On May 6, 2026, the Trump administration released its latest conspiracy-laden attack on “the left,” this time in the form of a “counterterrorism strategy". While laughably lacking in evidence or regard for laws, the “strategy” will have serious, deadly consequences. It sets our country’s counterterror apparatus and racist, anti-Muslim goals against the Global South, Europe, and all those here at home who have the nerve to demand their rights and oppose full-fledged autocracy.

In this post, I will focus on the domestic implications, although the global impacts are both frightening and impossible to fully separate, as the strategy conflates everything from domestic resistance movements to people with disfavored ideologies to drug trafficking with international terrorism.

The strategy is authored by Sebastian Gorka, a known anti-Muslim bigot whom former counterterrorism officials pan as “ill-informed” and a “huckster.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this so-called “strategy” is basically a cocktail of fearmongering and post-9/11 playbook, but on steroids. It incorporates and expands on the president’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which casts a sweeping set of dissenting views as (domestic) terrorism, plays up fears of a “new alliance” between leftists and “Islamists,” and completely ignores the documented threats of right-wing and white supremacist extremists.

This is all hauntingly familiar. For generations, federal agencies have surveilled, monitored, and targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color, using surveillance as a tool of intimidation and enforcement that deepens racial inequities instead of making people safer.

Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.

For example, the strategy promises to wield massive law enforcement, surveillance, and other counterterror powers to “map” and "neutralize" groups it describes as "anti‑American, radically pro‑transgender, and anarchist." In the post-9/11 era, the New York Police Department attempted to map all Muslims and their institutions in the Tri-State Area, for which Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C. successfully sued in 2012. We have long seen our community and sacred spaces violated by informants and oppressive surveillance.

The document also states that the US government will "[i]dentify terror actors and plots before they happen,” (emphasis added) which sounds dystopian, but is the same false logic underlying the notorious Countering Violent Extremism program that targeted American Muslims in the post-9/11 era.

In Gorka's reported comments to the press, he doubled down on targeting "ideology” and preventive policing: “We see a threat… we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals.”

These practices have caused lasting trauma and generational impact for Muslims, stifling our religious and political expression and wrecking intra-community trust. Now the government is wolfishly expanding while few seem to notice. Gorka himself said, “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”

A Sweeping Attack on Dissent

Indeed, the breadth of attacks on protesters, dissenters, and civil rights organizations is overwhelming. A few examples:

• This administration slandered Renee Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists after its own officers shot each of them dead in broad daylight, contravening overwhelming bystander and video evidence.
• Prairieland case: Eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protesters were convicted of material support for terrorism; raided; and had their flyers, zines, and use of encrypted chats cited in the indictment as evidence of their connection to terrorism.
• “Domestic terrorist” database: In January, an ICE officer told a legal observer, “[W]e have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist." When pressed at a congressional hearing, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons denied that a database of American “domestic terrorists” exists, but in a subsequent hearing, former Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to deny it.
• In late April, federal prosecutors indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented violent white supremacists for decades.

Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.

What can we do?

Make noise: Call attention to the harms of this counterterror “strategy.” Its release during congressional recess let it fly under the radar, although Ranking Member of House Homeland Security Committee Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) noted its lack of strategy and called again for a hearing with officials. Other elected officials should likewise take action to condemn this latest attack on dissent, demand transparency about its implementation and adherence to the Constitution, and protect our rights.

Congress also has an immediate opportunity to curb vast surveillance powers enabled by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. Congressional leadership has so far blocked bipartisan efforts to pass a warrant requirement for searches of people in the US, and before accessing our intimate details through data-broker purchases. Lawmakers have until June 12 to enact basic protections for people in the US. This counterterror strategy—along with the recent whispers of its potential use against right-wing dissenters from Trumpism—shows exactly why we must urgently rein in the government's massive counterterror arsenal, starting with 702’s warrantless spy power.

Demand that local governments refuse to cooperate with the federal government, divest and remove surveillance technology, and withdraw from Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF’s), which deputize local law enforcement to do the feds’ bidding and share information pursuant to its permissive interpretations of federal law.

Collectively, we must continue to demand our rights: to protest, to speak, to commune, and to live free from Big Brother—especially Big Brother with a gun. Remember: The overwhelm we feel isn’t an accident; it’s tactical. Refuse to allow the administration’s intimidation tactics to succeed. Our mass, unapologetic refusal to comply, is what’s truly “delicious.”

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Crisis in Cuba: Cuba’s oil reserves have run dry, which will plunge the country into even more frequent, bigger and longer nationwide blackouts. Venezuelan fuel stopped flowing in January, after the US kidnapped Venezuela’s president and stole Venezuela’s oil industry. Later, Trump imposed a blockade barring oil from reaching Cuba, which had also received shipments from Mexico.

• The US is moving to indict former Cuban president Raúl Castro. The charges are related to the Cuban government shooting down two planes operated by a right-wing group in 1996.

•  CIA Director John Ratcliffe leads a delegation to Havana to deliver a message from Trump to Cuban officials and Raúl “Raulito” Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the elder Castro’s grandson. Last week, the U.S. State Department ⁠said it had privately offered the $100 million in aid to Cuba, in addition to “free ​and fast satellite internet” on the condition that it agree to “meaningful reforms.”

•  The Justice Department accuses Yale School of Medicine of discriminating based on race, by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones. The DOJ looked at median grade-point averages and standardized test scores broken down by race, and concluded that “Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.” The investigation did not address other factors, such as essays, transcripts, letters of recommendation and interviews. The median entrance exam score for admitted Black students last year was 518 and for 517 for Hispanic students. The median score was 524 for both White and Asian students. The highest possible score is 528. The median grade point average for Black students was 3.88 and 3.91 for Hispanic students. For White students, it was 3.97 and for Asians 3.98.

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As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it. As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find, all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.

Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents' childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents' childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.

After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn't have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother's parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only two hours away from their families, but they didn't know if they'd ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.

My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It's hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I will never forget when my grandfather, who was a bus driver back in the day, told me that he was once able to drive to Beirut or Baghdad, and then return home on the same day. Now, such an idea is unfathomable.

In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide.

Ever since I was old enough to comprehend things, I knew Palestine was my homeland and that it was being hurt by something called Israel. Israel was the reason my mom was born in Jordan instead of Palestine, the driving force that led my parents to move to the US for better education and work. It is the thing that separates me from the rest of my extended family, preventing me from knowing them wholly and truly. Israel is why I only see my grandparents every few years, why I have to watch my younger cousins grow up through a phone screen. As a Palestinian who grew up in the States, I was immersed in Western culture and disconnected from my own, and Israel is the reason.

This was my norm, the reality I was born into. After a while, the daily reminders of being disenfranchised, the cruelty of it all, become something you just get used to. You begin to get settled with the unsettling feeling that this may be the fortune of a Palestinian in this world: a life of displacement and diaspora, with the occasional travesty, like the previous bombing campaigns of Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014. This process of desensitization is imprinted in my generational DNA; I was practically born already accustomed to the injustice of being Palestinian.

The brutal truth was that the Nakba never ended. We all instinctively knew this, but especially after the Oslo Accords' normalization efforts, a sense of false comfort plagued the Palestinian community for the two decades following its signing. The reality before October 2023 was the occasional protest and the occasional outrage, only to be quelled by half-hearted statements of sympathetic apathy by politicians. I became involved in student organizing for Palestine in 2021, and although we were constantly working, the landscape back then was much quieter and smaller.

Then, two and a half years ago, the current stage of genocide in Gaza began. I don't think I will ever experience life the way it happened that fall. I had gone to sleep on October 6, when everything was relatively "normal," then I woke up for my morning shift at 4:30 am to my phone practically blowing up with notifications. I remember going to my barista job with headphones in the whole time, watching Al Jazeera while I made coffee for people who had no idea what had just shifted in the world.

In the wake of October 7, the protests became consistent, the outrage became something so eternal that you felt like it could consume you and burn you to ash. What was once a few hundred people in the streets became thousands, and in some places, millions would turn out.

It was the beginning of a period of exhaustion, having something so important to organize for every single day, to the point that my studies didn't even matter anymore. It was tough, but what was happening to those in Gaza was far worse, and it became a matter of expending everything you have for those who have nothing. Millions felt the same all over the world, and this sparked the mass-education and mobilization of the Palestine solidarity movement we see today.

Since October 2023, the images out of Gaza resembling the Nakba have flooded our timelines. After nearly three years of the most inhumane, dehumanizing, genocidal campaign by the US and Israel, one might assume that a sense of hopelessness would take hold, as it did after the 1948 Nakba. But I see this moment as the catalyst for the exact opposite to happen.

