.” Our leaders bought by Zionism will certainly not, but the people will.

The sanctions on a handful of people and companies in the occupied West Bank might be a generally positive step. But at a closer look, these measures are only on three people, two outposts, and two organisations. All of the 700,000 settlers occupying the West Bank in their 150 settlements and 128 outposts are illegal under international law. These very narrow sanctions then give wider justification for the illegal occupation of the West Bank, scapegoating a handful of “extreme” characters but not contending with the occupation itself. Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal. Once again, Britain is ignoring international law, just as it does in refusing to hand over surveillance data on Gaza to the International Criminal Court.

Britain’s recent moves should rightly be compared with the United States, which has formed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private company of U.S. military veteran mercenaries to run an aid distribution operation, better described as a trojan horse to occupy Gaza. As Israel accelerates its genocide in Gaza, the U.S. and Britain are attempting to conceal their role in the violence. We might see these as necessary measures for Israel to be committing what many are referring to as the final stage in the genocide.

Over the past few days, the Starmer government’s statements have given us the illusion of a change in course toward Israel. Yet in five of the six days leading up to May 20, Britain has flown a surveillance flight over Gaza for Israel.

Britain has made no material change in its policy of arming Israel, providing surveillance information, and using its military base on Cyprus for weapons shipments. Therefore, not only are these statements hollow and vacuous, but they are a pernicious and sly attempt to divert attention from Britain’s role as it directly participates in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Sunday (May 18th), Britain sent an A400M Atlas plane to Israel from RAF Akrotiri. This aircraft can carry up to 37 metric tons of cargo, including weapons and soldiers. Two hours later, it sent a surveillance flight over Gaza. These operations have been purposefully concealed from public knowledge, but this is clearly shifting. The only reason we know about these flights is because of the work of Matt Kennard, Declassified U.K., and Genocide-Free Cyprus, among other groups. There clearly is mounting pressure as a result of the revelations of Britain’s direct role in Israel’s genocide, and perhaps we must recognize it has a role in Lammy’s face-saving attempts.

Last week, the U.K. government defended its continued provision of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, pointing to the need for “national security.” In court, they claimed “no genocide has occurred or is occurring,” that Israel is not “deliberately targeting civilian women or children.” Britain is defending Israel legally, diplomatically, and militarily. No statement can change that fact.

Israel stopped all aid trucks from entering Gaza on March 2. It has taken more than 11 weeks for the government to take any action at all. Every day, the Israeli occupation commits heinous massacres. They are even bragging that the world “won’t stop us.” And so far, they’re right.

In the face of this, we cannot despair. Palestinians in Gaza remain steadfast each day, for the 18 months of this escalation in the genocide that has been ongoing for more than 77 years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the world “won’t stop us.” Our leaders bought by Zionism will certainly not, but the people will. We must continue our demands for a full arms embargo, an end to British surveillance flights, and the total liberation of Palestine.

Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a “Jewish political artist.” The painter’s quick reply was that he wasn’t a “Jewish political artist,” he was just a “political artist.” In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily, that his answer was too pat. Yes, he was a political artist. His paintings had focused not just on Latin America but on war-torn Vietnam and racism in the United States and South Africa. But he had consciously avoided Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Golub admitted that what it meant for him to be a successful artist was never to take the “horrors inflicted on Palestinians” as his subject matter. Only then would he be left free to paint his political opinions on anything else.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve thought of Leon Golub, who died in 2004, many times as the escalation of Israel’s assault on Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank paralleled my own rush to finish a book (just published as America, América: A New History of the New World). Among other things, it traces Latin America’s largely unrecognized role in the abolition of the doctrine of conquest and the creation, after World War II, of the liberal international order, including the founding of the International Court of Justice (today considering South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza).

Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands have.

I’ve been writing critically on how the U.S. acted in Latin America for more than three decades. Unlike many scholars and students of the Middle East, I was able to do so and not be punished because, like Golub, I mostly focused on the “horrors inflicted” on people other than Palestinians. As President Richard Nixon put it all too accurately in 1971, nobody of import in the United States gives “one damn about Latin America.”

A general indifference to the region, as well as the fact that even the most diehard defenders of U.S. global power have been willing to concede that this country often acted in unhelpful ways in its own hemisphere (where Washington undertook at least 41 regime changes between 1898 and 1994!), have made it remarkably safe to speak out about Latin America. Yet, in 2025, the “horrors inflicted” are everywhere and it’s no longer possible to silo one’s sympathies.

