Image by Allec Gomes.

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Thoreau Daguerrotype – Public Domain

Watching Donald Trump’s disjointed, narcissistic ramble at the United Nations, I kept thinking: “Why don’t the delegates walk out?” After all, he insulted many of their countries. “You’re destroying your countries. Your countries are going to hell,” he shouted. Walking out on speakers at the U.N. during the annual General Assembly meeting has precedents: U.S. diplomats walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches from 2009 to 2012. And this year, after Trump’s muddled 57-minute performance, more than 100 diplomats from over 50 countries walked out when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the podium. Why didn’t any delegate walk out on Trump? And outside the U.N., where is civil disobedience in the United States today?

The 19th-century American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is considered the father of civil disobedience. His 1849 essay On Resistance to Civil Government – later retitled Civil Disobedience – has inspired generations to challenge unjust government policies. Thoreau refused to pay the state poll tax to protest the Mexican-American War and slavery. More than a century later, folk singer and activist Joan Baez followed his example, refusing to pay a portion of her federal income tax. She justified her refusal, saying: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Other non-taxpaying protesters against the Vietnam War included Nobel Prize winners George Wald and Salvador Luria.

Refusing to pay taxes in protest of government policy is an example of civil disobedience. Following Thoreau’s model, the disobeying person accepts that citizens have an obligation to pay taxes and respects the general authority of government. The refusal to pay taxes targets specific policies, not the state itself. Thoreau, Baez, Wald, and Luria were not revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government.

In that sense, civil disobedience is an act of conscience rather than a political rebellion. Thoreau opposed the government only insofar as it carried out specific policies he could not accept. He was not an anarchist. As he famously wrote: “That government is best which governs least.” He believed in some government.

As for other possible acts of dissent, Thoreau never renounced his citizenship nor did he call for the overthrow of the United States government. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, which would not be a violent and bloody measure… This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution…” he wrote, in words that later inspired Mahatma Gandhi in the nonviolent struggle for India’s independence from British rule, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful advocacy for racial equality in the United States.

The delegates’ walkout at the United Nations in protest of Netanyahu and Israel took place within a proper institutional framework, under the established rules of the U.N. General Assembly. The protesting delegates accepted Netanyahu’s right to speak;  they simply chose not to listen because of Israel’s policies. In essence, the walkout was merely a violation of diplomatic protocol.

There was no major disruption during the General Assembly meeting in New York because of the walkout. Had there been a question about Netanyahu’s legitimacy as Israel’s representative or about Israel’s legitimacy as a member state, that would have been different. (The International Criminal Court’s warrants against Netanyahu did not prevent his visit since the United States is not a party to the Court and prime ministers have diplomatic immunity at the U.N.)

The Netanyahu walkout fits within the spirit of civil disobedience; it was symbolic, peaceful, and within institutional rules. Similarly, Thoreau accepted the consequences of his refusal to pay taxes by going to jail without protest. For him, imprisonment was not a shame but an honorable outcome of resisting injustice. As he wrote in Civil Disobedience: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons…”

Civil disobedience cannot be separated from civility. Neither Joan Baez, George Wald, nor Salvador Luria gave up their American citizenship, as many dual nationals living overseas have done. They all respected the United States’ legal and political system. After leaving Walden Pond, for example, Thoreau returned to Concord, where he worked in his family’s pencil-making business and became a surveyor – a rather bourgeois life despite how many memorialize him.

The question of opposing Trump through traditional civil disobedience is harder to unpack. There is no question that fear exists within the United States, as was undoubtedly the case with the delegates in New York who opposed Trump’s policies but feared recriminations if they walked out. There are so many Trumpian actions that merit specific protest. Thoreau opposed the Mexican War and slavery. Baez, Wald, and Luria protested the Vietnam War. Where does one even begin with Trump? Undermining the balance of power between the three branches of government? Personal corruption? Threatening traditional alliances while weakening the U.S.’s global image? Overriding the rule of law domestically and internationally? Challenging freedom of speech? 

Being civil in the face of overwhelming incivility is not easy. Is Thoreau-style civil disobedience against Trump possible today? What should be protested, and how? What would be the consequences? Trump defies the very civility that gives civil disobedience its moral force. His crude behavior undermines whatever civility underpins civil disobedience. 

The following legendary anecdote about opposition, Thoreau, and civil disobedience is intriguing. In 1848, Thoreau spent one night in jail for failing to pay his taxes. When his friend, the poet and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to bail him out, Emerson asked: “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau quickly replied with a blunt question: “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

As long as Trump remains in power in the White House, we are all, somehow, “out there.”

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Lately, I’ve had lyrics to ‘I’ve Got No Idols,’ by 1990s indie-darling Juliana Hatfield running through my head, particularly the line, “But I am a liar, that’s the truth, go home and think it through.” Why is this song, especially that particular lyric, taking up so much space in my brain these days?

I think it is because of JD Vance and his gift at being honest about being a liar.

Just about one year ago, during the presidential debate, when then-candidate Trump ranted about Haitian immigrants eating other people’s pets, it sounded like more of his bluster. In a rambling response to a question about immigration—arguably, one of his strongest and most popular campaign topics—Trump pounced on a rumor spread on the internet, “They’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

Then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance swiftly came his future boss’s defense, defending the debunked rumors, stating, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” 

One year later, cut to the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk and we see that Vance is following through on his promise. Weaving the beginnings of a baseless conspiracy, Vance announced, “We know Joe Biden’s FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk. Maybe they should have been investigating the networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk’s murder. If they had, Charlie Kirk might be alive today.” Discussing this comment on his podcast The Bulwark, Tim Miller was shocked that no news organization picked up this thread or remembered Vance’s statement from just one year ago. The ignorance of Vance’s comment about “networks” may be because the legacy press are no longer able to do their jobs as watchdogs of the government when their corporate owners are more interested in protecting their mergers.  

As of this writing, all the information the public has about the alleged killer of Kirk is that he acted alone, drove his own car, used his grandfather’s rifle, and was turned in to law enforcement by his family. What network, then, “motivated, inspired” or “funded” the murder? Nearly 10 months into Trump 2.0, it is hard to fathom what threat Joe Biden could still play so that Vance needs to blame him for not protecting Kirk. One year ago, Vance told us clearly and with no equivocation what his role as Vice President would be: Creating stories to advance an agenda. How come we did not believe him? 

In response to the baseless—and frankly: racist—rumors about the eating of pets, the legacy press was quick to point out how easy it was for misinformation to spread in the digital environment without taking a frank examination into their own culpability. In response to the baseless—and frankly: cowardly—accusation that there are “networks” that funded an alleged murderer, the legacy press was … nowhere to be found. The words and actions of President Trump, Vice President Vance, and their administration are newsworthy. However, giving their words oxygen without question, without demand for evidence, without any degree of pushback, is the equivalent of giving them free rein to coax whatever falsehoods they desire into the public consciousness. In their desire for profit, the corporate press enable their poor behavior and, in not pushing back, passively allow the false information to become truth.  

Let us heed Juliana Hatfield’s advice and “go home and think it through.” As audiences, we have a lot to think about. I, for one, do not yet know how to live within an autocracy. I do know, however, that I cannot wait for corporate news organizations to catch on to the new playbook being used by Trump 2.0 where they are honest about their lies. 

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Giacometti’s Last Ride: A Novel
by Bart Schneider; Art by Chester Arnold;
Kelly’s Cove Press; 2025; $20.

Artists, Ezra Pound once observed, were “the antennae” of the human race and provided a “warning system” about the future. They have also been keen observers of the present and have described the world without embellishments. In Giacometti’s Last Ride, novelist Bart Schneider and painter Chester Arnold, offer a stunning bookend to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a literary masterpiece which was just what I wanted and needed as a 19-year-old student eager to become an artist.

In Cormack McCarthy’s western and the film based on it, the Texas/Mexico border is “no country for old men.” The opposite is true for Giacometti’s Last Ride. The novel that Schneider and Arnold have assembled with words and images explores a country of old men, white and European, that provides a model for growing old with dignity.

They have also unromantically mapped a crowded corner of the 20^th-century art world that transformed ways of seeing and thinking. Schneider and Arnold surround Giacometti with a cast of aging painters, sculptors, writers and photographers who are beyond their prime. They live and work in Paris and they’re mostly harmonious with one another, though the Picasso who emerges in these pages tends to be competitive with his peers.

In addition to Giacometti and Picasso, the cast includes Giacometti’s brother, Diego, and their contemporaries: Samuel Beckett, known here as “Sam”; and Eli Lotar, a photographer who explains that Giacometti’s work represents “man’s isolation.” Lotar adds that Giacometti’s tall, thin, dramatic figures—which are less than three-inches in height—had a “particular poignancy after the tragedy of the war when so many people wandered through the world lost.” Giacometti’s art reflects the anxieties of the age in which it was born.

As readers of modern literature know, James Joyce offered the quintessential account of the alienated, anxious modern writer in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published at the start of WWI and a classic ever since then. Joyce’s Irish-born protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, observes famously, “The only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning. ” The Giacometti who takes his last ride in these pages is far less defiant, though no less experimental than Joyce or his hero and no less dedicated to the demands of art.

Born in Switzerland in 1901 and influenced by the surrealists and the cubists, Giacometti settled in Paris in 1922. He created some of his best known work, including Grande femme debout I through IV,  in the early 1960s. Grande Femme Debout 1 sold for $14.3 million and Pointing Man for $126 million. Giacometti died in Switzerland in 1966 two decades after the end of WWII when young white male artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning came to the attention of the world.

Giacometti turned to figurative painting in the mid-1950s. His success, which often overshadowed women artists like Helen Frankenthaler, was due in part to the myth that New York not Paris was at the center of the art world. Bye bye Left Bank studios, hello Greenwich Village galleries.

French author, Serge Guilbaut, tells much of that story, which never seems to get old, in his book, How New York Stole the idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War. After 1945 and well into the post-war era, New York art critics persuaded consumers to shell out big bucks, buy works of abstract expressionism and display them on the walls of their homes and apartments. As Schneider knows and shows in his new novel, Giacometti’s career benefitted from the notion that New York replaced Paris as the beating heart of the art world.

In Last Ride, the artist himself explains to a Parisian hoodlum how the New York art world operates. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not,” Giacometti says. “The fact that I painted it makes it important and valuable.” He adds, “I think it’s absurd but that’s how the art world is.” To sell art in New York, he must sell himself and his personality which becomes increasingly challenging as he ages.

Giacometti asks the hoodlum, who seems to have stepped directly from the celluloid world of film noir, “Why not become a collector?” He adds, ‘”Once you’re a collector, your status rises in the world,” and you “gain access to a wealthy echelon.” The acquisition of art can turn the criminal who plays his cards right into an accepted member of bourgeois society.

How much of the story that Schneider tells is based on fact and how much is based on fiction , the author doesn’t say. There are no acknowledgments to any of the biographies, including Giacometti: A Life (1997) by James Lord, who knew the artist and his entourage intimately well. Still, Schneider allows that he has ”fabricated some events, minor characters and the dialogue.” Which ones, a reader would like to know. Did his wife, Annette, and his lover, Caroline, really spat like two cats, or was that fabricated?

In a note at the back of the book, Chester Arnold writes that the “masterworks” by Giacometti and his contemporaries “provided inspiration for any child born in the mid-twentieth century with ambitions to be an artist.” He includes himself as one of those ambitious kids. Arnold adds that the great artists were as “recognizable in their persons as in their creations.” That was certainly true of Picasso who turned himself into an iconic figure, albeit less true for Giacometti.

Four women join the cast of the novel’s indelible characters: Giacometti’s wife, Annette, who begins her life as a member of the Swiss bourgeoisie and who is eager to become a bohemian; Caroline, a sex worker who serves as Giacometti’s model; his sister-in-law, Odette; and his mother whose funeral he attends before he embarks on his last ride.

His mother’s death awakens memories of boyhood when he learned from his artist/father to draw things as he sees them and to aim for “authenticity rather than perfection.”

For the most part the women characters revolve in Giacometti’s orbit and don’t have their own autonomous lives. The wives, lovers and models for Picasso and Rodin were often their co-creators. Was that true of Caroline and Annette one wonders? Giacometti’s Last Ride leaves that question unanswered, though the novel offers hints. One would also have liked one or two overtly political figures and perhaps a cameo appearance by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Schneider dedicates the novel to “Catherine, who drove with me along the winding Giacometti road.” He says that she “opened her French kitchen to him.” Not surprisingly, mouth-watering food and wine are almost as decisive in these pages as art. Giacometti is always ready for champagne and oysters, though his stomach gives him acute pain and sends him to a hospital.