Israel believes it can continue what it has always done. It can embark on an outright genocide with the intent of wiping Palestinians off the map, then agree to multiple ceasefires only to break every single one of them. After all, you cannot cease a genocide while the genocidal entity still operates with impunity. The difference this time around is that people around the world actually know what's going on. Israel, along with its benefactor, the US, has backed itself into a corner I doubt it will ever escape from.

And that's the fuel to my revolutionary optimism. Sometimes, it's hard to think liberation is near when faced with so much death and destruction. But it's even harder to ignore the cracks in the facade of the US and Israeli machine. They were both built on false foundations that were already rotten and cracked, and nothing built on the crushed livelihoods of millions will ever persevere. People are seeing the rot come up to the surface, and they are utterly disgusted with the state of our world that has perpetuated genocide, all held together by an ultra-wealthy ruling class, agonizing capitalism, and white supremacy.

When Israel was once known as the democracy of the Middle East, it's now the stain, the villain that has rained chaos, death, and destruction all over the region. When getting American Israel Pubic Affairs Committee money once meant you were a strong candidate, now it's a sure death sentence in local American elections. When American institutions like the American Medical Association once deemed it acceptable to stay silent on Palestine, they are now condemned for it. When our media and news outlets operated as tools of Israeli propaganda, they are now seen as tools of war and oppression. It is our work and dedication as activists that have changed the perception of all these things that were once deemed normal.

In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide. That's the difference: The struggle for Palestine was built on the sacrifice of our martyrs and revolutionaries, on principle, and on love for our land and people. It is a beautiful, rich foundation that can withstand whatever force attempts to tear it down.

Most of my family remains on the land, or near it in Jordan. I see this as a consistent win against the oppressor every day. As long as we keep our homes, livelihoods, and stories, the Palestinian identity will never die, and my family is fighting that battle every day. If desensitization has an imprint on my DNA, so does resilience and the steadfast faith that Palestine will be liberated soon.

It is an inspiring time to be a New Yorker. Over the last year, thousands have been mobilized by a vision for a more just city, where the interests of the people, not the 1%, are at the center of social and economic policies. Driving this vision is a city that is affordable, one where public infrastructures are not indicative of neglect, exclusion or harm, but are life-affirming institutions grounded in principles of participatory democracy: where everyday residents have a direct say over the public policies that govern their lives.

It is a beautiful vision, especially in a city that has long been plagued by corporate and private interests, and one that draws from models of what is termed new or radical municipalism and experiments with mass and co-governance in cities including Barcelona, Jackson, and Porto Alegre, among others.

Distinguishing New York City’s municipalist moment is its political geography: It is a global city, a center of global finance; a metropole in the Global North, at the center of the imperialist core, and the home of Wall Street; and it is an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity. The city with the highest concentration of wealth in the world runs on a workforce where only 33% of workers have “good jobs” (qualified by living wage pay, full-time, and year-round employment, employer sponsored health insurance, and safe working conditions). Over one-quarter of New Yorkers struggle with poverty, and nearly two-thirds are economically precarious. Adding to this context is intensified fascism, integral to which has been the bipartisan project of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed the anti-state state: The structured expansion of corporate interests and privatization schemes coupled with the shrinkage of the public infrastructures, entitlements, and services alongside the increased entanglement of policing, surveillance, and punishment into nearly every vestige of the public that remains.

Transforming Public and Civic Infrastructures

On one hand, the renewed interest in public infrastructures grounding radical municipalism signals an important turn from neoliberal consumer citizenship, exemplified recently by former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina’s description of parents as the Department of Education’s “clients.” On the other hand, New York’s wealth, part and parcel of its long-standing and structured class- and race-based inequity, presents a real challenge to the reinvigoration of civic and public life, to what kind of power, what kind of public, will be built and transformed—and to what ends. How do we ensure that the promise of a more just city is truly and actively guided (not just informed) by New Yorkers whose experience of the public has long been shaped by histories of organized abandonment (or the intentional divestment of state and private capital that shape particular places), by the harm, exclusion, and violence of the anti-state state?

Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.

The promise of radical municipalism to enliven deliberative spaces that build capacity for protagonism and expand practices of citizenship needs to be guided by what Celina Su understands as epistemic justice, “actively questioning what bodies of knowledge are counted as expert, rational, and valuable.” More than an advisory role, epistemic justice must actively structure deliberative spaces. In its absence, Su notes, deliberative spaces run the risk of perpetuating already existing inequities. The urgency of this approach is captured by the now infamous New York City District 3 CEC (Community Education Council) meeting, when City University of New York Professor Allyson Friedman’s racist remarks, in response to an eighth grade student who was speaking out against their school being closed, were captured by an open mic. As many recognize, Friedman’s remarks are not a unique case, but emblematic of the changing same in the district.

The district, among the most segregated and unequal in the city, is where I have worked with others to build power, organizing, and leadership among low-income families of color for just and equitable public schools. There have been countless occasions in which “concerned parents” broadcast their racism sometimes in official testimony, sometimes in unofficial remarks. Most often, these remarks have not captured headlines. And in that mix (which included CEC, district, Community Board, and school-site meetings) poor and working class families of color were regularly told that they didn’t “understand” or might be “confused” by their own experiences—their own stories—and dismissed. Friedman’s comments implied the same: that the student speaking out against their school being closed simply did not understand (and, according to Friedman’s racist analysis, could not understand) their own circumstances or the value of their school community. Yet students, teachers, parents, and school workers have long recognized and resisted school closures as a mechanism of dispossession, racist violence, encroachment, and displacement. Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.

In our municipalist moment, deliberative spaces need to be reinvigorated and also reassessed. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Sumathy Kumar, and Celina Su write that New York City has an extensive infrastructure for civic participation (which includes CECs, community boards, the Civic Engagement Commission, and more). However, they assess, “much of it is shallow, uncoordinated, fragmented, and symbolic. New Yorkers are rightly skeptical of consultations that go nowhere.” They note the need for an audit of such structures with a goal of repurposing and revitalization, guided by the knowledge and experience of community organizers and organizations. As such, the question raised by the winter meeting that went viral is not only if such remarks should be tolerated, but rather, how to intentionally transform the CEC and other infrastructures that are supposed to enliven participatory democracy from places that too often confirm and perpetuate inequity into places where the long-standing violence enacted by austerity and mechanized through school closures is interrupted. To do so, the voices, experiences, and analyses of those who have experienced such violence need to be active, understood as credible, and prioritized.

Epistemic Justice, The Presence of Abolition, and the Remaking of Social Relations

The transformation of our public and civic infrastructures requires both deep local knowledge and an understanding that such spaces are not static. Bonnie Honig reminds us that public things—libraries, schools, healthcare, and housing—as well as civic infrastructures through which they are governed, are “holding environments.” That is, they are simultaneously containers through which life is reproduced in the everyday (including making sure that all students have warm winter coats, that access to ultrasound mammograms is universal, and that lighting and heat work in public and subsidized housing) and spaces of contestation over what democracy, citizenship, and our social relations—not yet determined—might be.

These holding environments have been contradictory at best. More often, they have been vehicles through which the silencing, exclusion, and disenfranchisement that liberalism relies upon are administered, and where scarcity engenders social relations of competition and individuation, where it is assumed that one’s needs are only confirmed in opposition to the security of others.

Radical municipalism offers the promise to shift that configuration, and actualize Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insight that “abolition is not absence, it is presence.” This insight directs us to the need not just to dismantle, but to build practices, structures, institutions, and experiments that affirm life. The perspectives of structurally marginalized communities are essential to determining what kind of presence is necessary: to mapping not only how harm works, but also to what kinds of alternatives are needed and might be capable of transforming our social relations.

A good example of why this is true comes from Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) and the Public Science Project’s (CUNY) report, We Deserve to Be Safe. Rooted in Participatory Action-Research (PAR), the project’s leadership team included CPR member-led organizations in over-policed communities, was grounded in long-standing relationships and an understanding of the multi-layered harms of policing, and anchored by the shared principle that highly policed communities need to be at the center of how safety and harm are understood and re-imagined. As they note:

Our findings illuminate that people in highly policed New York neighborhoods often hold deeply complex beliefs, attitudes and proposals for community safety, supporting this report’s approach of presenting data about the multiple truths that communities hold. Notably, our findings suggest that while police officers have provided moments of successful intervention and important services for New Yorkers, for many respondents the police are also a constant threat to safety.