Conquest, Then and Now

Consider the Spanish conquest of the Americas alongside Israel’s assault on Gaza. In many ways, the two events, separated by half a millennium, are incomparable. The first was continental in scale, a fight for a New World that was then home to, by some estimates, 100,000,000 people. The second unfolds on a patch of land the size of Las Vegas with a population of just over 2 million. The conquest would claim tens of millions of lives, while so far, Israel is estimated to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more.

Yet there are uncanny parallels between the two conflicts, including the fact that each began in the wake of a communications revolution: the printing press then, social media now.

Spain was the first empire in modern history to actively publicize its colonial atrocities, as printers in Madrid, Seville, and other cities stamped out sheet after sheet of conquest gore: accounts of mass hangings, of babies drowned or roasted over fire pits to be fed to dogs, and of torched towns. One Spanish governor described a post­apocalyptic landscape filled with the walking near-dead, victims of mutilations meted out to Native Americans, this way: a “multitude of lame and maimed Indians, without hands, or with only one hand, blind, their noses cut off, earless.” Today, the internet circulates countless photographs and videos with no less horrific images of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians, of armless boys and “decomposing babies.” Some photographs of children starved by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to a New York Times editor, were simply too “graphic” to publish.

In 16th-century Spain, common soldiers wrote, or paid others to write, their stories of mayhem, hoping to make a heroic name for themselves. Today, we see updated digital versions of a similar kind of conquering pride, as members of the IDF, on platforms like TikTok, upload videos of Gazans “stripped, bound, and blindfolded” and others showing bulldozers and tanks razing homes. Soldiers mock the destruction of schools and hospitals or, as they rummage through abandoned homes, are seen playing with or wearing the bras and underwear of their former residents.

Both Spanish officials then and Israeli spokesmen now have openly declared their intention to “conquer” their enemies by forcing their removal from their homes and concentrating them in more controllable areas. Not all Spanish, like not all Israelis, believed their enemies to be subhuman. But some did and do. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda thought Native Americans were “brute animals,” as “monkeys are to men.” Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls Palestinians “human animals.” Many Spanish priests and royal officials admitted that Native Americans were human, but considered them child-like innocents who had to be violently severed from their pagan priests—just as Israel believes Palestinians have to be violently severed from Hamas. “We are separating Hamas from the population, cleansing the strip,” said Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the IDF’s extreme tactics.

Hernán Cortés had his men level Aztec temples, which he called mosques. Those temples served as healing places, and their destruction parallels the ruin visited on Gaza’s hospitals and other centers of refuge. Not even the dead were safe—neither in the Americas, nor today in Gaza. As did the conquistadores, the IDF has desecrated several burial grounds.

Spanish violence in the Americas provoked a powerful ethical backlash. The Dominican jurist Francisco Vitoria, for instance, questioned the legality of the Conquest, while Father Bartolomé de las Casas insisted on the absolute equality of all human beings, and other theologians of the time condemned the many varieties of enslavement imposed on Native Americans. Such declarations and condemnations were consequential in the long run. Yet they did little to stop the suffering. Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands have.

“The Conquest,” as a singular uppercase event, might have been challenged, but all the individual battles that made up the Conquest, the morning massacres and midnight raids on Indigenous villages, simply went on. Spanish settlers took it for granted that, no matter what priests said from pulpits or jurists argued in seminar rooms, they had a right to “defend” themselves: that, were Indians to attack them, they could retaliate.

Here’s just one of many examples: in July 1503, Spanish settlers slaughtered over 700 residents in the village of Xaragua on Hispaniola (the island that today comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic), killings that Spain’s Queen Isabella deemed “just” because some members of the village had started to violently resist Spanish rule. Israel uses the same kind of legalisms to insist that its war on Hamas is indeed similarly just, since Hamas started it. Just as the conflict on Hispaniola is sequestered from the larger context of the Conquest, the conflict that started on October 7, 2023, is isolated from the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

From Cortés to Hitler

The doctrine or “right” of conquest goes back to Roman times and, apart from the criticism aimed at Spain in the 1500s, remained mostly uncontested until the late 18th century, when—with the breaking free of the Americas from Europe—the doctrine found new champions and new critics.

The leaders of the new United States reinforced the doctrine, invoking the right of conquest to justify their drive westward toward the Pacific Ocean and their taking of Native American and Mexican lands.

At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America’s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar “rules-based” liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted.