The narrative, which is told effectively through concise dialogue, moves deftly across the landscape of Paris. It slows down long enough to situate the artist in his atelier, where he clashes and conspires with his models.

“I don’t plan to die now,” Giacometti tells Caroline. “I have too

much work to do. And then there’s the problem of loving you.” She responds, “Problem?” He asks, “who’s going to love you if I’m not around?”

A loveable figure in large part because he’s not narcissistic, Schneider’s Giacometti is an artist worth knowing and admiring as a human being with charms galore. Chester Arnold’s sketches bring bits and pieces of bohemian Paris to life: a pack of Gauloises, the trademark French cigarette; Giacometti’s atelier with its detritus and unfinished pieces; café society; and the artist’s “last ride” in a lovable, funky Citroen 2 CV, known as a “deux chevaux.” (Because it only had “two horsepower.”)

In these pages, the ubiquitous car becomes an icon for Giacometti himself and serves as an emblem for Paris before it was displaced by New York as the cosmopolitan capital of the commercial art world. There’s a lot more than two-horse power in the creative engine that drives this well-crafted novel that paints a picture of what the French call “la condition humaine.”

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Image by Onur Burak Akın.

Two years into Israel’s destruction, war crimes, and genocide in Gaza, Donald Trump rolled out a 20-point proposal, hyped as a path to peace. Arab and Muslim leaders rushed to give their unqualified blessing. Standing right next to Trump, however, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered only a “conditional” endorsement, so riddled with caveats it gutted the plan before the ink was dry.

Predictably, the U.S. administration and the managed American media applauded Israel’s supposed acceptance, without any critical review of Netanyahu’s crippling conditions. We’ve seen this script before. Back in 2003, when George W. Bush introduced his “Road Map,” media headlines screamed about Ariel Sharon’s acceptance. What went largely unreported was that Sharon and his cabinet had attached 14 reservations that essentially veered the plan off the road.

The pattern is unmistakable. In every so-called proposal for peace, Israel secures immediate, tangible gains, such as Palestinian recognition of Israel under the Oslo Accord, with a mere promise to recognize Palestine at some vague point in the “foreseeable” future. More than three decades later, that future never arrived.

In my column earlier this week, I warned that Netanyahu would inject “a poison pill to undermine Trump’s plan from within.” It didn’t take long. As Axios reported, Arab leaders were “furious” when Netanyahu rewrote critical clauses, especially on the conditions and timetable for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

Here are just a few of those poison pills:

Captive Release vs. Withdrawal

Trump’s Item 3 promised: “If both sides agree to this proposal … Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed-upon line to prepare for a hostage release.”

Netanyahu retorted:

“Israel will retain security responsibility, including a security perimeter, for the foreseeable future … the first step will be a modest withdrawal.”

Israel’s benefit is instant: the return of all captives. Palestinians, meanwhile, are promised a “modest withdrawal” to an undefined line, all while Israel retains security responsibility, a loophole allowing Israel to re-enter Gaza at will.

Gaza’s Governing Body

Trump’s Item 9 envisioned an international body managing Gaza’s redevelopment until the Palestinian Authority (PA) reformed and could govern. Netanyahu clarified Israel’s position:

“Gaza will have a peaceful civilian administration that is run neither by Hamas nor by the Palestinian Authority.”

Trump gave Israel the right to dictate who governs Gaza, while Palestinians told they are not ready to govern themselves, not even by the submissive PA.

Statehood Illusions

Trump’s Item 19 suggested a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” if (PA) reforms were carried out. Netanyahu dismissed the very premise:

“Israelis have no faith that the PA leopard will change its spots … Gaza will not be administered by the Palestinian Authority.”

He then redefined the PA “reforms” as ending Palestinian appeals to the ICC and ICJ, recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state,” and accepting “many, many other reforms.”

New conditions that have nothing to do with governance or effective administration. They are political pretexts, crafted to sabotage Trump’s 20-point plan or to render the PA irrelevant should it “reform” on Israel’s terms.

Occupation

Trump’s Item 16 declared: “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.” Netanyahu replied:

“Israel … will remain in the security perimeter for the foreseeable future.”

Translation: Israel will occupy Gaza.

Further to the above clear rebuttals undermining Trump’s Plan, still even more telling is Item 8: Neutral Aid Distribution—it calls for “aid in the Gaza Strip will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent…”

Unwittingly, Trump’s Plan acknowledges that the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not “neutral” but a tool using food as a weapon against a captive population.

Trump stood silently as Netanyahu gutted his plan, offering no objection but showering Netanyahu with praise as a “warrior.” The plan offers Israel everything in advance, by contrast, Palestinians receive conditional promises, vague timelines in the “foreseeable” future. Even that, according to Netanyahu, is contingent on Palestinian compliance and “good behavior.”

This is not a new playbook. In 2003, Bush’s Road Map tumbled into a ditch under Israel’s 14 reservations. Now, Trump’s plan faces the same fate because the structure is identical: Israel collects its benefits immediately, while Palestinians are left with empty promises. I must confess, though, Netanyahu was generous, offering only four conditions, enough, nonetheless, to bury Trump’s Plan into oblivion.

Should Palestinians dare to request clarifications or attach conditions of their own, the managed U.S. media would instantly brand them as “rejectionist,” while Israel’s sweeping conditions are politely ignored.

Irrespective of how Palestinians will respond, Trump’s 20-point Plan is destined to join Bush’s “Road Map.” Neither plan was ever about justice or reconciliation. The Road Map gave Sharon cover to accelerate the expansion of the Jewish-only colonies and build the apartheid wall on stolen Palestinian land. Today, Trump’s blueprint functions as a veneer for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while offering Palestinians little more than equivocal promises.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On Sept 23, 2025, the Foreign Policy Association and the Committee of 100 hosted a debate on the topic “Is Deglobalization Inevitable?,” with Walden Bello, co-chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South, and Edward Ashbee of the Copenhagen Business School, with Bello defending the affirmative side, after a fireside chat with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.  The audience judged Bello’s position the more persuasive of the two sides.

In the 1990s, we were told that we were entering an era, known as globalization, that, owing to free trade and unobstructed capital flows in a borderless global economy, would lead to the best of all possible worlds. Most of the West’s economic, political, and intellectual elites bought into this vision. I still remember how the venerable Thomas Friedman of The New York Timeslampooned those of us who resisted this vision as “flat-earthers,” or believers in a flat earth. I still recall the equally venerable Economist magazine singling me out as coining the word “deglobalization,” not with the aim of hailing me as a prophet but as a fool preaching a return to a Jurassic past.

Thirty years on, this flat-earther takes no pride in having forecast the mess we are in, to which unfettered globalization has been a central contributor: the highest rates of inequality in decades, growing poverty in both the Global North and the Global South, deindustrialization in the United States and many other countries, massive indebtedness of consumers in the Global North and whole countries in the Global South, financial crisis after financial crisis, the rise of the far right, and intensifying geopolitical conflict.

Globalization did not lead to a new world order but to the Brave New World.

Snapshots of a Dreary Era

Let me present three snapshots of that era of globalization that we are now leaving:

Snapshot No 1:  Apple was one of the main beneficiaries of globalization. Apple led the escape away from the confines of the national economy to create global supply chains propped up by cheap labor. Let me just quote The New York Times in this regard:

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

Apple, of course, was not alone in the drive to deindustrialize America. It was accompanied by fellow IT corporations Microsoft, Intel, and Invidia; automakers GM, Ford, and Tesla; pharmaceutical giants Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer; and other leaders in other industries and services, such as Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Walmart, and Amazon, to name just a few. The favorite destination was China, where wages were 3-5 percent of wages of workers in the United States. The “China Shock” is estimated, conservatively, to have led to the loss of 2.4 million U.S. jobs. Employment in manufacturing dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was before World War II, in 1941.

Snapshot 2:  The removal of the barriers to the free flow of capital globally led to the Third World Debt Crisis in the early 1980s, which almost brought down the Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which brought down the so-called Asian miracle economies. Removing global capital controls was accompanied by the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, which led to the creation of massive profit-making scams through the so-called magic of financial engineering like the frenzied trading in sub-prime mortgages. Not only were millions bankrupted and lost their homes when the subprime securities were exposed as rotten, but the whole global system stood on the brink of collapse in 2008, and it was saved only by the bailout of U.S. banks, with U.S. taxpayers money, to the tune of over $1 trillion.

Snapshot 3 is the famous French economist Thomas Piketty’s summing up of the U.S. economic tragedy of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

[I] want to stress that the word “collapse” [in the case of the United States] is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1950 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 per cent in 2010–2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 per cent to more than 20 percent.

Accompanying this massive increase in inequality in the United States has been an increase in poverty. Globally, according to available data, since the financial crises of 2007-08, wealth inequality has risen, and now the top one percent owns half the world’s total household wealth.

Let me turn from this nostalgic recounting of the past, and once more, let me focus on our good friend Apple. It is now leading the so-called reshoring process. It has read the handwriting on the wall and, though this will negatively affect its bottom line and scramble its operations, to protect the remainder of its super profits, it is leading the reshoring of its supply chains, with a planned $600 billion investment in the manufacture within the United States of its iPhone, iPad, MacBook, as well as in the fabrication of semi-conductor chips. Boasting that Apple manufacturing plans will create 450,000 jobs in the United States, CEO Tim Cook admitted to being a hostage to Trump’s push to deglobalize the operations of American firms, saying, “The president has said he wants more in the United States…so we want more in the United States.”  Where Apple goes, others follow, among them U.S. chipmakers Intel and Nvidia, automotive leader Tesla, and pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson.

But American firms are not the only hostages to politics. Among the foreign firms that have bowed to Trump’s ultra-protectionist push via unilateral tariff increases by regionalizing or nationalizing their supply lines are Hyundai Motors, Honda Motors, Samsung electronics, Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, and pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.

Although reshoring or relocation has proceeded by fits and starts over the last decade, under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, it is likely to accelerate over the next few years, despite constraints and inefficiencies, as economic nationalism rises in the United States and the West. In 2023, an exhaustive study of North American firms showed that that more than 90 percent of manufacturing companies in the region had moved at least some of their production or supply chain in the past five years. Another study conducted at the same time showed that by 2026, 65 percent of surveyed companies would be buying most key items from regional suppliers, compared to just 38 percent in 2023. With Trump imposing unilateral tariffs on Mexico and Canada, companies are realizing that relocating to the NAFTA partners may not appease Trump; they will have to relocate to the United States itself, despite the disruption and chaos that might accompany that process, such as that which saw 300 workers vital to the Hyundai facility in Georgia arrested by ICE and deported to Korea.

Rage: Triggered by the Left, Expropriated by the Right

The tremendous global anger and resentment at the dystopia to which corporate-driven globalization has led us is perhaps the biggest reason why deglobalization will be the trend for a long, long while. That rage first came from the left, which inflicted a reversal from which corporate-driven globalization never recovered during the historic Battle of Seattle in December 1999. But it was Donald Trump and other forces of the far right that successfully rode that anger to political triumph in the United States and Europe in the coming decades.

In other words, the politics of rage, not the economics of narrow efficiency in the service of corporate profitability is now in command.  In the United States, globalization created two antagonistic communities, one that benefited from it due to their superior education and incomes, the other that suffered from it owing to their lack of both economic and educational advantages. The latter is the vast sector of the population that Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables,” but is better known as the “Make America Great Again” folks or MAGA base. That community will not easily forget either the sufferings brought about by the deindustrialization spearheaded by Apple and other well-known TNCs or the slights they endured from Hillary, whom they regard as being in the pocket of Wall Street.

A second reason for the strength of the deglobalization wave is that the multilateral order that served as the political canopy or system of governance for free trade and unobstructed capital flows is on the brink of collapse. The World Trade Organization, which was once described as the jewel in the crown of multilateralism, no longer functions as a system for governing world trade, partly owing to sabotage by the United States, when under Obama and later Trump and Biden, Washington could no longer rely on favorable rulings in trade disputes. The International Monetary Fund has not recovered from its reputation of promoting austerity in developing countries and its push for unfettered capital flows that brought down the Asian tiger economies. The World Bank also is discredited for its complicity in imposing austerity measures as well as for the wrong-headed policy of export-oriented industrialization for Global North markets that the Bank prescribed as the route to prosperity for developing countries—one that is now especially fatal for those who followed it given the ultra-protectionism sweeping the United States.