The perspectives and findings outlined by the report provide insight that, as the authors note, reach beyond an “overly simplistic duality of either decreased policing and lawlessness or increased policing and safety.” The stories and experiences outlined make painfully clear the violence of policing while also centering participants' complex personhood not simply as anecdote, but as analysis and insight to understanding what kinds of alternatives to policing—informed by place-based histories and realities—might actually be transformative. Bound up in the stories that the report documents is the sobering reality that understanding what “successful interventions and important services” have actually meant is integral to disentangling policing with the provision of social services.

Examples of radical municipalism in other cities show the meeting of our material and everyday needs is deeply connected to the transformation of our social relations, rooted in structures and practices that expand (rather than shrink) how we understand ourselves in relationship to one another, and how we value life, its reproduction, and sustainability. Drawing on her work with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Rebecca Tarlau terms this process contentious co-governance which “is not simply [about] more resources or policy changes but, rather, the prefiguration of alternative social and economic relations within… public institutions.” Importantly, in the case of the MST, Tarlau finds that prefiguration need not be outside of the state and that participation is not simply a means to an end, but rather invokes practices that expand and transform social relations through and within public and civic infrastructures, while also strengthening social movements.

New York City’s political geography—as a global city, as a metropole in the Global North and center of the imperialist core, and as an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity—matters to how we navigate our current conjuncture. Chaumtoli Haq reminds us that in the context of the global city, radical municipalism presents a “powerful strategy for change… [that] enables communities, given their proximity to local governance, to mobilize for changes in law and policy.”

The strength of this strategy has already been demonstrated by the historic campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Rooted in strong partnerships with grassroots organizations including CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, and New York City Communities for Change, the material conditions of these organizations’ members shaped the policy platforms of the campaign. What kind of power and solidarity is built and transformed in New York City’s municipalist moment will depend on whether or not the remaking of public and civic infrastructures is guided by participatory democracy and deliberative spaces that are grounded in epistemic justice and contentious cogovernance: whose knowledge, experience, and know-how actively shapes those processes; what kind of protagonism and popular shared analysis propels momentum and movement; and what kinds of social relations are enlivened to expand political horizons and protracted struggle.

Despite repeated disasters, the Democratic National Committee continues its strategy of sidelining leftists and progressives in favor of corporate moderates who are unpopular with voters.

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For Immediate Release May 14, 2026 For more information, call: 202-387-8030   Statement by Ralph Nader  Yesterday, an Illinois jury in a civil suit rendered a verdict of $49.5 million to the family of Samya Rose Stumo, who was killed in Ethiopia in the March 2019 crash of Boeing’s criminally defective 737 MAX. The verdict…

Trump’s three presidential campaigns were contests between establishment and insurgent, steadfastness versus change, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” against “burn it all down.”

Trump did not offer new ideas. Rather, the vagueness of MAGA and America First promised an idea-generation machine powered by a pair of nationalist principles. The implicit pledge that anything would be possible was reinforced in his second term by out-of-the-box personnel picks like Gabbard and Kennedy.

Intellectually exhausted, in permanent defense mode, and paralyzed by the internal contradiction between their New Deal history and their Clintonite present, Democrats tacitly conceded the framing to the opposition. 2016, 2020, and 2024 were referenda about Trump.

Liberals took comfort in Biden’s win, failing to recognize that COVID was a black swan moment, that Trump’s weird disavowal of Operation Warp Speed was political suicide, and that “nothing will fundamentally change” is not an appealing campaign message under normal circumstances.

Yet here we are, ten years into this current political drama, and Democrats are entering the midterms with one repeatedly failed message—we’re not Trump—and one predicated on faulty assumptions: Black and Latino voters will be so angry about GOP efforts to disenfranchise them via gerrymandering that they will turn out in record numbers for Democrats.

About those assumptions: Latinos are no longer a majority Democratic voting bloc and probably never were. Blacks were, but are far less likely to support Democrats nearly unanimously as they have done historically. These days, it turns out, minority voters (and everyone else) often stay home unless something exciting—Obama, Black Lives Matter—compels them to head out to their local school gymnasium or firehouse to cast votes that, individually, as everyone knows, cannot make a difference.

Stupidity by people who seem smart enough to know better—when that stupidity is unmistakable, avoidable, yet repeated, and then repeated again!—fascinates me. How can it be that the Democrats are once again arriving at the field of battle without having prepared a set of policy prescriptions tailored to this moment, as well as a poll-tested messaging campaign to promote it?

The fact that they keep doing this—or, more accurately, not doing what they should be doing—suggests that they have not suffered enough from previous iterations of this misjudgment for the lesson to stick. What happens to individual Democrats who lose elections in a two-party system, after all, is less than awful. They while away their wilderness years in academia and the media until, inevitably, they return or someone close to them returns and hooks them up with some sinecure. Meanwhile, the party apparatus fundraises as an opposition unaccountable for either the outrages of the incumbents or those of its own past, cuz ahistoricity.

Punishment this fall, such as it will be, will probably see Republicans overperforming but losing the House—i.e., beating the spread. Because they won, Democrats will say, and privately believe, that the results reflect voter approval and thus validate running against Trump. This will be a repeat of the error of 2020. Winning a majority while throwing away a chance at a supermajority is political malpractice.

Given their vast experience, donor base, and media alliances, corporate Democrats have no excuse for their lack of imagination. That’s just as true of Trump’s MAGA movement; with nothing to lose, their pariah status ought to have freed them from establishment encumbrances. They had the chance to make good on their vision of a Republican Party opposed to foreign wars, dedicated to adding American jobs by leveraging our consumer base, and repealing and replacing Obamacare. They have instead succumbed to the siren calls of militarism, Zionism, and transnationalism, betraying their base and the country at large.

So 2026 has become a contest no longer between a party bereft of ideas and one offering the possibility of future ideas, but between a party bereft of ideas and one with no credible argument to make concerning future ideas.

Happy 250th.

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

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Perhaps I haven’t up kept as well as I should, but I can’t recall New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coming out with such a spectacularly bad idea for some time now. But he’s certainly broken that streak—if ever streak it was‚ with his article, "NATO, Please Help. Trump Has No Strategy for Iran," in which he calls upon NATO to “get all your navies together and proceed to the Persian Gulf immediately to join the American armada.” And just so’s we’re clear here, polling tells us that the attack on Iran is the first war to be rejected—not later on but from its outset–by the American public, since before the Second World War—perhaps the first in 100 years. And Friedman thinks Europe should sail right in.

"This does not come out of nowhere; Friedman does have a serious history of sh*t-talking, the highlight of which might be his appeal to “Give war a chance” during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo War (one of our country’s “little wars” that no one is expected to recall outside of an Advanced Placement History class.) What kind of chance did he propose to give man’s oldest profession at that time? “It should be lights out in Belgrade,” he wrote, “every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted,” Whatever it took, so that no one would be “holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides.”

It was understood, of course, that this advocacy of attacking civilian infrastructure—presumably including merry-go-rounds if need be—was legitimate if was done to “them.” If it were to be done to us it, would be called by its rightful name: terrorism—and you’d be able to read about that in a Friedman column. And, truth be told, this is the unspoken understanding underlying most public debate and discussion of our foreign policy—then and now—even if few choose to be quite so crude as Friedman.

But hey, Friedman didn’t last this long by not knowing just how stupid you’ve got to talk nowadays if you want to stand out for stupid during the second Trump administration. While allowing that “it would be a lot easier if either Trump or the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would ever summon the integrity to apologize for launching this war,” he quite reasonably assumes that this will never happen. So, he reasons, if you can’t stop a war, what’s the next best thing to do? Well, join it—of course.

Here we have the nation’s most prominent newspaper proffering this argument as worth an estimated 8 minutes and 11 seconds of your reading time.

Friedman does allow that “Trump sounds more and more unhinged every day,” but he writes as if it hasn’t occurred to him that the surest way to divert people from noticing the hinges coming off would be to legitimize his war. All justification would then be retroactive: Trump and Netanyahu would have played a vanguard role in starting a war that “the West” ultimately realized was a just war—otherwise, why would they come aboard?

Now if this were just someone on the bus or train talking about how the best way to stop stupid stuff from happening was by doing more of it, you’d just move away—if it wasn’t rush hour—and that’d likely be that. But unfortunately here we have the nation’s most prominent newspaper proffering this argument as worth an estimated 8 minutes and 11 seconds of your reading time. And really, the problem goes much deeper than just the New York Times. Three years after assuming the mantle of the anti-John Lennon with his endorsement of destroying Serbian civilian infrastructure, Friedman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (one of three he’s won) for Commentary, cited "for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat." If there were a Pulitzer for Irony, the Committee would have little choice but to award it to itself.