Generations of law professors in the U.S. taught their students that the doctrine was legitimate. “The title of European nations, and which passed to the United States, to this vast territorial empire, was founded on discovery and conquest,” as James Kent put it at Columbia Law School in the 1790s. The Supreme Court, too, said that the United States was founded on conquest, and that its doctrine remained applicable. As late as 1928, a widely-assigned English-language law book insisted that, “as long as a Law of Nations has been in existence, the States, as well as the vast majority of writers, have recognized subjugation as a mode of acquiring territory,” deeming it legal for “the victor to annex the conquered enemy territory.”

In contrast, Spanish America’s independence leaders fiercely repudiated the principle of conquest. They had to, since they had to learn to live with each other, for they presided over seven new Spanish-American republics on a crowded continent. If they had adhered to a U.S. version of international law, what would have stopped Argentina from conquering Chile the way the United States conquered the Creeks and the Mexicans? Or Chile from marching on Argentina to gain access to the Atlantic? The result would have been endless war. And so, the region’s jurists and other intellectuals (drawing from earlier Catholic criticisms of Spain’s subjugation of the New World) disavowed conquest. In its place, they cobbled together a new framework of international relations that outlawed aggressive war and recognized the absolute sovereignty of all nations, regardless of their size.

For decades, Latin American diplomats tried to force Washington to accept such a vision of cooperative international law—and for decades Washington refused, not wanting to be a Gulliver tied down by a gaggle of Latin Lilliputians. Over time, however, U.S. statesmen began to grudgingly accept Latin America’s legal interpretations, with the far-sighted among them realizing that a reformed system of international law would allow for a more effective projection of Washington’s power. In 1890, at the first Pan-American Conference, the United States signed a provisional treaty abrogating the doctrine of conquest. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to give up the right to intervene in Latin American affairs and to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nations.

At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America’s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar “rules-based” liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted, especially the rejection of the doctrine of conquest.

Cortés to Hitler, the age of conquest, it seemed, was finally over.

The End of the End of the Age of Conquest

Not really, of course. Cold warriors found many ways to circumvent the “rules,” and didn’t need to cite Roman law doctrine to justify atrocities in Vietnam, Guatemala, or Indonesia, among other places. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, war began spreading again like wildfire in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the U.S.-led first and second Gulf Wars.

Still, the liberal order globally held on to the idea that the world should be organized around cooperation, not competition, that nations had more interests in common than in contention.

Now, though, that idea seems to have been tossed aside and, in its place, comes a new vision of conquest. We see its burlesque version in the boastful pronouncements of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has casually claimed the right to use coercion to take the island of Greenland, annex Canada as “the 51st state,” grab the Panama Canal, and clear out Gaza, supposedly turning the strip into a Riviera-like resort. Far more ferocious expressions of that vision of conquest are seen in both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza.

Of those two wars of conquest, the second touches a deep nerve, in part because Israel’s existence is so tightly bound up with the fortunes of the liberal international order. The United Nations in 1949 conjured Israel (legally at least) into existence. Latin American nations at the time voted unanimously to recognize Israel’s nationhood, with Guatemala serving as Washington’s whip, ensuring that the region would act as a bloc. And the Holocaust has served as the West’s moral reference point, a nightmarish reminder of what awaits a world that forsakes liberal tolerance or doesn’t abide by liberal rules. At the same time, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, the United Nations has also become the most persistent critic of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel ignores U.N. criticism while invoking the U.N. charter’s article 51, which grants nations the right to self-defense, to justify its assault on Gazans.

As we enter what may be the final phase of the Gazan genocide, that long entwinement between a rules-based order and Israel has become a kind of death dance. Many turn away, unable to bear the news. Others can’t turn away, horrified that those in power in this country offer nothing other than more weapons to Israel, which continues to kill indiscriminately, while withholding all food and medicines from those trapped in Gaza. As of April, about 2 million Palestinians had no secure source of food at all. Babies continue to decompose. “When children die of starvation, they don’t even cry. Their little hearts just slow down until they stop,” said Colorado pediatrician Mohamed Kuziez, who works with Doctors Against Genocide.

In early May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet unanimously approved a plan dubbed Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which, if enacted, would drive all Gazans into a small containment zone in the southern part of that strip, with Israel controlling all food and medical aid to them. The IDF would then, as one official described the plan, complete “the conquest of the Gaza Strip.” Gaza, said Finance Minister Smotrich, will then be “completely destroyed.” He added grimly, “We conquer and stay.”

Back in the 1500s, the revulsion felt by some theologians and philosophers at the extreme brutality of the Spanish conquest began the “slow creation of humanity”—the fragile idea, nurtured over the centuries and always imperfectly applied, that all humans are indeed equal and form a single community beyond tribalism and nationalism. Today, a similar brutality is undoing that work. Humanity appears to be dissolving at an ever-quickening pace.