Third, national security, both economic security and military security, has displaced prosperity through trade and investment as the principal consideration in relations among countries. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have banned the transfer of advanced computer chips to China, and more such measures will follow. Reorganizing and regionalizing, if not nationalizing, access to and supply lines for key resources for advanced technologies like lithium, rare earth, copper, cobalt, and nickel is now an overriding concern, the aim being not only to monopolize these sensitive commodities but to prevent competitors from getting hold of them.

Two Routes to a Deglobalized World

The issue is not the inevitability of deglobalization but what form deglobalization will take. Deglobalization marked by ultra-protectionism in trade relations, unilateralism and isolationism in economic and military relations, and the creation of a domestic market geared principally towards the interests of the racial and ethnic majority is one way to deglobalize. That is indeed where Trump is leading the United States.

But there is another way to deglobalize, the key elements of which I laid out in my book Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy 25 years ago.

One, we do not demand a withdrawal into autarky but continued participation in the international economy, but in a way that ensures that instead of swamping it, international market forces are harnessed to assist in building the capacity to sustain a vibrant domestic economy.

Two, we propose that via a judicious combination of equality-enhancing redistributive measures and reasonable tariffs and quotas, the internal market will again become the engine of a healthy economy instead of being an appendage of an export-oriented economy.

Third, we promote participation in a plurality of economic groupings–those that allow countries to maintain policy space for development, instead of imprisoning them in a single global body, the World Trade Organization, with a uniform set of rules, one that favors the interests of transnational corporations instead of the interests of their citizens.

Fourth, inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi, we advocate the re-embedding of the market in the community, so that instead of driving the latter, as in global capitalism, the market is subject to the values and rhythms of the community.

And finally, in contrast to the far right, we uphold the notion of community as one where membership is not determined by blood or ethnicity but by a shared belief in democratic values.

That is the alternative we offered a quarter of a century ago. This fluid system of international trade that allows especially the economies of the Global South the space to pursue sustainable development is not far from the flexible global trading system before the takeoff of globalization in the late eighties, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Twenty five years ago, we were promoting and we continue to promote a route of progressive deglobalization, one that avoids the extreme of the doctrinaire dystopia of corporate-driven globalization, on the one hand, and, on the other, savage unilateralism and protectionism.  This route to deglobalization is not new, nor, some would claim, particularly radical. Keynes’ common sense advice, addressing the global situation in the 1930s, is very relevant to our times, “Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.”

Had we taken this route, I dare say, the chances are great that we would not be in the terrible mess the world is in today, with the threat not only of trade war but of real war at its doorsteps. There is still time to take this route, but the window of opportunity is closing fast.

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Photograph Source: Fred Schilling – Public Domain

October 6 is the first Monday of the month. It is the traditional start of the U.S. Supreme Court term. It is also the twentieth year with John Roberts as Chief Justice. While American democracy faces many challenges—economic inequality, racial divisions, and rampant polarization—another corrosive force too often overlooked sits at the very top of the judicial hierarchy. The Roberts Court may be the most aggressively anti-democratic Supreme Court in U.S. history.

By design the Court is inherently insulated from democracy. Justices are unelected, serve for life, and wield the power to strike down laws passed by elected representatives. The Constitution envisions this insulation as a safeguard: the Court should resist majoritarian pressures and protect vulnerable minorities. In United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 US. 144 (1938), the famous footnote four laid out this vision of the judiciary as the guardian of political participation, tasked with keeping the channels of democratic change open. But under Roberts, the Court has abandoned this role. Instead of defending democracy, the Court has shut doors, tilted the playing field, and entrenched power in the hands of the wealthy, white, and well-connected.

Consider the record. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), upheld Indiana’s strict voter ID law. The state could not point to a single example of the voter fraud it claimed to be preventing. What the law actually did was burden poor, elderly, and minority voters—those least likely to have government-issued identification. With this decision, the Roberts Court put its seal of approval on voter suppression, encouraging states to pass laws that systematically exclude inconvenient voters. Far from protecting the right to vote, the Court became an accomplice in undermining it.

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), was a body blow to voting rights. The Court gutted the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most effective civil rights tools in American history. Roberts claimed the formula was outdated, ignoring the ongoing evidence of racial discrimination in voting. Within hours, states rolled out new restrictions: voter ID laws, polling place closures, and voter purges. The Court unleashed a wave of suppression that disproportionately targeted minority communities. This was not colorblind constitutionalism; it was willful blindness to racism in the political system.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. 647 (2021), continued the demolition of the Voting Rights Act. By upholding Arizona’s restrictive voting laws and adopting a narrow test for discrimination claims, the Court all but neutered Section 2 of the Act. Even laws with obvious racial disparities now stand a better chance of surviving. Roberts and his majority did not just interpret the statute narrowly; they rewrote its purpose, leaving voters of color with diminished protection.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), the Roberts Court struck down restrictions on corporate and union spending in elections. By equating money with speech, the Court created a plutocrat’s playground. Elections became less about ideas and more about dollars. Super PACs, dark money groups, and billionaires now dominate the airwaves, drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. This was not judicial restraint; it was judicial activism of the worst kind—an activist Court rewriting the rules of democracy to empower corporations and the wealthy few.

The attack continued in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 564 U.S. 721 (2011). Roberts himself wrote the opinion striking down Arizona’s system of matching funds for publicly financed candidates. This was a program designed to reduce corruption and give ordinary citizens a fair shot against entrenched money. By invalidating it, the Court told states they could not even experiment with reforms to clean up politics. The message was unmistakable: the Roberts Court is not a neutral umpire but a battering ram against any effort to curb the power of money in politics.

Meanwhile, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. 185 (2014), doubled down on the assault on campaign finance. By striking down aggregate contribution limits, the Court opened another pipeline for the wealthy to buy influence. Combined with Citizens United, the result is an electoral system increasingly controlled by the donor class. For Roberts and his colleagues, the problem was not that money distorts democracy, but that wealthy donors weren’t free enough to spend more.

The Court then washed its hands of partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019). By declaring the issue nonjusticiable, the Court effectively gave politicians a green light to draw maps that lock in their own power such as they are doing in Texas and other states. Gerrymanders now allow minority parties to dominate legislatures and insulate themselves from electoral accountability. Roberts’s claim that courts lack a standard to judge gerrymandering was disingenuous. Standards had been proposed; the Court simply lacked the will. By abdicating, it entrenched minority rule and undermined representative democracy.

In Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, 591 U.S. ___, 140 S. Ct. 2019 (2020), the Court weakened Congress’s ability to investigate the president. Oversight is a cornerstone of checks and balances, yet the Roberts Court imposed a burdensome test that made it far harder to obtain crucial information. In effect, it shielded presidential misconduct from scrutiny, tilting power further toward the executive.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), the Court toppled Chevron deference, stripping federal agencies of their ability to reasonably interpret ambiguous statutes. This was a long-standing conservative goal, and Roberts delivered. The decision shifts policymaking away from agencies answerable to elected officials and hands it to unelected judges. The result is paralysis in regulation and a judiciary empowered to thwart democratic governance in environmental protection, labor standards, and consumer rights.

Perhaps most alarming, Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), granted sweeping presidential immunity for “official acts.” This decision elevates the president above the law, a status the Constitution never contemplated. If the president cannot be held criminally accountable for abusing power, democracy itself is at risk. By insulating the office from accountability, Roberts and his Court invited authoritarianism.

Finally, Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. ___ (2025), curtailed federal courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. In the context of an executive order limiting birthright citizenship, the Court limited remedies to only the named plaintiffs. The broader public, even if equally harmed, received no immediate protection. This ruling stripped the judiciary of one of its most effective tools for checking executive overreach, making it harder to stop unconstitutional actions before they spread nationwide.

The pattern is unmistakable. The Roberts Court has dismantled campaign finance protections, gutted voting rights, legitimized gerrymandering, weakened congressional oversight, kneecapped the administrative state, and placed the president above the law. Far from defending democracy, it has been one of its most consistent adversaries . Every chance the Roberts Court has had to come to the aid of  democracy and limiting abuses of power, it has turned away.

This is not judicial modesty. This is not principled restraint. It is a project: to entrench minority rule, empower moneyed interests, and protect executive power from accountability. John Roberts, who once sold himself as an umpire calling balls and strikes, has instead led a team of partisan players rewriting the rulebook of American democracy to favor the wealthy, the powerful, and the entrenched.

As the Court begins its twenty-first year under Roberts’s leadership, the outlook is grim. Those who once hoped the Supreme Court would serve as the final firewall against authoritarianism must confront the reality that the Roberts Court has been an accelerant of democratic decline. God help this honorable Court and American Democracy—because under John Roberts, it has done little to help democracy itself.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the summer of 2020, during the protests in Minneapolis following the brutal murder of George Floyd, Donald Trump and his senior aides discussed the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 in order to deploy active-duty military personnel to quell the unrest.  Fortunately, Trump’s most senior advisers—Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley—were strongly opposed to sending military personnel to an American city.

There is reason to believe that the invocation of the Insurrection Act is once again on the table in the White House, and there is little likelihood that Attorney General Pam Bondi or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would object; in fact, it is reasonable to assume that Bondi and Hegseth, who are consumed with exaggerated fears of domestic instability, would favor such a move.  The unknown in the group, of course, is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, who is already facing a great deal of pressure to politicize the professional military.

Trump was furious about the protests in Minneapolis and reportedly wanted to send thousands of active-duty forces to the city.  He had significant support from White House aides, presumably led by Stephen Miller, the current deputy chief of staff who is shepherding the harsh domestic crackdown against sanctuary cities and immigrants in general.  In June 2020, Trump repeatedly urged General Milley to use the military to confront protesters in Washington, and ranted about the unrest in such cities as New York, Chicago, and Portland.  Currently, National Guard troops are in place in Chicago and Portland, where there are no signs of unrest.  Trump’s targets are typically blue states where there are mayors of color in key cities.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s unprecedented summoning of hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Washington to announce the reordering of U.S. military priorities, centering on perceived threats to the homeland, suggests that the Insurrection Act is high on Trump’s agenda.  If there is a major power in the world that faces little threat to the homeland, it is the United States.  No other major power in the global community can claim the geographic safety and security from oceans to the east and west, and stable border relations to the north and south.  The homeland threat is being exaggerated for a reason, and that reason could well include the invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Trump’s highly partisan and bellicose remarks to the assembled generals and admirals called for using America’s “dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”  He painted a picture of the United States under attack “from within,” which could presage the use of the Insurrection Act ultimately.  His attacks on Joe Biden were met with silence, unlike his remarks at Ft. Bragg several months ago that elicited anti-Biden boos from American soldiers.  Hegseth used the meeting to criticize “fat generals and admirals,” and announced mandatory personal fitness tests on a semi-annual basis.

The loosely worded Insurrection Act of 1807 empowers the president to deploy the U.S. military and to federalize National Guard units of individual states in specific circumstances.  It was last used in 1992 to deal with the riots in Los Angeles following the riots that erupted after the acquittal of police officers who had beaten Rodney King.  Ironically, the Senate voted 57-43 to convict Trump of inciting insurrection to stop the counting of the votes in January 2021, but the vote was ten votes short of the required two-thirds majority required by the Constitution.

In addition to Trump ordering troops in Portland to use “full force if necessary, there are other worrisome developments.  Secretary of Defense Hegseth recently issued a warning to journalists and implemented strict new rules that limit press access to the Pentagon.  He warned reporters that the “press does not run the Pentagon—the people do, and that reporters should “wear a badge and follow the rules—or go home.”  The Trump’s administration’s current challenges to free speech and free press point to a mindset that could justify invocation of the Insurrection Act.

In recent years, several Democratic senators, including Richard Blumenthal, Alex Padilla, and Adam Schiff, have tried without success to introduce legislation to restrict the president’s broad and vague authority to deploy troops—either with or without the request of a state—to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”  Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky warned several years ago that American exceptionalism has created a complacency about the strength of the rule of law and constitutional safeguards that are now under attack.

Trump clearly has the ability and the inclination to escalate tensions in U.S. cities, rather than to legitimately restore order.  Trump and Hegseth appear  driven to politicize the professional military and turn it into a political tool.  The fact that major protests are scheduled to take place in cities all over the country in less than three weeks could provide the opportunity that the Trump administration is seeking to deploy more force in U.S. cities.  The invocation of the Insurrection Act would allow Donald Trump to act with impunity.

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Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump. Image Wikipedia.