Such are the blinders shared throughout the American journalism profession—and well beyond. Barack Obama is reported to have consulted Friedman during his presidency—this despite Friedman’s ardent support of the Iraq War, during which he wrote, “There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign policy I don't like, but their willingness to... be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.” At the pinnacle of American power, neither “crazy,” nor supporting too many wars is disqualifying... as long as it’s happening to “them.”

It is only fair to note, however, that even Friedman may have limits. He does not favor the “extreme Christian nationalist beliefs” of Pete Hegseth who prays “for US troops to deliver ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy … in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.’” Friedman appears genuinely appalled by the Defense Secretary’s suggestion that “it’s now our religious warriors against Iran’s”—even as his writing continues to water the violent soil from which Hegseth grew.

Last week the Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.

In essence, the Supreme Court OK'd the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The amendment confirmed—in principle—that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.

So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African Americans’ right to vote.

The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.

The 15th Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights—after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests, and lethal bombing; after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults, and the burning of Black churches; after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen—Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the 15th Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.

But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.

To make things worse, the court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.

As the right-wing justices explained, carving congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.

Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.

In practice it amounts to the same thing. The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.

The GOP’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.

What does this look like?

After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.

One-third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one-third of the population—including the Black voters of Memphis—are to have zero representation in Congress.

South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold 6 of 7 House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.

Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one-quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.

US President Donald Trump has pressed for a similar outcome wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.

GOP redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).

We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests, and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.

Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.

American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to healthcare costs to measles, war, and climate change.

But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.

Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump—with a big assist from MAGA Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?

Ten years ago, when reflecting on his signature legislative achievement, President Barack Obama famously encouraged Americans to think of the Affordable Care Act as a “starter home.” For as much good as the ACA did—expanding coverage to millions, offering policies to people with “preexisting” conditions—it is clear that the foundation of this starter home is starting to crack.

As an emergency medicine physician who has practiced throughout the Chicagoland area for nearly 50 years, I have seen these fault lines up close. Health insurance corporations like Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare have strayed far from their nonprofit roots, and now routinely delay and deny care for everyday Americans. Put simply, these insurers have an incentive—and even a duty—to skim hundreds of billions of dollars off the top.

Earlier this year, the Chicago City Council recognized this dynamic when it passed a resolution calling for a single-payer national health program, also known as “Medicare for All.”

The resolution passed without objection from any of the city’s 50 aldermen, and concluded by saying council members “enthusiastically support the Medicare for All Act of 2025 and call on our federal legislators to work toward its swift enactment.”

Under a single-payer national health program, Americans would no longer need to worry about what treatments their insurance would cover, what doctors they would be allowed to see, and how much they would be charged out of pocket.

Every representative whose district includes Chicago has already co-sponsored the Medicare for All Act in the US House, and every likely replacement for retiring members of Congress has promised to do the same, with one exception. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), whose district includes parts of the Garfield Ridge and Clearing neighborhoods west of Midway Airport, has committed to staying in the “starter home,” even though it is coming apart at the seams.

The shortcomings of US healthcare are painfully apparent throughout Rep. Casten’s district, where more than 40,000 of his constituents lacked health insurance before the expiration of enhanced ACA subsidies and the implementation of federal Medicaid cuts. That’s to say nothing of his constituents with sky-high deductibles and limited provider networks who cannot afford to use the coverage they do have.

During my years in the emergency department, I have seen the awful impacts of delayed care. When I practiced at Michael Reese Hospital many years ago, it was distressingly common for me to treat young men with kidney failure. Why? Because their high blood pressure went untreated due to a lack of health coverage to pay for doctor visits and simple medications. They waited until their health issues became unbearable—and much more expensive to treat.

We can do so much better than this, and growing numbers of Americans—including 90% of Democrats in a recent Gallup poll—are starting to demand that we replace our “starter home” with a much more durable healthcare system.

Under a single-payer national health program, Americans would no longer need to worry about what treatments their insurance would cover, what doctors they would be allowed to see, and how much they would be charged out of pocket. I enjoyed a glimpse of this during my 20 years at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, where I was able to care for veterans, active-duty members of the US military, and their families—without worrying about what their insurance would cover or whether they could afford to pursue treatment.

As Dr. Claudia Fegan, who recently retired as the chief medical officer of Cook County Health, testified before the Chicago City Council, a system like Medicare for All is well within our grasp.

“We already spend enough money on healthcare in this country,” Dr. Fegan said, “we just allow too many people who do none of the work of delivering healthcare to take profit from it. By eliminating the waste and greed of private insurance, we can afford to cover everyone in our country for all necessary care, and end the scourges of surprise bills, skipped medications, and medical bankruptcy.”

Rep. Casten has declined to co-sponsor the Medicare for All Act during his four terms in office, but his position has become increasingly lonely within the Democratic Party, the Illinois Congressional Delegation, and the US medical profession.

Thankfully, it is never too late to do the right thing.

It’s hard to avoid noticing, and internally screaming over, the Trump administration’s proposed military budget upgrade to $1.5 trillion annually—as though the present trillion-dollar annual gift to the end of the world weren’t enough.

It’s not just the proposed taxpayer bleed. It’s the collective assumption that “self-defense” requires an ever-present readiness to kill lots of people—and beyond that the utter certainty that we have soulless enemies out there who want what we have, hate our freedoms, and will take what they can the moment we relax. This is just the way it is. No questions allowed.

And our enemies aren’t pussycats. One of them, for instance, is China. Indeed, as Megan Russell of CODEPINK writes:

US lawmakers have been using China as a military budget increaser and ultimate policy-generator for years. Competition with Beijing is invoked to justify military expansion, new regional alliances, AI weapons development, semiconductor restrictions, and rising nuclear expenditures. In Washington, framing a policy as necessary to "counter China" has become one of the quickest ways to secure bipartisan support. As a result, the "China threat" rhetoric proliferates while the military budget skyrockets.

“A quick way to secure bipartisan support”—that says it all. Nothing holds a country together like a good enemy. This is who we are; this is the identity we’re stuck with. We unify when we fight. Apparently that’s at our political core, which is why any cries for peace—which is oh, so complex—are ignored, belittled, and virtually always voted down. All of which is to our own detriment, not to mention the world’s detriment.

As Russell notes:

...currently, the US and China are building their own tech ecosystems, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The US refers to this as a "strategic rivalry" with wider national security implications. This perspective only exists because China is considered a rival. China does not have to be considered a rival. China could just as easily be considered a development partner. And indeed it should, because cooperation on tech is the only potential avenue for ensuring the continued existence of the planet.

Uh, too bad, Planet Earth. Collective humanity refuses to think at that level. Technology serves only our belief in dominance. Consider President Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” nuclear defense system: thousands of satellites patrolling the planet, on the lookout for enemy nuclear missiles, a deeply flawed reincarnation of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative plan that went nowhere. The cost, though minimized by the Trump administration, could wind up, according to some estimates, amounting to well over $3 trillion.

And, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense:

Pursuing Golden Dome also poses serious strategic risks, including the potential to accelerate nuclear arms and space arms races and to undermine opportunities to secure verifiable arms control agreements that reduce the nuclear threat. The program has also raised troubling conflict-of-interest concerns involving individuals within the Trump administration and companies vying for Golden Dome contracts.

Wars. Sometimes you stop ’em, sometimes you start ’em, but they ain’t going away. The most powerful people on the planet are utterly committed to the limited nature of their thinking. That’s just how it goes. What about that do you not understand, Rep. Kucinich?

Remember US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and his Department of Peace legislation, which he introduced in Congress every year from 2001 to 2011? And it was introduced again in 2013 by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). It, uh, never passed.

Here’s how it was defined in 2001, as HR2458:

Establishes a Department of Peace, which shall be headed by a Secretary of Peace appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Sets forth the mission of the Department, including to: (1) hold peace as an organizing principle; (2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and (3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.

Establishes in the Department the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Peace, which shall provide assistance and make recommendations to the Secretary and the President concerning intergovernmental policies relating to peace and nonviolent conflict resolution.

Holding peace as an organizing principle? Developing policies that promote peaceful resolution of conflict? Can you imagine this at the core to the American government? With significant funding? As I read these words today, I feel compelled to help keep them alive. I want that level of sanity in my government—that level of commitment to something I believe in, with all my heart.

Instead:

Taken together, the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions point to a clear conclusion about its recent request for a whopping $1.5 trillion in military spending: This is not a defense budget. It is a war budget, designed to enable a pattern of aggressive military action and escalating threats that are already imposing a devastating toll on civilians abroad, while the combination of spending cuts and rising costs imposed on Americans is deepening injustice at home.