From Cortés to Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump, the end of the end of conquest begins.

A series of internal government messages reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed governments to clear regulatory barriers for Elon Musk’s Starlink. In the messages obtained by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directs U.S. officials to push for permit approvals for the satellite internet service. Governments facing chaotic tariff threats have gotten the message and are rolling out the red carpet for Musk in the hope of avoiding costly tariffs.

This scandal has drawn widespread attention and condemnation, with dozens of members of Congress and senators calling for investigations into Musk and the government agencies that may have pressured countries on his behalf.

While this corruption is shocking, it’s hardly surprising. Before the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, Public Citizen issued a report documenting how the tariff process in President Donald Trump’s first term enabled a quid-pro-quo spoils system that rewarded the rich and well-connected. We warned that Musk’s powerful and ill-defined role in the U.S. government could lead other countries to decide that giving special privileges to Musk’s companies would help them earn brownie points with the Trump administration.

U.S. Government’s Sales Pitch for Starlink

Elon Musk has been pushing for Starlink expansion across the world for years, but some countries have been wary of permitting the service to enter their markets for a number of reasons. For example, experts have raised concerns about threats to “data sovereignty,” a group or individual’s right to control and maintain their own data. To the extent that communications on the Starlink network are routed through the U.S., they may be accessible to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

And it is not unreasonable for countries to consider that access to Starlink services could be weaponized and a nation’s internet access held hostage at the whim of a single man or wayward administration. Alarmingly, claims abound that the U.S threatened to withdraw Ukrainian access to Starlink if the country did not sign the U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement (though this has been denied by Musk).

But now, Musk’s proximity to the White House and Trump’s innermost circle has provided him with powerful new leverage to push his businesses on foreign governments: the threat of Trump’s chaotic tariffs. For some countries weighing the pros and cons, the chance that approval for Starlink helps stave off tariffs has changed the equation.

Trump and his cronies have made it clear since Day 1 of his 2015 presidential primary campaign that he will bend public policy to benefit himself and his wayward inner circle of Yes Men.

The Washington Post exposé highlighted several diplomatic cables from various embassies commenting on foreign governments’ decision-making on the satellite internet service.

For example, a March cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia explains it “has observed the Cambodian government—likely due to concern over the possibility of U.S. tariffs—signal its desire to help balance our trade relationship by promoting the market entry of leading U.S. companies such as Boeing and Starlink.” Leaders of the American Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia advised the Ministry of Economy and Finance to take “decisive action in offering concessions to the United States… recommending that Cambodia… expeditiously approve Starlink’s market entry request.”

Cambodia is facing a 49% Trump tariff rate.

Another cable from April highlighted that Starlink was pushing for a license to operate in Djibouti. State Department staffers noted Starlink’s approval would be an opportunity to open the country’s market and boost “an American company.” Embassy officials “will continue to follow up with Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

Djibouti is facing a 10% Trump tariff rate.

The Pressure Is Working—At the Expense of Public Interest Policies

Sec. Rubio “encouraged Vietnam to address trade imbalances,” in an early March 2025 phone call with the nation’s Foreign Ministry. Shortly thereafter, the Vietnamese government laid out a battery of appeasements to the Trump administration, including a waiver of their domestic partnership requirements, enabling the launch of a five-year pilot program with Starlink. An unnamed source speaking with Reuters said this can be seen as “an olive branch” to Musk and his company, a “demonstration from the Vietnamese side that they can play the transactional diplomacy game if the Trump administration wants that.”

Vietnam is facing a 46% Trump tariff rate.

A Bangladeshi representative visited the White House in mid-February to offer concessions to stave off the promised tariffs and was brought to a surprise meeting with Elon Musk. Musk wanted to discuss the ongoing negotiations between Starlink and Bangladesh’s regulatory agency—the implication being that Bangladesh would not get favorable trade terms from the U.S. if Starlink wasn’t permitted. Early April saw Bangladesh’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission issue what was described as “the swiftest recommendation” in its history for a Starlink license. When Trump announced a punishing 37% reciprocal tariff on Bangladesh, the export-dependent country wrote a letter to Trump requesting leniency and detailing the ways in which it was already taking action to benefit U.S. businesses—including its access for Starlink.

Bangladesh is facing a 37% Trump tariff rate.