Since Charlie Kirk was killed on September 10, amongst the obfuscation and outright misrepresentation of his politics, and the weaponisation of his death by Trump and his cronies – with the support of establishment Democrats – to push the United States deeper into the depths of MAGA’s fascist dystopia, the Left has been caught off-guard. Some have been quick to condemn his killing and decry political violence, while others criticise the former for misrepresenting the life, politics and legacy of a heinous far-right figure. But among these divisions, an alternate perspective has emerged within segments of the global Left, one that is growing increasingly popular every passing day: Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel.

It’s not too surprising that this view has emerged. Over the last two years, during its genocide in Gaza, Israel has bombed sovereign countries, targeted journalists and activists, and unleashed a pervasive, all-reaching hasbara (propaganda) campaign to salvage its perpetually withering international standing. And Israel has, over the course of decades, also unleashed an assassination campaign that makes even the CIA’s pale in comparison – as is explored in extensive detail in Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First.

So, the presumption that Israel, which only two weeks ago killed 31 Yemeni journalists in a targeted attack – the second-deadliest recorded against journalists ever – would carry out a political assassination of an American citizen, even on US soil, is not far-fetched. Not least because Benjamin Netanyahu has, on multiple occasions, made statements explicitly saying that Israel did not kill Kirk, only fueling the flames for this theory among anti-Zionists the world over.

The words coming out of the mouth of Israel’s war-criminal prime minister must always be taken with scepticism; however, it is important to be critical in our justified criticism of Israel and the impunity with which it acts. Netanyahu is many things. He is a genocidaire, a racist Islamophobe, and a repulsive war criminal who has no regard for human life. But one thing he is not is stupid. The fact that he has, quite needlessly, made repeated statements regarding Kirk’s killing is telling, indicating that he sees a pragmatic purpose in keeping the rumour going. This was also pointed out by Drop Site News, whose September 18 newsletter stated: “Netanyahu’s decision to once again publicly deny the allegations gives oxygen to the storyline, suggesting Netanyahu paradoxically sees some public-relations benefit to it.”

The public-relations benefit is that it offers Israel another opportunity to misrepresent the anti-Zionist movement by making baseless accusations of blood libel and anti-semitism for its criticisms of Israel and Zionism for the horrors it continues to unleash on the people of Gaza and beyond. Simultaneously, giving this theory oxygen keeps the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine movement fractured, and it also keeps the lid on the actual covert assassination operations that Israel continues to conduct with impunity.

At a time when perpetually increasing numbers of people, including those politically detached, are opening their eyes to the malicious weaponisation of anti-semitism by Israel to mask its genocidal lust, Israel has found itself determined to push harder to obfuscate and confuse. This has taken the form of a significantly increased propaganda budget, which has undoubtedly been at the core of the bile it continues to disseminate through advertising, including by working directly with Google.

Here, amidst its international standing falling to previously unfathomable lows, especially in the West, Israel seeks to manufacture victimhood and play to both imagined and real fears. The fears of the mostly liberal voices, to echo the concern that, as a result of Israel’s policies, Jews will be blamed for any and everything – a sentiment that makes people uncomfortable, especially as there has been an increase in incidents of anti-semitism as a result of Israel’s malicious conflation of Judaism with Zionism for its ethno-supremacist project. Fuelling the conspiracy theory that Israel killed Kirk does just that: it further weaponises anti-semitism to create rifts within the broad coalition of people around the world who are appalled by the genocide.

Indeed, to illustrate the absurdity of this theory, one need only reflect on the circumstances that led to its development. If Israel really wanted to eliminate the online personalities and content creators seriously committed to worsening its already ruined reputation and standing, why would it choose to assassinate one of its most fervent defenders?

Some point towards a seemingly mysterious change in Kirk’s attitudes regarding Israel, even though, until the moment he was killed, he spoke candidly, often with joy, about his contentment at the destruction of Gaza and the killing of Palestinian civilians.

“I used to say: ‘If you, as a gay person, would go to Gaza, they would throw you off of tall buildings.’ Now they don’t have any tall buildings left,” he gleefully exclaimed at an event, not long before he was killed. He quickly followed that comment up with: “Maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews, stupid Muslims.” Is this the behaviour of someone so “anti-Israel” that they must be taken out?

Let’s consider, as some claim, that in spite of all of this, Kirk was on the brink of a complete reversal – turning his unwavering support and loyalty to the state and government of Israel into indifference. Even in such a scenario, it would be imprudent for Israel to assassinate Kirk, and not the countless other online personalities who have already been outspoken in their criticisms of Israel, including on the far-right, for almost two years now, some of whom command larger platforms than Kirk did.

Any serious credence one may want to attach to the theory that Israel killed Kirk falls apart the moment one looks at the events and the political context surrounding this killing, with the backbone of the claim being little more than Netanyahu’s constant and seemingly unnecessary denials.

Again, Netanyahu is not stupid. He recognises that the weaponisation of this claim, its potential to create divisions within the anti-Zionist movement, and its capacity to mask Israel’s sophisticated killing machine all benefit Israel. In fact, when one is sceptical and critical of the assertion that Israel killed Kirk, unless they are already well-versed with Israel’s covert assassination machine, this may only make it likelier for them to assume that other claims of Israeli assassinations are unsubstantiated, even though that is far from the truth.

Lastly, it is frustrating to see so many who are rightly appalled by and enraged by Israel’s genocide have chosen to hyper-fixate on Kirk’s killing, with some even misrepresenting Kirk’s politics and legacy, and elevating him to the status of martyrdom. Not least because the horrors that Israel has subjected Gaza and the world in only the time since Kirk was killed are infinitely more important to focus on.

On the day Kirk was killed, Israel bombed the sixth sovereign country in a period of 72 hours. In the days since, it carried out brutal targeted strikes on Yemeni newspaper offices and has marked individuals on the boats that are a part of the Global Sumud Flotilla – a humanitarian non-violent mission to provide aid to the besieged people in Gaza – which includes activists, actors, and sitting members of parliament, including Greta Thunberg, Adèle Haenel, Mariana Mortágua and Rima Hassan, among others, as terrorists. All of this while it continues to kill and starve everyone in Gaza, with some estimates emerging now that Israel’s assault may have killed a third of Gaza’s pre-October 7 population.

Our focus should not move away from these realities, not least in the defence of the death of one of Israel’s most committed defenders, who never let any opportunity to be racist or Islamophobic slide. Fixating on tying Kirk’s death to Israel does little beyond taking focus away from the genocide and playing into the traps of Israel’s withering propaganda machine.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Noem Scheiber, the New York Times’ generally excellent labor reporter, had a lengthy background piece that really hit a nerve. The piece sought to answer why top executives at major corporations are so quickly caving into Donald Trump’s lunacy rather than banding together and fighting it.

Scheiber puts the root cause as a shift from a focus on stakeholder capitalism, where top executives sought to serve not just the company’s bottom line, but also the company’s workers and the communities in which they operated, to an exclusive focus on maximizing shareholder value. This is seriously wrong, and it is important to point out why it is wrong.

First and foremost, it is wrong to say that CEOs have an exclusive focus on maximizing shareholder wealth. There is very solid evidence that they are more focused on maximizing their own pay rather than corporate earnings. Much research shows that CEO pay does not closely reflect returns to shareholders. Lucien Bebchuk and Jesse Fried presented this case in their book, Pay Without Performance, two decades ago.

There are any number of CEOs who have walked away with tens of millions of dollars after doing serious damage to their companies and their shareholders. Most recently we saw the CEO from Boeing walk away from the company with over $60 million after bringing it to the edge of bankruptcy, that’s really maximizing shareholder value.

 The Bebchuk and Fried argument is that the corporate boards that ultimately determine CEO pay owe their positions largely to top management. (I made a modest contribution to this literature in a paper with Jessica Schieder. We examined CEO pay in the health insurance industry after the ACA took away deductibility in 2011. This change unambiguously raised the cost of CEO pay to companies, but no matter how much we beat up the data, we could not find any evidence it lowered pay, even after controlling for revenue, profits, share value, and everything else imaginable.)

As long as they maintain the support of their fellow board members, they can be almost certain of maintaining their seat. More than 99 percent of board members who are recommended for re-election win shareholder elections. Asking questions like, “can we pay our CEO a lot less money?” is not likely to endear a board member to their colleagues, so it seems this question is rarely asked. That means there is no effective check on CEO pay.

Since being on a corporate board is a very cushy job, typically paying several hundred thousand dollars a year for a few hundred hours of work, board members generally want to keep their jobs. Steven Clifford, a former CEO and corporate board member, outlines this case from the inside in his book The CEO Pay Machine.

This distinction matters for several reasons. First, most of the upward redistribution of the last four decades has been to high-end wage earners, not corporate profits. In fact, the bulk of the upward redistribution had already taken place by 2000, a point at which the corporate profit share was the same as its 1960s level.

The excessive pay of CEOs, by itself, may be a small part of that story, but if a CEO is getting $25 million or $30 million, then odds are the other people in the C-suite are getting $10-$15 million, and the third layer of corporate execs are likely pocketing several million a year. This is a very different world from one where the CEO might get $3-$4 million, as would be the case if the ratio of CEO to worker pay had remained at its levels of a half century ago. And more money for those at the top means less for everyone else.

And the change in rules and norms that allow CEO pay to explode also allowed for top end pay to rise in other contexts. Longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies made many STEM workers millionaires or even billionaires. The abuse of bankruptcy laws by private equity companies, also created many millionaires and billionaires. This is a mix of wages and profits, since the private equity partners who get the big bucks are ostensibly working for their money. The bloated financial sector more generally has also made for many big paychecks.

This is my usual schpiel, but it is important to distinguish it from the line that Scheiber gives in his piece. According to Scheiber, there were benefits to the alleged shift to a focus on shareholder value:

“The economy became more efficient and dynamic. Consumers often benefited and American firms became the most innovative on the planet.”

These benefits are far more difficult to find in the world than in policy discussions. Here is what productivity growth looked like in the period of stakeholder capitalism compared with the period where corporations were ostensibly maximizing shareholder value.

The average annual rate of productivity growth was 1.3 percentage points higher in the former period. There are technical reasons, like the lower depreciation share in output in the earlier period, that would make the gap even larger. I left the seventies slump as a separate period since we can argue where it belongs. It was a period in which the economy was hugely shaken by two massive oil price hikes at a time when the U.S. economy was far dependent on oil than is the case today. In any case, putting it with the earlier period would not change the picture.

If we look at the international comparisons, contrary to Scheiber, we don’t get a story for the obvious superiority of the U.S. economy in the last 45 years. According to the I.M.F., in 1980, France’s per capita GDP was 85.7 percent of the U.S. per capita GDP. It had fallen to 74.3 percent by 2024. The ratio for Germany was 95.3 percent in 1980 but had declined to 85.6 percent by 2024.

However, before anyone sees this as a victory for U.S. capitalism, consider that average annual hours worked declined by 17.4 percent over this period in France and 23.8 percent in Germany. That compares to a fall of just 3.4 percent in the United States. The rest of the world chose to take the gains of productivity growth in longer vacations and shorter workweeks. That doesn’t make for a victory of U.S. capitalism, it just means workers who put in more hours get higher annual wages.

A full international comparison is more complicated, but the vigorous handwaving by Scheiber and others is not convincing. The U.S. economy is obviously ahead in some ways, but the fuller picture is far more ambiguous.

The distinctions here matter in terms of how we view the legitimacy of a system that has shifted a massive amount of income upward. There is some amount of integrity in saying that we just want to leave things to the market. There is much less integrity in saying we are rigging the deck to give all the money to the rich. We have done the latter, it is understandable that the beneficiaries of this upward redistribution want to conceal this fact, but it is mindboggling that people opposed to the upward redistribution also conceal the reality.

The rationale that there has been a payoff in better economic performance also needs to be attacked. At best we can say by some measures the U.S. economy has performed better than its peers over the last forty-five years, but it is far from a slam dunk case, and it is easy to show statistics, like gains in life expectancy, where it has done far worse.

Why the CEOs Genuflect to Donald Trump

If we don’t buy Scheiber’s story for the mass capitulation to Trump, then we need an alternative. To my mind the story is a lack of an institutional structure that supports a challenge to Trump. The most important part of the story here is the reduced power or organized labor. In the fifties and sixties, one-third of the workforce was in unions. Today, the figure is just 10.0 percent overall and only slightly over 6.0 percent in the private sector.

Unions were a serious part of the national dialogue in the fifties and sixties, with leaders of unions being a regular part of major policy debates. Today they are an after-thought even for the Democrats and largely an enemy to Republicans. They still have some clout, especially in states where they represent a substantial share of the workforce, but their political power is radically diminished compared to a half-century ago. That was not an accident, the Republicans, and some Democrats, deliberately pushed policies to weaken unions.