This is Scott Paul, writing at The Hill. He goes on: “This budget is certainly not business as usual. It is a dramatic reordering of national priorities. Trump has made this shift explicit, arguing that the US cannot afford childcare, Medicaid or Medicare because, as he put it, ‘we’re fighting wars.’”

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Backed by $5.6 million in outside money, Corporatist Denise Powell has narrowly defeated progressive State Sen. John Cavanaugh to win the Democratic primary in the race for Nebraska’s second congressional district. Powell will go on to face Brinker Harding who is endorsed by Trump. The race for the state’s second congressional district could help decide which party controls the narrowly divided U.S. House after this year’s midterm elections. The district, which includes Omaha, is known as the “blue dot” because it was the lone Nebraska district to vote for Kamala in 2024 and Biden in 2020. It is currently represented by Republican Don Bacon, who is retiring.

• The South Carolina Supreme Court has unanimously ruled to overturn the 2023 double murder conviction of disgraced attorney Alex Murdaugh, saying the jury tampering actions of former Colleton County Court Clerk Rebecca “Becky” Hill denied “Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.” Murdaugh’s case will now return to circuit court. He is accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and younger son Paul at the Murdaugh rural estate in Colleton County on the evening of June 7, 2021.

•  JPMorgan warns that oil prices may hit $150 per barrel by June 15th, the time available to reach a diplomatic resolution is narrowing, and the economic consequences of delay are compounding in ways that are not yet fully visible in either securities markets or inflation data. Global supply disruptions reached 13.7 million barrels per day in April 2026, roughly 14% of total world demand. Spare capacity from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is effectively offline due to the Strait of Hormuz closure. 75 percent of Americans say the war has had a negative effect on their finances.

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The CBS Sunday Morning program, “Next: Cuba?” which aired on April 26, presented a discussion of the recent intensification of sanctions on and threats against Cuba. I am disappointed that this program, and several other shorter recent segments on CBS News, did not cover some essential points that must be stated about what is happening in Cuba now. My own experience in Cuba, including the recent delivery of humanitarian aid directly to Cubans, contradicts some perspectives presented by CBS.

Fidel Castro is dead. And, he has been dead for a while. He was a fascinating character who still inspires polemic discussions. Stories of Fidel are legendary on the scale of Paul Bunyan. But we think the choice of focus of these eight minutes on Fidel’s legacy is unjust to the Cuban people. The news of the moment is that Cuba is underwater. The CBS Sunday Morning program, instead of engaging in a discussion of a crisis on the island, entertained us with old, mostly obsolete stories about Castro.

Cubans are suffering currently. The US sanctions on Cuba are enormous, by any measure. We find it remarkable that Cuba has withstood for decades sanctions that would bring down any other country of its size and reach within weeks. The recent fossil fuel blockade on the island, however, has placed the people of the island in a choke hold. Cuba’s economy, like those around the world, is dependent on petroleum products for most of its electricity generation, vehicle use, and cooking. Food is rotting in the fields because of a lack of fuel to connect products to markets, and it is rotting in homes because the refrigerators are disconnected.

The recent military blockade prohibiting oil shipments disrupted Cuba’s economy on a level that frightened people, in a way that we would compare to drowning; If something is not done quickly, disaster will occur. The blockade was challenged successfully by a Russian oil tanker, but the sabers from the US State Department continue to rattle loudly.

Cuba deserves to make its path without undue pressure from the US.

A health crisis is happening in real time. The impacts of the sanctions on health are huge. Cubans are accustomed to excellent health services, but hospitals are less able to provide services than ever. Infants who were once saved from preventable risks are now dying, even in the best hospitals. Surgeries are postponed, simply because there are not sufficient provisions, made acute by the recent oil blockade. Let’s be clear: The oil blockade has provoked an epidemiological disaster.

The current suffering has a psychological dimension. A refrigerator that won’t keep food fresh, a stove that won’t cook, darkness all day and night, no transport to the workplace or market, overflowing trash piles every few blocks because the garbage trucks have no fuel, no running water, are not the same as a fun camping trip. Cubans are humiliated as the system they depend on spiraled downward from weakly working to a horror show. The people of Cuba are frightened, in our opinion, not only by the capacity of the US government to cause mayhem, but by their own vulnerability. All Cubans heard President Donald Trump say that he will “take Cuba." Cubans know what happened in Iran, Gaza, and Venezuela, and these words are designed to make them think they are next. The psychological impact of this pressure compounds the physical hardship.

The intent of the current administration can’t be missing the mark—the effect of the fuel blockade, on top of so many, layered, sanctions and complications, is the same as waterboarding a person. By strengthening the intensity and increasing the duration, a waterboarded subject will eventually stop resisting and walk calmly to the next waterboarding session. That waterboarding may have occurred in Guantánamo, on the same island as the 10 million victims of these sanctions, is ironic. Even now, with a Russian tanker arriving to provide only a portion of the Cuban needs, the US government continues the horror of a tightened blockade to convert Cuba into a compliant state.

Cuban voices should be heard. The positions of Cuban Americans regarding the US sanctions on the island are not unanimous, as the news segment might lead one to believe. Americans should realize that Cuban Americans hold diverse positions on how representative the Cuban government is and how responsive it is to the changing situations regarding the needs of Cubans. This is not reflected in the mentioned segment.

More importantly, not a single Cuban citizen on the island spoke in the CBS Sunday Morning program. Even when including the other recent CBS News segments, very little expression of sentiment on the island is found. The viewers may be surprised, not only by the diversity of positions held among Cubans, but also by their sophistication in the analysis of the role of the Cuban government and the US government in their lives. Cubans don’t need to be represented by a few voices from inside Miami: They can speak for themselves, but the mentioned news item definitely cut them out of the conversation.

Cuba deserves sovereignty. The mentioned program made no mention of the overwhelming castigation of the US sanctions against Cuba that have occurred around the world. The United Nations votes against US sanctions have been occurring yearly for a few decades. Numerous countries are pushing back against the US line on Cuba. Russia dared the US to stop its fuel tankers from supplying the island. Small and large countries alike, ranging from Sri Lanka to Brazil, from Belgium to China, are speaking out against the US sanctions against Cuba. Many are putting their money where their mouth is, with donations and technical assistance, including many organizations and individuals from the US. Their message is simple: Cuba deserves self-determination, not intervention from abroad. They do not deserve the web of financial, travel, commercial, and diplomatic punishments imposed on Cuba and on any business or country that dares to conduct some kinds of business with Cuba.

Cuba is not a threat to any other country or people. It is amply evident that Cuba is not a danger to any group or people or nation outside its country. Even the most stridently anti-communist Cuban Americans travel to Cuba freely. The State Sponsor of Terrorism designation of Cuba, one of the pillars justifying US sanctions, is neither accurate nor helpful. Discussion of this was absent from the mentioned news article, leaving the viewer with a deficient view of why Cubans and their government face our collective wrath.

There are problems inside the country. There are serious problems in both Cuba and the US, both of which need sober, thoughtful discussions. Let’s all be clear: Discontent rages in the US, too. However, no yardstick exists that makes Cuba look like an outlier in either internal human rights or international threats. What does exist is the cry of “but they are communists,” coming from South Florida, and this has no place as a criterion for US foreign policy any longer. And recently, the Cuban government has called for frank discussions with the US government, hopefully, where all issues could be discussed in a framework of sovereignty and the intentions of being good neighbors.

Cubans are capable of handling their own problems, with our cooperation instead of imposition. We all would like to see Cubans happier. We have varying levels of knowledge about Cuba, ranging from first-time visitors to Cuba to citizens and former residents of the island. Our political opinions vary along a wide range, but we are unanimous in one aspect that was left out of the CBS Sunday Morning program: Cuba needs and deserves an end to the US-imposed sanctions.

Cuba deserves to make its path without undue pressure from the US. The CBS Sunday Morning article left out the voices of Cubans, which would have expressed their anxious desire for what now seems impossible: that Cubans be able to conduct their business without undue pressure from the US. Practically no Cuban alive is old enough to know what normal diplomacy from the US is. Let’s give them the most revolutionary present of all—a decent, respectful foreign policy, just like all the rest of the countries in the world.

Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.

There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfair, hurtful, and false seterotypes of the mentally ill that are propagated and repeated over and over again in our society. For instance, media figures and journalists often describe perpetrators of violence as mentally ill. Generally speaking, this is not true. Study after study points out the the mentally ill, in fact, are not violent. Indeed, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Most people with mental health diagnoses are law-abiding contributing members of society. Epidemiological research indicates that 97% of those with mental illness do not commit violent acts.

Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding. It is pretty common to hear or read that those whose behaviors are irrational, unpredictable, or erratic must have a mental health condition. This, also, is a harmful and erroneous stereotype. After all, irrational thinking is pretty common. We are all irrational some of the time and in some situations. and also rational and predictable in others. Irrational thoughts are completely normal. Researchers sometimes point out that some kinds of mental illness may include a deficit in common sense or deviations from social norms but not a deficit in logical thought or “reason.”

Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump.

Another common misconception about those with mental illnesses is that they are dysfunctional and unable to live as honest and contributing members of their communities. This, too, is not true. The majority of those with a mental illness are simply ordinary folks. In any given year 20% or more of the population has a mental health diagnosis. Therefore, at any given time, there are millions of people with a mental health condition making positive contributions to their communities.

So, why do so many of us hold these false and damaging steretypes about those with a mental health condition? Perhaps the most common communicator of these misconceptions are the media of mass communication, both fictional (television, movies, internet sites, etc) and nonfiction (talk shows, news media, politicians, etc).

This brings me to Donald Trump. Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.

Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.

The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel's raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world.

And, of course, actions of this president also have caused harmful and deadly damages within the United States. Consider: the terrible harms, injuries, and deaths caused by his orders to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in the detention of over 50,000 adults and children in dangerous and deadly detention centers; he also has deported millions of individuals, some to dangerous countries or to the very life-threatening situations they fled. In addition, he has empowered his ICE agents to injure and even murder US citizens who were exercising their political and personal rights; Trump’s defunding of federal programs in the areas of healthcare and the environment has stripped men, women, and children of their access to food and medical care, causing pain, injury, and death to many people; and his administration’s reductions of environmental protections and general disregard of climate change threatens the health of all living beings,

Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump. Nearly every day he posts messages that threaten his critics and opponents. He says he will use the power of the government to bring them down. He tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Time and time again, he threatens to destroy Iran, razing it to the ground and killing millions of Iranians. He announces planes to annex Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela. He hints that he is going to use force to change the political-economic system in Cuba. He says he will prosecute his political opponents for treason and has threatened to shoot those protesting in the streets. And, of course, he regularly declares that he will imprison immigrants and deport them to dangerous places. In just one year he has threatened to punish, invade, or take control of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Nigeria, and Iran.

So, dear news anchors and pundits, please stop suggesting that President Donald Trump is mentally ill. Doing so defames and insults those of us who have a mental illness and misunderstands the problem that is Donald Trump. He is not “crazy.” He is prejudiced, cruel, violent, hateful, uninformed, dangerous, and immoral. Our president is not mentally ill. Our president is evil.

Live 12 noon Eastern time today:

Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you. Q&A extras are every Monday and Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

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On May 4, Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe announced that negotiations with the US regarding critical health services and minerals have been suspended due to the Trump administration’s “unacceptable” terms.

For Haimbe, this includes: first, the Trump administration’s proposed health memorandum of understanding (MOU) requires that Zambia turn over health data to the US “in violation of our citizen’s right to privacy.”

Second, the US demands “preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals.” Haimbe rejects this. He contends, “the Zambian government rightfully takes the view, first and foremost, that Zambians must have a say on how her critical minerals are used, and second that no one strategic partner is to be treated preferentially to others.”

Third, and perhaps most crucially, is “the coupling of the two agreements and frameworks to one another such that the conclusion of the minerals agreement is made conditional to the conclusion of the Health MOU.” The US is effectively demanding privileged access to Zambia’s abundant supply of copper, lithium, and cobalt—all critical for the development of AI and modern technologies—in exchange for health funding.

The only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses.

This is not an isolated incident. As of March 2026, at least 24 African countries have agreed to similarly controversial health agreements with the US. Zambia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe are the only African nations thus far to reject the Trump administration’s coercive demands.

In those cases, concerns about data management and control similarly derailed negotiations. Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, explained, “The proposed data sharing agreement looked at access not only to health data sets, but also to metadata, dashboards, reporting tools, data models, and data dictionaries.” It would have allowed up to 10 US entities access to this data without any prior approval from the Ghanese government.

Similarly, the US was demanding that Zimbabwe turn over any data it collects about pathogens causing outbreaks. Zimbabwe would not, however, be guaranteed access to any vaccines, treatments, diagnostics, or medical innovations that might result from this shared data. As Ndabaningi Nick Mangwana, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information, Publicity, and Broadcasting Services, remarked: “In essence, our nation would provide the raw materials for scientific discovery without any assurance that the end products would be accessible to our people should a future health crisis emerge. The United States, meanwhile, was not offering reciprocal sharing of its own epidemiological data with our health authorities.”

These kinds of take-it-or-leave-it proposals represent the Trump administration’s strong-arm approach to global health funding. Instead of foreign aid, President Donald Trump offers two options: a crooked deal or death.

This has been their goal from the start. Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has taken several measures aimed at weakening foreign aid and humanitarian programs. This includes: dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID); withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and 66 international organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund, which addresses sexual and reproductive health; as well as diverting funds away from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports HIV prevention, care, and treatment worldwide. Each of these actions deliberately endangers the lives of millions of people around the world—the cruelty really is the point.

From Ghana to South Africa, the Trump administration maliciously leverages human suffering to continue the centuries-long exploitation and systematic theft of Africa’s resources. Here, foreign aid has only one value: an exchange value.

Indeed, on April 27, at an event hosted at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and attended by major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs, and Palantir, US Ambassador to the UN Michael Waltz formally announced the launch of the “Trade Over Aid” initiative. This is a self-described “international economic development vision built on free markets.” It is premised on the idea that, unlike capitalism, humanitarianism and providing direct aid only create “dependency, inefficiency, and corruption.” As Waltz remarked, “free market principles remain the best proven path to lasting prosperity with better and more permanent results than any of the alternatives.”

On April 30, outgoing US Ambassador to Zambia, Michael Gonzalez, echoed these remarks. He accused the Zambian government of widespread corruption and “nationwide theft of US provided medicines.” He contended that, “For decades, the US relationship with Zambia was one centered around aid.” This “unrequited relationship” is no longer tenable—“going forward, the benefits of our relationship must be mutual.” Gonzalez continued, “We know that while you pursue a Zambia First agenda and we pursue America First, we are still able together to achieve something notably better for our countries.”

This emphasis on market solutions overlooks that capitalist exchanges always produce winners and losers. Competition, not cooperation, is the ethos of the proverbial free market. There is no “together” when “America First” is pitted against “Zambia First.” Instead of “lasting prosperity,” the only “permanent results” are widening inequalities between the haves and the have-nots.

And to be clear, the winners here are neither Americans nor Africans. Americans will be forced to bear the social, economic, and environmental costs of more data centers, AI-driven layoffs, and AI-powered surveillance. Zambia and other African nations will see their natural resources stolen and the bodies of their citizens exploited.

No, the only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses. It is worth noting that Trump and his children have raked in billions from their investments in cryptocurrency, AI, and data centers.

What the Trump administration is offering is no more than colonialism dressed as humanitarianism. Foreign aid should never be manipulated for profit or political power. We must reject capitalist schemes like “Trade Over Aid.”

Instead, we must focus on building institutions that guarantee the right to healthcare for all. This is not simply an act of charity. As every pandemic makes patently clear, ensuring that everyone has access to health services benefits everyone. In the end, we must recognize that healthcare is a human right and a collective good. Ignoring this puts us all at risk.

The late 19th century was a dismal time in American politics. Corruption ran rampant. Congress was governed by staunch partisan loyalties and nail-biting majorities. And redistricting, instead of being confined to after the census every 10 years, was a tool of manipulation and partisan hardball. “From 1872 to 1896,” a political scientist reports, “at least one state redrew its congressional districts each year.”

Of course, that era was marred by another phenomenon—one too familiar to us today. It saw a swift rollback in voting rights and representation for the newly freed Black population of the South. In 1875, after the Civil War and the adoption of the 15th Amendment, seven Black men served in the House, and one sat as a senator. Terrorism, political cowardice, and racial backlash ended Reconstruction. By 1902, Congress was once again all white.

That status quo largely held until the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law ushered in the multiracial democracy we have taken for granted.

Nearly two weeks ago, the Supreme Court supermajority finished its project of demolishing the law. The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais convulsed American politics. Since then, we have seen an ugly frenzy in Southern states, a brutal redrawing of district lines that could, as scholar Rick Hasen put it, “bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils.”

Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.