Lesotho also granted a license to Starlink in April, despite local objections to foreign-owned businesses. Local NGOs called the licensing decision “a betrayal—a shameful sellout by a government that appears increasingly willing to place foreign corporate interests above the democratic will and long-term developmental needs of the people of Lesotho.” An internal State Department memo states, “As the government of Lesotho negotiates a trade deal with the United States, it hopes that licensing Starlink demonstrates goodwill and intent to welcome U.S. businesses.” Subtle.

Lesotho is facing a 50% Trump tariff rate.

Musk has infamously complained on social media over South Africa’s post-Apartheid reparations rules, claiming that Starlink is “not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because [he’s] not Black [sic]”—despite having never even applied for a license. The Washington Post noted that “the story about Bangladesh was making its way around political and business circles in South Africa,” and it’s assumed that approval of a Starlink license has become “a prerequisite for getting a favorable trade deal.” Legislators have introduced a controversial measure to exempt Starlink from the Black empowerment law.

South Africa is facing a 30% Trump tariff rate.

Musk has been looking to break into the Indian market for years—even launching, then retracting, services in 2022 without the necessary licenses. Around the time of the Bangladesh meeting, Musk also met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi near the White House. According to India Today, a “key agenda” item was Starlink’s pending approval in India. In May of 2025, India dropped two proposed security rules that Starlink had refused during earlier discussions.

India is facing a 26% Trump tariff rate.

In March of 2024, Starlink was prohibited in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, citing concerns from military experts who warned it could be misused by armed insurgent groups including M23. That ban was recently lifted, and Starlink launched in May 2025. This policy reversal comes at a time of mounting frustrations from Congolese civil society over secretive dealmaking with the United States. The resurgence of rebel group M23 has pushed President Felix Tshisekedi’s government toward a controversial deal that has the private military corporation Blackwater’s Erik Prince at the center. The deal would exchange U.S. security assistance for access to DRC critical minerals, not unlike the recent U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal.

The DRC is facing an 11% Trump tariff rate

The list goes on. Mali, Somalia, Namibia, and others are also considering regulatory approval of Starlink and facing varying degrees of resistance from civil society.

Namibia is facing a 21% Trump tariff rate, with Mali and Somalia at 10%.

The Blueprint

Paving the way for Starlink in other countries is just the tip of the iceberg. Trump and his cronies have made it clear since Day 1 of his 2015 presidential primary campaign that he will bend public policy to benefit himself and his wayward inner circle of Yes Men. Anything that can limit their personal gain is on the chopping block.

The attacks on other governments’ legitimate domestic policies aren’t just predictable, they’re predicted. In detail. Not just by Trump’s erratic speeches and TruthSocial policy changes, but across nearly 400 pages, readily available to us all at ustr.gov: the 2025 National Trade Estimate (NTE) Report.

This year’s report targets a litany of public interest laws and policies adopted by countries around the world to regulate the digital ecosystem. Notably, the 2025 NTE report calls out the satellite licensing and approval processes in Brazil, South Korea, and Malaysia, and points out that a number of countries impose import restrictions on certain types of internet and telecommunications equipment. Removing these would smooth regulatory hurdles for Starlink in those countries. The NTE report is also chock-full of other privacy, AI accountability, and competition policies that Big Tech companies want to get rid of around the world.

The report was drafted in large part based on comments submitted by corporations in October 2024 under then-President Joe Biden and before the presidential election. Given the Trump administration’s brazen willingness to openly push the agenda of his billionaire buddies, we can now expect even more extreme demands from companies like Starlink. For instance, in a submission to the Trump administration ahead of the “reciprocal tariffs” announcement, SpaceX complained about governments imposing “non-tariff” barriers impeding global roll-out of Starlink, including having to pay governments for access to spectrum—a standard practice in a number of countries, including the U.S.

As Trump wields his chaotic tariff threats to extract concessions in dozens of closed-door negotiations, we should not be surprised to see even more Big Tech giveaways and lucrative favors for Musk. It is imperative that Congress demand transparency in these trade talks and hold the Trump administration accountable for such inappropriate coercion.

Ted Rall’s cartoon skewers Democratic hopefuls copying Trump playbook. Last week Gavin Newsom faced backlash for proposing deep cuts to immigrant health care while vowing to crack down on the homeless. Pete Buttigieg stirred debate by endorsing Trump style tariffs to protect American jobs. Gretchen Whitmer drew criticism for rejecting birthright citizenship to appeal to conservative voters. Yet Democratic voters expressed frustration with these candidates for mimicking Trump policies while opposing him. Rall mocks this hypocrisy as Newsom, Buttigieg and Whitmer chase Trump voter base by adopting his tactics. The irony lies in their anti Trump stance while embracing his ideas.

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