The media also provided an effective check to the sort of authoritarian nonsense being pushed by Trump in a way that is no longer the case. We shouldn’t idealize the media of the early post-war decades, they helped to conceal the reality of U.S. interventions in places like Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam, although eventually their truth-telling helped to bring an end to the war. But the key point is that they were a major institutional voice prepared to intervene on the side of reality in way that is no longer true.

Back in the 1960s, nearly 30 million people watched Walter Conkrite on CBS news every night in a country with half the current U.S. population. Today the combinedviewership of the network news shows is less than 18 million. And that viewership tilts hugely older, less than 3 million are under age 55.

This means that insofar as the television news outlets could be counted on to be truth tellers who would expose lies from politicians and their allies, they are much less effective today. Relatively few people are paying attention. And even this limited truth-teller role is being put into question as the networks are taken over by far-right wing billionaires who are happy to go along with whatever nonsense Donald Trump says. The story with newspapers is even worse, as the Internet, as well as the dominance of Facebook and Google, has devasted the ad revenue that was their primary means of support.

While the Internet does offer low-cost means of communication there is virtually no institutional support for a progressive presence on it. The broad liberal-left has largely ignored the media even as traditional mainstream outlets were collapsing and the right was openly building up Fox News and other alternatives. This includes taking over huge platforms like Twitter and now TikTok, and bringing over Facebook now that Mark Zuckerberg has joined the team.

This means that a corporate CEO, who might have been ridiculed into retirement by endorsing some of Donald Trump’s deranged comments, can freely push utter nonsense and know that in most cases it will not matter to them personally or the companies they run. The checks that existed forty or fifty years ago are gone.

There were and hopefully still are alternative routes that the center and left could have taken. In addition to the broad economic issues that I discuss in Rigged (it’s free), it could have pushed for alternative support mechanisms for the media, such as individual vouchers or tax credits. It also could have tried to structure the rules for social media so as to make it less conducive to the sort of concentration we see with the huge platforms like X or Facebook, most importantly by not granting them special protection with Section 230.

Unfortunately, the center and left largely ignored the media world changing around them, adopting a strategy of “we have been losing for fifty years, why change now?” It is very late in the game at this point, who knows if democracy can be saved. But maybe, maybe, maybe, we can get some people to look at the situation with clear eyes and not just keep repeating the same nonsense that passes for wisdom in policy debates.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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Our freedom of speech should be guided by how we respect and live together as human beings, how we share and protect the bounty of creation, and the many other things of worth and dignity. Image by Mike Newbry.

The debates over the protection of free speech have been raging since before the killing of Charles Kirk. The killing of Charles Kirk has taken this discussion into another realm. Jimmy Kimmel was a high-profile casualty of the skirmish. He was suspended from his show and returned recently to record audiences, even though the companies on the political right, Sinclair and Nexstar, refused to air his show on the stations they owned. It has been demanded of Kimmel that he offer a full-throated apology to the family, and contribute to Turning Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded, as an act of contrition before he can really be forgiven. The premise is that short of that it would be doubtful whether he was actually remorseful. But while the corporate media focused on Jimmy Kimmel and his suspension, other people lost their positions because they exposed the racist things that Kirk uttered regularly on his podcast and in public forums. Jimmy Kimmel returned to TV after a brief suspension due to public pressure.

However, there are still a number of people without jobs because, like Kimmel, they exercised their First Amendment right and expressed outrage, disagreement, and concern over this Kirk moment in the country’s political life. Some questioned the way that the MAGA/Trump base was gathering around the spirit of Charles Kirk, canonizing and deifying him, and using him as the litmus test of whether people were aligned with the political right and the MAGA/Trump agenda or not. The MAGA/Trump white supremacist agenda was emboldened in their right-wing Onward Christian Soldier march to win new ground and to increase their abilities to conquer the left. Criticism of what Kirk said in life could not be submitted for examination of the words and intent, but according to the political right, to do so it was a celebration of the killing of Kirk. This was a calculated stretch, but worked as corporate America fired workers who felt sorry for his death but questioned his words and the words intent.

Karen Attiah, the last full-time Black opinion writer and editor of Global Opinions at the Washington Post, was let go in the midst of the Charles Kirk storm, but unlike Kimmel, she did not get her job back. MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd was also let go. People know of the high profile people, but there are numbers of people that we do not learn from educators in the high schools and colleges, lawyers, doctors, first responders, people working in a variety of businesses, government workers, and many other professionals who have been shown the door because employers felt that their comments on social media was too raw, not remorseful enough, and had crossed the line as far as free speech was concerned. This is like a monster that have been let out of its cave where the mantra of advancing free speech is utilized, weaponized, and targeted toward “wokeness”, “critical race theory”, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, college admissions, voting rights, women, LGBTQIA, and every other group and person that is non-white and not in the fold of the MAGA/Trump and the white supremacist agenda.

Someone needs to explain to me this new set of rules concerning free speech. This week at Tennessee State University a MAGA group wearing those offensive red hats breached the safety of that HBCU with signs that said, “DEI should be illegal” and “deport all illegals now.” They called themselves the “Fearless Debaters,” and they claimed that this was their first stop on a tour. They argued they were exercising their First Amendment right. They were escorted off campus by security. But this demonstrates how the right has raised the ante on free speech from something that should be revered but now is being used in hateful and destructive ways.

The First Amendment is noble and is an expression of a free and open society where debate and discussion are welcomed. But freedom of speech for the political right has little to do with worthy ideas and valued discussion and debate, and it has nothing to do with advancing the dignity of the world or of the human race, but it has everything to do with advancing racist and hateful ideology under the guise of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is being used as a litmus test to distinguish between those on the right and those on the left. The right interprets freedom of speech as the right to say anything they want with all of the disrespect and hatefulness that they can. The idea that you can say anything you wish disrespectfully to anyone you want is what the political right means by freedom of speech. They mean to offer the most demeaning, degrading, insulting, and racist speech into the political and public arena. This is what they want the freedom to do, and are expressing this with a vengeance after their canonization and deification of Charles Kirk.

The political right felt restricted in its ability to speak from the 1980s until recently. During previous decades, racist speech became less acceptable in the public domain. Popular TV shows took on the idea of racist attitudes and speech and comically showed how boorish, foolish, and ill-mannered the practice and people were. All of us know how Archie Bunker, in a comedic way, exposed the subject of racism and bigotry weekly. There were other programs and popular shows that took on the theme, and racist speech was exposed for the virus that it is. It became less and less popular to express racist ideology openly.

But that was then, and this is now. We have taken giant steps backwards. When I listen to the political right, I hear the Klansmen screaming that racial mixing will create a mongrel race. What the political right wants to bring back is the speech of old along with the attitudes and racial restrictions of yesterday. The conservative Trump/MAGA political right wants to freely and publicly utter ideas and present attitudes that were exposed as wrong in the past, and it is just as wrong in the present. They want to talk about how Blacks and women are unqualified for a job. They want to talk about how every Black or Brown person in the job market represents a white person who should have had that job. They want to talk about how Black and Brown people coming into the country will soon out-populate white people unless we remove them from the country and turn them back at the borders. They want to talk about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives as a threat to qualified white people and offering less competent non-white people the job. And most of all, they want to call me the “N” word in a myriad of free speech ways.

It has been argued that speech is limited in its protections if it creates an imminent danger or causes serious harm. Free speech can be deemed unprotected due to its intent and the threat it causes to others. For example, it is often cited that you can yell fire in a crowded movie theater, and if there is a fire, the speech is protected. Speech, however, that is not true, such as yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater when there is no fire and causing a stampede and injury to others, is not protected because it was intended to cause harm and resulted in bodily injury. I am a preacher and not a lawyer, but the speech that is being pushed by the political MAGA/Trump white supremacist agenda is intended to cause harm and to inflict mental anguish. The words they use, the ideas disguised as simple free speech is metastasizing as a cancer and infecting the country.

It won’t be easy to pull it back. Words will lead to violence as we have been witnessing, and it will get worse unless our ideas of speech edify instead of denigrating, and engage in the weightier things of existence. Our freedom of speech should be guided by how we respect and live together as human beings, how we share and protect the bounty of creation, and the many other things of worth and dignity. Unless the political rhetoric and public discourse become serious and thoughtful, the country’s polarization will persist, and we will become weaker as a nation rather than stronger. The hatred, racist, white supremacy ideology of the present must be put back into the past and made once again boorish and obsolete. We have to find a way to retire hate and harmful speech to the dirt pits of history, where relics lie buried. Unless we can elevate Free Speech to a loftier place, we will be doomed and remain polarized and broken as a people and a country.

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Photo by yeetingtu@icloud.com Tu

The Washington Post has systematically altered its editorial policies to favor the actions and policies of Donald Trump.  Now there are additional signs that its news division is pulling punches in order to favor the president.  In an Oval Office session with the press last week, Trump was unaware that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had summoned hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Washington on short notice and without any reason for the order.  When Trump was asked about the meeting, he clearly was unaware of Hegseth’s order and tried to cover himself by saying that it was a “good idea for the secretary to be meeting with foreign general officers.”  There were no foreign officers involved in Hegseth’s order, of course, and Vice President J.D. Vance immediately jumped in to downplay the meeting, and change the subject.  The Post ignored Trump’s ignorance.

The same day, the Post, in two op-eds, gave false credit to Trump for standing up to President Vladimir Putin on Russia’s war with Ukraine.  Marc Thiessen, a right-wing polemicist, concluded that Putin “will regret treating Trump with such contempt,” and said that “Trump won’t back down in the face of Putin’s escalation.”  Thiessen ignored the fact that Trump and Vance had sandbagged Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House in February, and that Trump ever since has been washing his hands of the war that he promised to end in 24 hours.  More ominously, he ignored the fact that Trump’s wavering and waffling has enabled Putin to escalate his genocidal actions in Ukraine and threaten members of NATO with provocative overflights.

David Ignatius, a long-time apologist for the U.S. military and intelligence communities, credits Trump’s so-called tougher talk with giving Putin a “red line” in the war.  It’s absurd to believe that Trump has issued red lines in Ukraine or in Gaza for that matter.  Trump’s impulsive outbursts and escalating rhetoric can’t be seen as part of a new strategic path or even an indication of Trump’s future actions.  One thing is clear: every Trump threat and warning has led Putin to intensify military attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and to indulged in more threatening actions in Europe.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has similarly exploited Trump’s bluster and, as a result, thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed or starved to death.

Trump further confuses the issue by crediting President John F. Kennedy with issuing a red line of his own in the Cuban missile crisis by imposing a quarantine in 1962 to stop future Soviet military deliveries.  In actual fact, Kennedy altered the quarantine to give more time for Nikita Khrushchev to retreat and then secretly promised to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, which was part of the secret diplomacy that ended the confrontation.  Diplomacy was the key to ending the Cuban missile crisis.

As a result of the editorial interference and even censorship of some of its best writers, the Post’s leading journalists are packing their bags (and their Pulitzer Prizes) and heading to more open journalistic enterprises.  Ever since the owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, killed an editorial in 2024 that endorsed Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, the paper has lost its leading luminaries to rival publications and media outlets.  A former executive editor of the P,ost, Marty Baron, wrote recently that Bezos was :basically fearful” of President Trump.  As a result of Bezos’ actions, hundreds of thousands of subscriptions to the Post have been cancelled.

E. J. Dionne, one of the nation’s best columnists, is now writing for the New York Times.  Ruth Marcus, a leading columnist on judicial matters, is writing for the New Yorker magazine.  Marcus left the post after Bezos killed one of her columns, which immediately ran in the New Yorker.  Carol Leonnig, a leading investigative reporter, has joined the investigative staff of MSNBC.  All three of them had won Pulitzers or were finalists in Pulitzer competitions.  Jennifer Rubin, a Post columnist for 15 years, was one of the first to leave.

The major beneficiaries of these departures have been the Post’s leading rivals, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and MSNBC.  Jonathan Capehart, another Pulitzer Prize winner, is currently a TV commentator at MSNBC.  Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize cartoonist, left after several of her works were rejected.  David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, resigned to protest the change in the editorial direction of the paper under Bezos and the publisher, Will Lewis.  Other luminaries took buyouts to get away from Bezos’ authoritarian dictates, including veteran political reporter Dan Balz as well as excellent reporters such as Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, who joined The Atlantic.