Since the ruling, Louisiana has gone back to the drawing board to erase one of its majority-Black districts, even though early voting had already begun in the primary election that was set for May 16. Preparations are underway in Alabama and Mississippi for redrawing their maps. Just last week, Florida passed a new map, which had been in motion in anticipation of a favorable Supreme Court ruling. In some states, as in Tennessee, Black voters could be left without any effective congressional representation.

Blue states, too, are scrambling to redraw maps to help their party, though their success remains to be seen. In a surprise ruling last week, a closely divided Virginia Supreme Court struck down the just-passed constitutional amendment that gave the legislature the power to redraw the state’s congressional map, which would have likely handed several seats to Democrats.

While gerrymandering remains unpopular among voters at large, among the activists whose votes tend to control primaries, party loyalty rules. In Indiana, for instance, several legislative challengers backed by President Donald Trump defeated most of the incumbents who refused to get on board with the Republican redistricting agenda.

Pundits who tally up the wins for each party may be missing the bigger point: Soon, state congressional delegations will begin to resemble the Electoral College—all red or all blue. Recall that Trump won 1 in every 3 votes cast in Massachusetts, while Kamala Harris won a similar share of the votes cast in Tennessee, yet both states will have monolithic party delegations.

What can be done?

The raw power grabs on display may be just the kind of thing to rouse voters to anger. Yes, midterm elections in November will turn on issues such as affordability and the war in Iran. But when people feel something being wrested away from them, they can fight back.

And Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.

It should enact legislation to make clear that American citizens can sue to protect their right to vote when it is infringed. Legislation should give voters of color a meaningful opportunity to prove intentional discrimination, and it should make sure that judges apply strict scrutiny to laws that impinge on the franchise.

And Congress should recognize the danger of an unelected Supreme Court—highly ideological, appointed for life—taking a hammer to laws that uphold political equality. This past month reinforces the need for court reform, including an 18-year term limit for justices.

Want more proof of the political role the court has assumed? Alabama took, as Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance put it, a “nanosecond” to rush to the justices for permission to gain the “benefit” of Callais, even though primary voting starts in a week. The justices quickly agreed, even though the state’s map had already been found intentionally racially discriminatory by a lower court, allowing the state to eliminate one of the two districts represented by Black lawmakers. This contravenes years of the high court’s assurances that rules should not change too close to an election. Calling balls and strikes? The fix seems to be in.

Alabama, of course, is where Selma is located. Its history is more complex than you might imagine. Here’s what I wrote in my book The Fight to Vote:

Alabama previously had one of the most democratically robust systems in the country, including universal male suffrage and a bar against gerrymandering. But its new Jim Crow constitution gave county registrars great discretion in barring African American voters. White men could vote without anyone attesting to their good character, but Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. As a result Black voting rates fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000 between 1900 and 1903.

History emphatically does not move only in one direction.

Abandoning the solemn commitment America made to guarantee equal representation regardless of race is a grave threat to our system of governance. And the fact that the Supreme Court has done it to enable partisan gamesmanship offends that legacy.

The Brennan Center was named after Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a leading force in the brief but celebrated period when the court actually moved to ensure equality in our election system. He authored the opinion in Baker v. Carr, which established the willingness of the court to enforce what would become the “one person, one vote” rule. He also wrote Thornburg v. Gingles, which set national standards so that voters of color could go to court and seek remedies when officials unfairly limited their opportunity to elect candidates to Congress. That American achievement is what the Supreme Court has so casually tossed away. It may be a long time before the court will once again play a positive role in our democracy.

The stakes are high. Brennan put it well: “The Constitution will endure as a vital charter of human liberty as long as there are those with the courage to defend it, the vision to interpret it, and the fidelity to live by it.”

Those of us who came up in a different age still occasionally harbor the belief that facts, truth, science matters; that it hasn’t all just vanished into a tweeting flash of nonsense. In service of this delusion, I’m dedicating this newsletter to the topic of wind, because I think it distills the corruption and irrationality of our sad moment into its purest essence—190-proof Trumpism, the stuff that blinds you if you guzzle it.

My rant is occasioned by the news that the administration has stopped all approvals on wind farms across the country. As Katherine Krawczyk explains, for 15 years wind farms have applied to the Department of Defense (DOD) where:

they’re supposed to undergo a “timely, transparent, and repeatable process to evaluate potential impacts” to national security and military operations. It’s a routine that has spanned presidencies, including the first Trump administration, and that typically revolves around making sure turbines don’t interfere with radars or federal airspace.

This has always been routine, until last summer when it became… impossible. Pete Hegseth’s DOD simply stopped replying, and didn’t explain why till last month when it sent a letter to developers saying it was “reevaluating how it reviews wind projects national security impacts.” Somewhere between 165 and 250 big projects are in limbo, and that’s obviously the point: Not only does it screw up their financing, it means they may not get done in time to qualify for what tax credits are left from the Biden Inflation Reduction Act.

Though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. Similarly, there is no drone on Earth that can shoot the breeze.

To say that the national security grounds are bogus is to give them too much credit. As those radicals at the Financial Times explained, the security review used to take a “few days” to complete. These installations are on private land, far away from military bases. The government has used the same argument to try and block offshore wind farms, and the courts have overruled their objections. I imagine that in time judges will find in favor of these blocked onshore projects too, but the damage will have been done: No one in their right mind would invest in new wind power now, not when the president has declared quite frankly that his “goal is to not let any windmill be built.”

That this is stupid goes without saying. Those blocked projects constitute, the FT says, about 30 gigawatts of cheap clean energy at a time when we desperately need it. But it also goes without saying that the blockage serves two purposes. One is to artificially increase demand for fossil fuel (and the other Trump-favored power sources, like the expensive array of nuclear reactors whose development the government is currently generously funding). The other is to serve his febrile rage at the wind farm built off his Scottish golf course all those years ago. A policy that feeds both his appetite for corruption and supplies his narcissistic hunger—well, that’s a twofer that can’t be missed. Hegseth may have no idea how to win the war in Iran, but he knows how to win favor from dear leader.

Of course, it means indulging in a huge number of lies, from President Donald Trump’s claim that wind power is the most expensive energy on Earth (actually, second-cheapest, right behind solar) to his claim that it causes cancer (1 death in 5 on this planet comes from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel) to his claim that though the Chinese build and sell wind turbines they don’t actually use them. If he glances out the window of Qatar Force One on this week’s trip to China he’ll be forced to recant that one: The Chinese actually lead the world in producing not just wind turbines but wind energy. As Keith Bradsher reported last week:

Across China, hilltops are dotted with wind turbines, and long rows of them span many miles in western deserts. Ultrahigh-voltage power lines carry electricity thousands of miles to the energy-hungry factories along China’s coast.

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

In fact, perhaps his Chinese hosts could arrange a field trip to their newest wind turbine, installed this week off the shore from Yangjiang. It’s, what do you know, the largest single-unit floating wind platform ever installed on planet earth, a single windmill that will supply enough power for 24,000 homes. As Adriana Buljan reports at that must-read site OffShoreWindBiz:

The project incorporates several new technologies, including a novel mooring system, an active ballast system, a smart monitoring system, and a 66 kV dynamic subsea cable, the developer said.

The floater is secured by nine suction anchors, using a combination of anchor chains and high-performance polyester mooring lines, marking the first application of such polyester cables in China’s offshore wind sector.

It’s not just China, of course. A few weeks ago, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 3 in the North Sea, sent its first power back to the UK. When it’s fully finished at the end of next year, reports Evelyn Hart, it will “generate enough power to meet the average daily needs of a population larger than Greater Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds combined.” Earlier Tuesday the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi announced a big investment in the project, reflecting what the fund’s head called its “approach of investing alongside experienced partners in high-quality infrastructure assets that support energy transition and deliver long-term value.”

What might the Trump administration offer them as an alternative? Well, the administration has ordered the restart of fossil fuel drilling operations off Santa Barbara despite local and state opposition. On Monday an old platform in the area caught fire and burned—26 people were evacuated, and thankfully none were killed, though two were injured. Here’s what America’s technological prowess looks like today.

I think that sometimes wind gets shorter shrift than it should when we talk about renewable energy. It’s not quite as simple as a photovoltaic array—there’s still a moving part, that windmill blade. But of course this is just another form of solar energy (the wind rises when the sun heats the Earth more in some places than others) and it is a miracle. In fact, it’s a perfectly complementary miracle. Along a coast, for instance, because it takes a while for the sun to heat the air molecules that produce the breeze, wind tends to build in power later in the afternoon, as the photovoltaic effect begins to ebb. And the farther north you go, the stronger the wind gets, which is useful since Greece has more sunshine than Norway. And wind speeds tend to be higher in the winter than the summer, thanks to sharper temperature gradients.