It is particularly disconcerting that the mainstream media, which initially swallowed Washington’s lies about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for decades before seeing the truth, is now pulling its punches on Trump’s policies in Ukraine and Gaza.  And now Hegseth has moved to limit journalists reporting from the Pentagon.  Hegseth’s new rules would restrict the reporting of unauthorized material, which would conflict with Supreme Court rulings in years gone by that limited “prior restraints on publication.”  This would represent a direct attack on the First Amendment, which was not tolerated by the Court in the wake of the Pentagon Papers.  Of course, Trump’s 6-3 majority on the court doesn’t provide any protections for the separation of powers or constitutional authority.

Authoritarian leaders such as Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban, and Erdogan  have moved quickly to stifle the press, and the media have been slow to retaliate.  The Times’ Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens still believe that “Trump will not retreat.” Meanwhile, there is no better way to stifle democracy than to engage in press censorship, which the Founding Fathers certainly understood 250 years ago.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Historically, the most terrible things war, genocide, and slavery have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

– Howard Zinn

The irony is unbearable. Trump has saturated public life in lies, turned immigrants and Black citizens into targets of contempt, and made corruption and violence the grammar of governance. He pledges loyalty to dictators, surrounds himself with sycophants and thugs, and uses state power to abduct foreign students, persecute immigrants, and declare war on the so-called left, grotesquely blaming them for Charlie Kirk’s death, even before a suspect was arrested. What should be a moment of grief over Charlie Kirk’s death has been twisted into a weaponized spectacle, with Trump and his allies rushing to frame the assassination as proof of leftist extremism.

As Jeffrey St. Clair observed, “Leaders of the Right didn’t waste much time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to ‘thoughts and prayers’ over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified or a motive uncovered, they blamed the ‘violent rhetoric’ of the Left for Kirk’s death.” This is not mourning, it is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: accuse first, investigate never, weaponize tragedy to consolidate power.

In this poisonous narrative, the real “enemies within” are not the racists, insurrectionists, corrupt corporations, and right-wing extremists who stormed the Capitol, but the critics of authoritarian power as well as groups designated as “other.” Against them, Trump and his allies wage war on the First Amendment, turning freedom of speech from a cornerstone of democracy into its target. In their framing, freedom of speech is recast not as a bulwark of democracy but as its enemy. 

From comedians and journalists to students, educators, and independent groups, every dissenting voice is branded a conspirator in imagined crimes–their real offense nothing more than speaking against cruelty when silence was demanded. Or committing the crime of not being loyal enough to Donald Trump. As Hannah Arendt once warned, under totalitarianism thinking itself becomes dangerous. Authoritarianism in its many forms arises in part from the failure to think—a prescient warning in the age of manufactured ignorance. The normalization of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and moral blindness in the age of Trump is foundational to creating fascist subjects who cannot tell right from wrong, truth from lies, or justice from evil.

 This warning is even more urgent today, for there is a horrifying ignorance in Trump that unleashes predatory passions, stretching from his embrace of war criminals and historical amnesia to the fatal strikes he ordered on three alleged drug-smuggling vessels. For Trump, the legality of such acts is irrelevant.  Violence coupled with criminalizing dissent is central to the logic of annihilation at the core of fascist politics.

This is fascism’s signature maneuver. Hitler did it in 1933 after the Reichstag fire, blaming communists and invoking emergency powers to suspend civil liberties. Mussolini did it in 1925 after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, turning a moment of crisis into a justification for outlawing opposition and silencing presses.  Orbán has perfected the tactic in Hungary, scapegoating “Soros-funded leftists” to dismantle universities, criminalize protest, and eviscerate the press.

Trump is no exception. He exploits Kirk’s death not to grieve but to consolidate power. His message is blunt: dissent is violence, criticism is terrorism, disloyalty is a crime, and free speech itself is a threat to Trump’s ideological panopticon. The vicious amplification of this line of toxic thinking is evident in Elon Musk declaring “The Left is the party of murder,” and Trump’s consigliere Laura Loomer demanding the state “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization…The Left is a national security threat.” It reaches hysterical heights in the anti-communist rhetoric of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who has likened the left to a “vast domestic terrorist network,” which he vowed to uproot and dismantle. The rhetoric is chilling not only for its cruelty but for its naked embrace of repression and the threat of violence as policy.

The consequences of Trump’s assault on dissent flare like a blazing neon sign in Times Square, impossible to ignore. Under his lawless reign, even satire is recast as treason, branded a ‘hate crime,’ as though laughter itself had become treason. Academic institutions that keep alive the memory of history and the struggles for freedom are stalked with mob-like threats, extortion masquerading as patriotism, intimidation parading as loyalty.  Canadian citizens are being threatened with visa revocation simply for making what Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, and others defined as critical comments about Kirk’s death. This sends a chilling message: Trump’s authoritarian reach now crosses borders, extending its silencing power beyond U.S. soil. In this twisted logic, simply making a critical remark about Kirk is branded as a ‘celebration’– a perverse distortion far removed from reality. Kirk’s death should be mourned, but that is distinct from condemning his far-right ideological beliefs.

These acts of silencing are never isolated. They are instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence. Censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of cruelty converge to normalize repression as both necessary and inevitable. Corporations and universities bow in fear and greed, sacrificing every shred of public responsibility to feed an unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this surrender more shameful than in higher education, where universities crush dissent and betray their own students by handing over the names of those protesting genocide to the Trump administration. tragically repeating the cowardice of fascist-era campuses. Even worse, Ken Klippenstein reports that “the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and are considering compiling a watchlist of Trans people. 

It is a chilling echo of fascist-era complicities, a moral collapse disguised as institutional neutrality. The echo is haunting and has given rise to a new McCarthyism of campus informants, a reprise of the shameful complicities of fascist-era universities. As journalist David French argued on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes show, the current attacks on free speech and dissidents critical of Trump are worse than McCarthyism, because it is “larger and broader in scope. It is more aggressive. It stretches across all  aspects of American society.” This is not merely an institutional failure but a moral collapse, a repudiation of knowledge, conscience, and the very democratic commitments that should define the purpose of the academy. What we are witnessing is McCarthyism reborn with a vengeance–surveillance, informants, blacklists.  Higher education has long unsettled the right, especially since the democratizing struggles of the sixties. Today that fear has hardened into something darker: not merely efforts to weaken its critical role, but the imposition of pedagogical tyranny that turns universities into laboratories of indoctrination.

Trump, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, and their cohort of democracy-haters now threaten to strip dissenting Americans of their passports, revoke citizenship, and criminalize free speech. They howl in outrage at being compared to fascists, even as their actions mirror the same grim playbook: militarizing society, crushing dissent, concentrating power in the hands of a cult leader, and reanimating the legacy of white supremacy and racial cleansing.

Trump hails Netanyahu, a war criminal, as a war hero. With grotesque irony, he denounces the left as the true perpetrators of violence. At home, his vindictiveness is just as corrosive: boasting of pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. This petty act of vengeance amounts to his own assault on the First Amendment and is a chilling reminder of how fragile free speech becomes under authoritarian whim. Yet no alarm is sounded when Fox News host Brian Kilmeade casually suggests exterminating the homeless through “involuntary lethal injections.” Nor does outrage rise in the Trump administration, or much of the mainstream press, over the United States’ complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, where, as the Quds News Network reports, “At least 19,424 children have been killed in Israeli attacks over 700 days of genocide in Gaza, the equivalent of one child every 52 minutes. Among the victims are 1,000 infants under the age of one.” Silence here is not neutrality; it is complicity in barbarism.

When the conduct of comedians is criminalized, it is not simply a matter of taste, decorum, or even misplaced moral outrage, it is a direct assault on the principle of free speech. Comedy has always served as a space where hypocrisy is unmasked, abuses of power are ridiculed, and the absurdities of authoritarian politics are laid bare. In fact, when Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000, one of the early targets of his cultural crackdown was the satirical television show “Kukly” (Куклы, meaning dolls), a puppet show produced by the independent channel NTV. Apparently being called the little Tsar puppet was too much for him to tolerate. This ruthless act of censorship was widely seen as a watershed moment in Putin’s consolidation of power. Of course, the real issue here is that to police or punish comedians for doing what they do is to signal that the state now seeks to control even the spaces of laughter and irony.

This criminalization is more than censorship; it is a canary in the coal mine for gauging the advance of fascism. When jokes are reclassified as crimes, the warning could not be clearer: what begins with comedians will not end with them. It marks the testing of boundaries, the normalization of repression, and the silencing of one of the oldest and most effective forms of dissent. The move reveals the fragility of regimes that cannot tolerate critique, no matter how playful or irreverent, and it signifies a broader project to narrow public space until only official voices remain.

In this sense, the attack on comedy should not be dismissed as a trivial or secondary issue. It is a symbolic and practical escalation of authoritarian politics, one that exposes the contempt fascist movements hold for humor, irony, and dissenting speech. If laughter is made a crime, then resistance itself is already under indictment. Repressing dissent has a long history in the U.S extending from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the domestic repression that followed Bush’s war on terrorism. Today’s attacks on dissent are more widespread, damaging, and unchecked than much of what we have seen in the past. To borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton, Trump and his MAGA stooges are drunk “on fantasies of omnipotence” and revel in acts of violence, destruction, and the exercise of boundless state power.

The parallels with fascist history could not be more ominous. The Reichstag fire decree suspended civil liberties and imprisoned communists; today, Trump declares dissent worthy of censorship and if Pam Bondi is to be taken at face value will be labeled as hate speech and subject to state repression. Benito Mussolini used  Giacomo Matteotti’s assassination to further consolidate his own power; today, Trump uses Kirk’s death to silence students, educators, and journalists. Orbán dismantled Hungary’s free press and universities by conjuring enemies; today, Trump and Miller invoke “the radical left” as an existential threat. 

Violence in America’s militarized streets now fuses with what John Ganz calls a “sanctimonious hue and cry … over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder [and] the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.” Fear has become the regime’s preferred weapon, wielded alongside a politics of erasure, historical amnesia, and ruthless denial.

Jeffrey St. Clair noted with grim precision that Kirk’s killing is “awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets”, but the hypocrisy lies in Trump’s silence after earlier acts of MAGA violence: “When two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch.” Violence committed by the Right elicits no outrage, but a single death weaponized against the Left becomes the justification for a war on dissent. As St. Clair recounts, the ledger of right-wing violence between 2018 and 2025 reads like a requiem: the assault on CDC headquarters, the murder of Officer David Rose, the plot to seize Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the massacre of 23 souls in an El Paso Walmart, and the slaughter of 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Every act carried the rhythm of cruelty; every atrocity struck like a warning written in fire and blood.

In spite of the nefarious claims by Trump, Miller, Bondi, and other officials that the left bears responsibility for Charlie Kirk’s death, the facts tell a different story. NBC News reports that “the federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down.” The Trump regime refuses to acknowledge this, erasing evidence and fabricating a narrative designed to demonize its critics. This distortion follows a familiar historical pattern, yet what the Trump administration refuses to admit and desperately hide is that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “since 2002, right-wing ideologies have fueled more than 70% of all extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in the United States.”

This is not simply denial but calculated deceit. By inverting reality, blaming dissenters for the violence overwhelmingly fueled by their own ideological allies, the Trump administration wages war on truth itself, weaponizing lies to justify repression. This is the oldest tool of authoritarianism; a script lifted from the fascist playbook in which regimes fabricate internal enemies to mask their own violence.

This is the machinery of fascism: scapegoating, historical amnesia, and the fabrication of a “threat within” to mobilize fear and erase accountability. To remain silent in the face of such lies is to allow history’s darkest patterns to repeat. The ominous rattling of boxcars is no longer mere metaphor; it is rehearsal. The same trains that once ferried enemies of the state, Jews, communists, Roma, and others- to concentration camps echo in today’s discourse of surveillance, detention, and deportation. These echoes abroad make the danger at home impossible to ignore. The first targets are always the vulnerable, immigrants, refugees, students, and the homeless. But the machinery of repression, once primed, sweeps wider. What begins at the margins always moves to the center.

First the masked thugs of state-sponsored terror descended on immigrants, then on student protesters; they occupied neighborhoods, turned cities into militarized staging grounds, and normalized violence as the language of lawless rule. Now the machinery of repression is tightening its grip, moving ever closer to ordinary citizens. A shadow from an authoritarian past has fallen across the republic, and unless it is confronted, the future will echo the grim theaters of repression already unfolding in Hungary, India, and Argentina. 

In all these countries including the United States, leaders of the new fascism speak with vomit in their mouths and blood on their hands. They share a language that Toni Morrison calls “a dead language” It is an “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence;” Trump and his minions traffic in a repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. It offers mass spectacles, a moral somnambulance, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment.

 In the current historical moment ripe with a politics wedded to revenge, systemic racism, and the building of a police state, language is weaponized, functioning as a powerful force for manufactured ignorance. The Trump administration turns grief into a rallying cry for repression. The radical imagination is now doused in conspiracy theories and civic ignorance. A hollow politics of cruelty now finds its match in the ruthlessness of state terrorism. At home, Trump and his political hacks imagine themselves as victims while they spread violence, misery, cruelty, and moral decay both at home and abroad. The stakes could not be clearer: silence is complicity, and to speak, to talk back, and to engage in non-violent action is now the most urgent precondition for building powerful modes of collective resistance. The lights are going out fast, but there is still time to make justice, equality, and freedom the foundation for a radical democracy; resistance is no longer optional but the urgent political and moral task of our time. 

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Sue Coe, Dinner for Two, 2016. Courtesy the artist.

Signs and wonders

The Norfolk landscape is mostly flat and unforested, but it boasts the Norfolk Broads,” 120 square miles of shallow lakes, marshes and canals. Now designated a National Park, the Broads is in fact man-made, the result of centuries of peat harvesting followed by centuries of flooding.  Threatened bird and other animal species are found there, along with pleasure boaters, commercial fisherman, light industry, farming and housing. I sometimes hike there, with my wife Harriet, but find the terrain monotonous and the pleasure boats intrusive.

The rest of Norfolk is given over to agriculture, forestry, and industry as well as houses and flats for about 900,000 people. I live in the county’s biggest city, Norwich, just to the west of Broads National Park. It’s a city with about 140,000 residents. That’s small enough that I’ll sometimes bump into people I know from one place in another on the same day. For example, last week I saw Little Mike – the 6’3” son of Big Mike the greengrocer – outside the Book Hive on London Street, just a few hours after I bought from him some courgettes (zucchinis), aubergines (eggplants), swede (rutabagas), and rocket (arugula).  I’m still learning British names for common fruits and vegetables. People here really do say “toMAHto” to my “toMAYto” just like the song, but “poTAHto” is considered too posh. 

Compared to the U.S., the U.K. is severely nature-deprived. There is no such thing as a truly wild place here, David Attenborough’s recent TV series (Wild Isles) notwithstanding. I doubt there’s an acre that hasn’t at some point been harvested, grazed, mined, built over or plowed under. But contradictorily, there are probably few places in the world with more trails and footpaths and a more established tradition of “rambling” (short walks in the countryside) and “trekking” (longer hikes). This is a roundabout way of saying that Harriet and I take a lot of walks in the countryside – compromised as it is – and sometimes see real wonders: English oaks with trunks as wide as cars, kestrels hovering above marshes, and 800-year-old village churches with crenelated round towers and graveyards edged with yew trees.  Lately, we’ve made note of more unwelcome signs – farm animals that are both victims of human cruelty and instruments of the countryside’s decline.  

An upsetting ramble

A few days ago, we walked a four-mile loop from the small village of Itteringham to Mannington Hall (a moated, medieval manor) and back. There was a light rain, bracing wind and lots of mud, but we were rewarded by a footpath with a plank bridge over a tributary of the River Bure, that led into a forest with oaks, hornbeams and crab-apple.  Despite Harriet’s warning, I took a big bite out of a plump, yellow apple that had fallen to the ground – my lips and mouth puckered as if I’d sucked a dozen lemons. At one point in our ramble, we left some woods and saw on our left a recently harvested field upon which a few dozen rooks were congregated. These birds are members of the corvid family, along with crows, jackdaws, ravens, magpies and jays, and are extremely smart and gregarious. Hearing their hectoring “caw caw” was like listening to a family argument.  

Sows and farrowing arks, North Norfolk, September 2025. Photo: The author.

A little later, we saw a field of perhaps 500 acres populated with large, female pigs, each with a little, igloo-like plastic or tin hut, called a “farrowing ark.” Sows like these bear three-to five litters before being slaughtered, age about three. (A feral pig or boar can live 10-20 years.) Piglets are taken away from their mothers as soon as they are weaned at about four weeks, and sent to enclosed, “finishing” facilities to be fattened. Unsurprisingly, research indicates that sows demonstrate high levels of anxiety and stereotypical behavior (pacing back and forth, incessant chewing, etc) when their babies are removed. The little pigs are killed at five or six months, usually by carbon-dioxide poisoning. Moments after exposure to the gas, they gasp for breath and begin to thrash. CO2 forms an acid that burns the animals’ eyes, nostrils, mouths and lungs.  Escape is impossible and death comes in a few minutes. Say what you will, comparison with Nazi gas chambers is inescapable. 

A little later, we passed a herd of about a dozen tagged and castrated bulls in a small, fenced meadow. There was lots of grass, and they looked happy enough, but it’s hard to know. Cows are prey animals, so they don’t loudly complain when they are hurt or frightened.  These bulls were young – not more than about 8 months; they’ll be slaughtered in a year or so. You probably don’t want to read about how they are killed, but if you do, click here.  

We walked on, greeted some Blackfaced sheep munching short grass in a small pasture fenced in barbed wire, and then crossed a large field of sugar-beets, a major crop here. We turned left and continued alongside a hedge, dense with brambles (blackberries), stinging nettles and little else. These are eutrophic plants; they thrive on very high nutrient levels, common in landscapes polluted by animal waste and animal fertilizer. Pig (shit) slurry is sprayed on fields in Norfolk in Spring and Autumn. It’s not advisable to hike near a field that has recently been sprayed. 

Passing over a stile, we entered a pretty meadow with woods on both sides. This time of year, there are few flowers, but we saw, here and there, surprising bursts of pink on tall green stems. I thought they were orchids, but Harriet knew better.  They were Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera), an invasive plant – also eutrophic — that crowds out other flowering plants essential to native bees, butterflies, hoverflies, moths and wasps. They are seductive augurs of species loss and capitalist crisis. 

“Late capitalism”

I’m generally disinclined to use the term “late-capitalism” because it assumes we are near enough the end that we can look back and chart capitalism’s full development.  “Post-capitalism” is even worse; it suggests that the economic features that define capitalism – private ownership of essential industries, and production for the sake of profit – have been superseded. In fact, the pace of private ownership is accelerating not slowing, and nearly everything today — including the air we breathe – is priced and sold for a profit. The poor settle for cheap, polluted air while the rich can afford expensive, mountain or oceanfront air. The same is true for water and housing. 

More than 70% of water resources in the U.K. are owned by private equity firms, pension funds, and other businesses headquartered in offshore tax havens. Water was privatized in the U.K. in1989 and has been a good business ever since. As we all learned in school, demand for water is inelastic – housing too.  In the 1970s, a third of British families lived in public (“social”) housing; today, it’s half that number. A recent Labor Party initiative promises to reverse this, but the results are a long way off, if they arrive at all. Prime Minister Starmer would prefer to spend scarce money on armaments. Meanwhile, lords and ladies, financiers and lawyers, sports stars and tech entrepreneurs, live in stately manses in the Cotswolds and posh flats in Mayfair. They vacation in cliff-side villas on Lake Como or hideaways in the Maldives. They enjoy clean air and pure water and don’t care what it costs.

In the U.S., capitalism is faring no better, except for the very few. Life expectancy is falling, while poverty (especially child poverty) is rising. Economic inequality continues to accelerate and along with it anger among the majority that they lack even a crumb of what the rich possess in loaves: good homes, fulfilling work, satisfying food, affordable medical care, easeful retirement, and the expectation that their children will enjoy as good or better lives than they. 

It wasn’t always thus. In its mid 20^th Century golden age, capitalism created prosperity, though of course, more for some than others. Karl Marx foretold that success a century earlier. He was capitalism’s biggest fan as well as most clearsighted Casandra. The capitalist class, “the bourgeoisie,” he famously wrote in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto  

“during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?”

Government investment during capitalism’s heyday enabled improvements in healthcare, transportation, communication, sanitation, fashion and entertainment.  Growing profits and higher productivity led to rising living standards almost everywhere in the capitalist world.  But there were also periodic crises that foretold a different eventuality: between 1914 and 1945, two world wars and a major depression; after that, regional wars, and multiple, short recessions. Then came the oil shock and stagflation of the 1970s followed by an economy characterized by boom and bust, succeeded by the Great Recession of 2007-9, when rising real estate prices and sub-prime loans led to bank failures, a stock market collapse, and the erasure of trillions of dollars of middle- and working-class wealth. 

Today, despite the recovery of housing and stock market values, computerization, and the rise of AI, productivity is flat or in decline in most capitalist states. A glut of industrial capacity has led to de-industrialization (especially in the core capitalist nations), a rising service sector, and a mad search by the investor class for profits in financial services, crypto, precious metals, fossil fuels (despite everything), and pharmaceuticals (both licit and illicit). None of these have ensured stable growth or secured the lives of the mass of working people. Now, as in the 1930s, fascism has reared its head, like the Jack-in-the-box Mussolini in Peter Blume’s painting Eternal City (1937). Trump, just as authoritarians before him, prefers to blame liminal populations – in the present instance immigrants, trans people, and TV comedians — for the failures of the economic and social order he represents.  

Capitalism’s greatest disfunction, however, isn’t its tendency to crisis or even its ultimate incapacity to deliver the goods; it’s the system’s inevitable slide to catastrophe, the consequence of its underlying premise that nature is an inexhaustible resource. The continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and ongoing despoliation of the environment, has led to a stage in capitalism that if not “late” or ‘post” is certainly “morbid.”  Symptoms of capitalism’s ecological crisis are already apparent: communities destroyed by fire or flood; heat and smoke that make some summers in even temperate zones unbearable; and the growing insurance crisis. It isn’t the organized working-class, it turns out, that will be capitalism’s grave digger; it’s rising temperatures, depleted soils, hypoxic oceans, loss of freshwater resources, forest death, the extinction crisis, and the economic fallout from them all.  “Hothouse Earth,” which is fast approaching, won’t be a welcoming place for anybody, MAGA or mogul.  So, unless there is a sea-change is what Marx called the “metabolic interaction” between humans and the environment – that is, the achievement of a global “ecological civilization” – capitalism is scuppered. (My newest British locution.)  What will follow is anyone’s guess.

 “The omnivore’s deception”

A Norfolk ramble reveals nothing obviously apocalyptic. The landscape is distinguished by flat plains or gentle hills planted with cash crops, and populated by farrowing pigs, grazing cattle or sheep, many, many chickens, and less than a million people. There are marshes, canals, and broads as well as beaches, many of which are lovely and apparently unspoiled. But Norfolk, in its quiet way, is nevertheless what capitalist catastrophe looks like, and a lot of the reason is farm animals, or more accurately, human exploitation of farm animals.

Animal agriculture is a mainstay of the Norfolk economy. Though the county contains only about 1/70^th the U.K. population, it produces ¼ of the pigs killed and the same percentage of chickens. The largest producer of pigs and chickens in the area is Cranswick plc, directed by Adam Couch. The business turns a profit of about $200 million per year and Mr. Couch rakes in a cool $5 million per annum in salary and other payments. (Most farmer salaries in the U.K. are between $50,000 and $100,000.) Cranswick routinely violates environmental laws – about twice a week for the past seven years – but that hasn’t stopped Couch from proposing to build a mega-farm for 750,000 chickens. The proposal was recently rejected by the King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council after 12,000 written objections, along with a petition with over 40,000 names. But that refusal won’t mitigate past and ongoing harms.

Meat consumption is marginally declining in the U.K., but exports to the EU and especially Asia are increasing. The same is true elsewhere, with rates of meat eating either level or slightly declining in North America, Europe and Australia, but rising elsewhere. The environmental consequences of the industry are dire.  As the philosopher John Sanbonmatsu writes in The Omnivore’s Deception, “raising and killing animals for food is the single most ecologically destructive force on the planet.”  Animal agriculture is responsible for a global cereal deficit and malnutrition, water shortages, deforestation, land degradation (including desertification), pollution, biodiversity loss and global warming.  The next crisis of capitalism may reasonably be blamed on cows, pigs, and chickens — but it won’t really be their fault. 

Sanbonmatsu’s book diagnoses a moral as much as an ecological crisis.  Though animals suffer grievous harm by being corralled, branded, tagged, castrated, crated, shipped, prodded, stunned and killed, most people are blind to the violence. The popular image of cattle browsing lazily on the American plain, sheep grazing in British meadows, or chickens squawking in rural barnyards is grossly inaccurate and masks cruelty of an almost unimaginable scale. “Humans kill over 80,000,000,000 land animals and 3,000,000,000,000 marine animals every year,” Sonbanmatsu notes. Some 40% of the earth’s land surface is  dedicated to animal agriculture, making it “the most extensive artifact ever built by homo sapiens.” 