If you want an in-depth technical explanation of this miracle, Mark Jacobson provides one in this 2021 study. Among many other things, he points out that:

In some locations, e.g. Europe, wind energy output follows heat load remarkably well on a diurnal basis. This is not only due to the day versus night wind speed peaks just discussed, but also due to the fact that low temperatures, which create heat loads, often occur behind cold fronts, where pressure gradients are strong, thus winds are fast. Low temperatures over land also often occur in the presence of strong temperature gradients, which produce strong pressure gradients and strong winds.

One irony of Trump’s anti-wind crusade is that this miracle was born here. Humans have long used wind, of course—to push boats, to grind grain. But we first put it to use to produce electricity on an industrial scale in the early 1940s at Grandpa’s Knob, about 50 miles south of my home in the Vermont mountains above the town of Castleton. An Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad named Palmer Putnam (and I was at MIT last week, and saw many impressive young people following in his wake) convinced the local utility to give him a shot at harnessing the Vermont winds (blowing 8 miles an hour in Castleton when I drove by this afternoon). Vannevar Bush—more irony here—was in charge of the nation’s scientific enterprises during World War II, and he thought it would be a good idea to see if we could produce power this way; Putnam’s design used two blades, each 66 feet long and weighing eight tons. It worked just fine from 1942 to 1943, when a shaft bearing failed, and wartime shortages meant no one could scrounge the part until 1945.

A study that year found that a block of six similar turbines similar to the prototype, producing nine megawatts, could be installed in Vermont for around US$190 per kilowatt. But in those days it was cheaper to get power other ways, and so the project was never replicated. In 2012 a new project was proposed for the area, but like all Vermont wind projects in recent years, local opposition doomed it, reminding us that Trump is not the only person who doesn’t like to look at windmills.

I do, though. I’ve always thought they were remarkably beautiful, Calder mobiles come to life. And they keep getting better. The first big American installation was on Altamont Pass, near Livermore California—6,700 small turbines lined either side of I-580. They produced lots of clean electrons, but because of their size and where they were sited, their fast-moving blades were a bit of a bird Cuisinart. To be clear, wind turbines never come within an order of magnitude of avian destruction compared with tall buildings and power lines, not to mention domestic cats, not to mention the effects of climate change now setting off a generalized extinction crisis on this Earth. But if bird mortality is not a reason to delay the move to clean energy, it’s also not something to be simply ignored. So here’s some good news: A recent “repowering project” on the pass replaced 569 of the old small turbines with just 23 newer and bigger ones, while still generating the same amount of electricity. Oh, and

Fewer turbines, spaced further apart, and equipped with modern bird-detection technology such as IndentiFlight, should reduce bird mortality in the Altamont Pass going forward.

“Brookfield Renewables has designed the [Mulqueeney Ranch] site and implemented state of the art technology to mitigate impacts to local and migratory avian species,” according to the MCE staff report.

“Turbines will be equipped with individual AI paired cameras to detect the presence of avian species which would trigger feathering/shut-off of specific turbines.”

And as Justin Gerdes reports, this kind of repowering could happen at every wind farm across the country:

“By replacing aging turbines with modern technology at existing sites, the United States could more than double its current onshore wind capacity and electricity generation without requiring new land,” write the authors of a Stanford University study published in March.

The study finds that repowering could increase the US’ onshore wind nameplate generating capacity from 153 gigawatts (GW) (as of 2024) to 314 GW at existing wind farms.

“Repowering is a key, yet overlooked, strategy to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future in the United States,” the authors conclude.

Data from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie confirms the near-term repowering opportunity in the US.

“The repowering market remains strong, as Wood Mackenzie projects that 18 projects will drive 2.5 GW of capacity additions in the next three years,” according to a December 2025 WoodMac press release.

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of my line that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. Similarly, there is no drone on Earth that can shoot the breeze. This is where the planet desperately wants to go. Our job is to change our nation’s politics so the wind can blow free.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Trump says that he is not weighing the economic burden of the Iran war on everyday Americans. Asked to what extent “Americans’ financial situations” were motivating him to make a deal with Iran, he replied: “Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing — we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

• Secret new assessments say Iran has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that its military remains far stronger than President Trump has asserted. Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile.

•  Dozens of Gulf citizens have been accused of belonging to Iran-linked terrorism cells as the war accelerates a shift toward deeper authoritarianism in the region. Shiite religious leaders in Pakistan also estimate that as many as thousands of Shiite Pakistanis have been deported from the Emirates since mid-April.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition may collapse next week, after one of his key ultra-Orthodox coalition partners called for the parliament to be dissolved. The political crisis comes after Netanyahu told ultra-Orthodox political leaders that he would not advance legislation to exempt ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis from military service.

•  More than 10,000 times, judges have said ICE detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, are illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda. Presidents’ signature initiatives often end up in court. But this flood of adverse rulings is unique — a never-before-seen reaction to a never-before-seen policy.

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

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When thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents invaded Minneapolis this past January, Twin Cities residents, and people across the country, jumped into action, trailing these agents, organizing major protests, and dropping off food and supplies to those understandably afraid to leave their homes.

Both of our organizations, too, took action. Bend the Arc: Jewish Action leadership traveled to join a clergy day of protest alongside close partners in Minneapolis, and T’ruah sent some 50 rabbis to support dozens of their colleagues who live and work there.

Lay people and clergy alike similarly stepped up in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other cities targeted by major Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Minnesotans successfully diminished the massive ICE takeover of their city. This is a testament to the power of citizen organizing and action.

But the absence of visible deployments of thousands of agents to a single city does not mean that the threat of ICE has disappeared, or has changed its tactics of kidnapping our neighbors, detaining immigrants without due process, and deporting people to places where they won’t be safe–including both their birthplaces and countries they’ve never even been to.

Every time we show up in the streets matters as we move through the wilderness to become the country of our aspirations.

Without the daily photos of masked ICE agents facing off against citizens armed only with whistles and cell phones, or dragging children in bunny hats or dads in pajamas out of their homes, it is easy to sit back and to believe that the threat to our neighbors has dissipated.

This is far from the truth. Last year's “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” gave the Department of Homeland Security $191 billion for immigrant detention and deportation, the largest immigration enforcement funding surge in American history. ICE alone received $75 billion, nearly nine times its annual budget. With that money, ICE is detaining more than 70,000 people per day across the country in truly horrific conditions; at least 17 people have already died in custody this year, which follows a record high 32 deaths in 2025.

ICE has yet to spend most of the money they received last year, and still they can enact this much violence in our communities. But for President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans this is not enough—right now they are trying to funnel up to $140 billion more dollars to these agencies to separate immigrant families.

In the Jewish calendar, we are currently counting the Omer, noting each day and each week between Passover and Shavuot. Within the biblical narrative, the Israelites have achieved freedom from slavery, but have not yet reached Mount Sinai, where they will receive Torah. With the drama of fleeing Egypt and crossing the sea in the past, they are stuck in the day-to-day slog of becoming free. They are disoriented, complaining, backsliding, and agitated. Counting the Omer reminds us that liberation does not come in a single moment, but rather takes days and weeks and even years of plodding through the wilderness.

It would be easy to throw up our hands and demand to go back to Egypt, as the Israelites did. But the true work of liberation requires continued action, even in the absence of flashy images and dramatic victories.

This is why our organizations, along with over 60 co-sponsoring Jewish groups, led a national day of Jewish moral action against ICE last month. This day of action followed a massive protest outside ICE headquarters in February that involved more than 600 Jews, including some 100 rabbis and cantors.

Scholars of fascism and democracy teach us that sustained nonviolent protests engaging only 3.5% of a population have been effective at multiple points in history at creating regime change. Every time we show up in the streets matters as we move through the wilderness to become the country of our aspirations.

Indeed, it is even more critical to be in the streets, showing up for our neighbors, advocating to our elected officials, and using all the tools available to us to show the Trump administration that we are still paying attention. That their attempts to distract and wear us down will not work. That we will always show up for each other.

Minneapolis may not be in daily headlines but the impacts of ICE’s violence will linger. The same remains true in far too many American cities. In the wilderness, the ancient Israelites kept complaining. They built a golden calf. They begged to go back. And they still made it to Sinai. Not because the wilderness was easy, but because they kept moving through it.

This is not a metaphor for passive endurance. Counting the Omer is an active process—you have to say the words out loud, with intention, or the count does not count. We can’t drift through the 49 days on autopilot. We have to choose, each day, to be in the middle of the story. We have a vision of the Promised Land we are trying to achieve here in the United States. It’s one where all of us, regardless of faith, race, ethnic background, ability, or birthplace, can be free.