The ideological system supporting this apparatus is momentous in scale and insidious in effect. To diminish the natural empathy people feel for animals, and flatter our morbid appetites, the meat industry – composed of a few, giant, vertically integrated producers such as the Brazilian JBS and the American Tyson Foods — employ armies of marketers, salespeople, and lobbyists to persuade consumers that the products they sell are wholesome, healthy, fashionable, sustainable, and even kind. Supermarket retailers, the restaurant industry – especially the big chains, like McDonalds and KFC – advertisers and the media companies that profit from them, are all in on the conspiracy. So are universities with their “food science programs” funded by food and agrochemical conglomerates including Coca Cola and Bayer-Monsanto. And then there are the street-level meat pushers, including public intellectuals like Michael Pollan, Barabara Kingsolver, Temple Grandin and the late Anthony Bourdain. 

The title of Sanbonmatsu’s book is derived from Pollan’s best-selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) which argued that decades of corporatization had created a meat industry that was dangerous, unhealthy and unsustainable, and that the solution was to support small, especially local farms, that raised humanely raised and if possible, organically fed animals. Vegans be damned, he suggested, conscientious Americans could have their meat and eat it too! The book was a smash hit and generated a library of imitators who lauded small farms, supposedly happy animals, and sometimes even artisanal slaughter. Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) similarly – and sanctimoniously –lauded small scale and do-it-yourself agriculture. Grandin was lauded for devising new ways to murder ever larger numbers of animals, supposedly without them knowing its coming. Bourdain earned fame and fortune for his publicized delight in killing and eating every imaginable part of an unprecedented range of creatures.

The problem with Pollan’s solutions to the food crisis, and those of his epigones, is that they are based on falsehoods. Small farms could never come close to satisfying the current American and global appetite for meat. In addition, there is no evidence that they are any kinder to animals than factory farms. Small scale and distributed operations are generally subject to less regulatory oversight than large, concentrated ones. (In most cases, they send their animals for slaughter to the same places as the big factory farms.) Small operations are also far more resource intensive. That’s the whole point of a factory!

Organic and “humane” meat are now mostly the product of large food conglomerates eager to cater to wealthy liberals wanting to eat the same way they always have but feel virtuous about it.  Finally, locally produced food – whether animal or vegetable – is not necessarily less carbon intensive than foreign grown. Large shipments delivered great distances by ship often cost less energy per unit than small shipments sent short distances by truck. The issue is not the scale, location or operation of the industry; it’s the animal agriculture itself. There’s simply no good reason for eating meat except taste and custom – and those can quickly be changed.

Another walk in the country

The next time Harriet and I take a walk in the Norfolk countryside, we are going to conduct a thought experiment: Suppose the Norfolk County Council, supported by a new, Green Party majority in Westminster (led by eco-Populist Prime Minister Zack Polanski), undertook a program to transition farmers from animal to vegetable agriculture. Farmers were given financial incentives to make the change, towns and cities were encouraged to develop farmer’s markets, and consumers were given tax credits or vouchers to encourage more consumption of healthy grains, legumes, green vegetables, root crops, mushrooms and local as well as imported fruits. 

And suppose there was also an initiative to reforest or re-wild the enormous amount of land that was freed up by the transition from growing feed for animals to food for people. Beyond that, imagine native grazing animals and predators – long extirpated in the U.K. – brought back to Norfolk to help restore ecological balance. Additionally, there’s an effort to remediate polluted lakes and streams and create conditions for the revival of threatened fish, amphibians and crustaceans. 

Imagine that invasive plants in moors, grasslands and wetlands are removed by legions of people – young and old – many from blighted cities and towns. (They are hired at good wages and taught lessons in botany, horticulture and ecology.) Native plants are re-established to foster a diverse and growing population of bees, wasps, butterflies, dragonflies and other insects. Birds long since absent from the British Isles, or very rare, such as the Golden Eagle and Dalmatian Pelican are reintroduced, along with endangered mammals such as the pine marten, red squirrel, water vole and Scottish wildcat.

As Harriet and I cross a field littered with kernels of grain left from a recent harvest, we imagine seeing, among the dozens of browsing rooks, some wary harvest mice, voles and hedgehogs. Circling above are bearded vultures and in the distance, a marsh harrier. Re-entering the woods, we cross a fresh, clean stream and pass into a wet, flowery meadow with cowslips, cornflowers, oxeye daisies, and marsh marigolds – not a Himalayan balsam in sight. Continuing on the well-marked trail, we see on our left, a forest edged with young oaks, birches and hornbeams, along with a few mature crab apple trees laden with ripe yellow orbs. I approach one tree, not this time, to taste the sour fruit, but just admire its abundance. To our right, is a 500-acre field with hundreds of newly planted trees – mostly wild privet, common beech and field elm.  Interspersed among them are soft-field ferns, lily of the valley, wild garlic, foxglove and meadow cranesbill. But prominent among all this bounty – because it is human made – is a bronze marker, about four-foot tall by three-feet wide, planted upright in the ground. It resembles in size and shape the tombstones we saw in the churchyard we passed, the one bordered with yew trees.  On its surface is the profile effigy of a sow with distended teats and below it, the following words:

“On this field, circa 2000-2025, some 300,000 piglets were born of 30,000 sows. All were killed to slake human appetites and gratify human hubris. What remains of them are only the faint echoes of their squeals and outcries. If you stand here quietly and close your eyes, you may hear them.” 

We shut our eyes and do.

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Photograph Source: CiDiBi – CC BY-SA 4.0

While starvation profoundly affects individuals across all age groups, this essay focuses specifically on Palestinian children to illuminate how deliberate starvation strategies are designed to compromise the futurity of the Palestinian nation by systematically destroying its youngest generation. Beyond the immediate devastation, Palestinian children’s physical health, mental well-being, and emotional development are being deliberately compromised through weaponized hunger. This analysis examines how starvation functions not merely as a byproduct of armed aggression, but as a calculated tool of necropolitical warfare aimed at foreclosing Palestinian futures (Mbembe, 2003)—a process enabled by the global racial hierarchies established through coloniality (Quijano, 2000).

Theoretical Framework: Necropolitics and the Politics of Unchilding

The genocide and the systematic starvation of Palestinian children must be understood as a manifestation of the enduring coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), which establishes a global racial hierarchy that constructs non-European lives as expendable, and as a direct application of Achille Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics: the sovereign power to decide who may live and who must die. This necropolitical power is exercised upon a population already prefigured as inferior and killable within Quijano’s colonial hierarchy. Applied to Palestine, this sovereign power operates through the calculated weaponization of basic needs against developing minds and bodies. Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s (2019) concept of unchilding provides a complementary analytical lens, exposing “the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself” (p. 122). Together, these frameworks reveal how hunger functions as a deliberate necropolitical tool, operating within and sustained by a global structure of coloniality that naturalizes Palestinian suffering.

The complete siege imposed after October 2023 intensified pre-existing conditions catastrophically. By early 2024, a UN-backed initiative classified the entire population of Gaza at risk of famine (IPC, 2024). The World Health Organization reported that acute malnutrition among children under two in northern Gaza soared from less than 1% before the escalation of the genocide to over 15% by February 2024 (WHO, 2024).  Despite all these warnings, no serious action was taken.  On August, 22, 2025, according to a new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, “more than half a million people in Gaza are trapped in famine, marked by widespread starvation, destitution, and preventable deaths. Famine conditions are projected to spread from Gaza Governorate to Deir Al Balah and Khan Younis Governorates in the coming weeks.” (WHO, 2025)

Physical and Biological Impacts: The Neurochemistry of Necropolitical Violence

Severe malnutrition constitutes a systematic, biological dismantling of the developing brain, directly serving the necropolitical objective of foreclosing future potential. This process operates through a well-understood neurochemical cascade. Chronic hunger and the pervasive terror of bombardment trigger a constant state of fight or flight,  leading to persistently elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormonal deluge is acutely toxic to the hippocampus, a brain region fundamental for memory consolidation, learning, and emotional regulation (Carrion et al., 2007). Research demonstrates that in children, this exposure to extreme stress and cortisol correlates with measurable reductions in hippocampal volume—a physical shrinking of the brain’s architecture essential for forming the building blocks of education and stable mental health (Carrion et al., 2007). This is not a metaphorical assault but a literal, biological one: necropolitics operating through neurochemistry, where sovereign power dictates not just death, but a degraded form of life inscribed in the very matter of the brain.

The damage extends beyond isolated structures. Sustained high cortisol disrupts the healthy development of neural networks, effectively rewiring  the brain for survival at the expense of growth. The brain prioritizes hyper-vigilance—constant scanning for threat—over the development of circuits dedicated to learning, memory, and higher-order cognition (Blankenship et al., 2019). Blankenship et al. (2019) found that cortisol reactivity in preschoolers predicted altered functional connectivity in the hippocampus years later, demonstrating how early trauma embeds itself in the brain’s long-term communication pathways. For a child in Gaza, this neurobiological reality translates to a crippled capacity to concentrate in a classroom (if one exists), to form stable memories of lessons, or to regulate the overwhelming fear and anger that are natural responses to relentless trauma. The weaponization of hunger thus achieves a key necropolitical aim: it biologically engineers a population whose cognitive resources are so depleted by the demands of survival that the possibility of prosperity and growth is systematically erased.

Cognitive Devastation and Prefrontal Cortex Compromise

The cognitive impacts of this neurobiological assault are severe, measurable, and tragically persistent. The landmark Barbados Nutrition Study provides a decades-long view of this devastation. It tracked infants who suffered severe malnutrition but then received nutritional recovery and adequate healthcare in childhood. Despite this intervention, these individuals showed profound and persistent cognitive deficits into midlife, including significantly poorer IQ, attention, and executive function compared to matched controls (Waber et al., 2014). This finding is critical: even if the bombs stop and food eventually arrives, the cognitive damage inflicted during critical developmental windows is largely permanent. The study suggests that early malnutrition can cost a child a standard deviation in IQ—approximately 10-15 points—a loss that severely limits educational attainment and future economic potential.

Neuroimaging reveals the structural basis of this compromise. The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center responsible for complex decision-making, impulse control, and future planning, is particularly vulnerable to early adversity. Studies show that severe stress and malnutrition are associated with reduced prefrontal cortex volume and weakened connectivity to other brain regions (Hanson et al., 2013). This is the neuroarchitecture of lost potential. The concept of toxic stress explains this process: the unrelenting, uncontrollable activation of the stress response without the buffering protection of supportive relationships literally disrupts the development of neural circuits, weakening the connections essential for reasoning, problem-solving, and self-regulation (Center on the Developing Child, 2010). A child affected in this way doesn’t merely struggle in school; they may lack the cognitive capacity to plan, control impulses, or think flexibly—skills absolutely necessary to rebuild a society, engage in complex professions, or prosper. The necropolitical calculation is thus horrifyingly efficient: starve a child, and you don’t just hunger them for a day; you starve their intellect and their capacity for a fulfilling future.

Intergenerational Biological Inheritance: Weaponizing Time

Perhaps the most insidious dimension of necropolitical starvation is its capacity to weaponize time itself, ensuring that trauma echoes across generations through the science of epigenetics. This is not merely a social inheritance of poverty but a biological transmission of vulnerability. Research on historical famines provides stark evidence. Individuals conceived during the peak of the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944–45 had a significantly higher risk of developing schizophrenia and other affective disorders in adulthood (Susser & Lin, 1992). This suggests that extreme nutritional deprivation in utero can leave a molecular fingerprint on the genome, altering how genes are expressed without changing the DNA sequence itself. Later studies confirmed that prenatal famine exposure was associated with differential DNA methylation—an epigenetic mark that can silence or activate genes—six decades later (Heijmans et al., 2008). These altered genes are often involved in stress regulation, metabolic processes, and brain development.

This epigenetic regulation illustrates how necropolitics can operate on a devastating temporal delay. The starvation of a pregnant mother today can alter the neurodevelopmental trajectory of her unborn child, predisposing them to mental illness and cognitive deficits that may not manifest until they reach adulthood themselves. This represents the ultimate foreclosure of futurity: an assault that writes its violence into the biological inheritance of the next generation, ensuring that even children not yet born will bear the scars of today’s siege. Furthermore, the current conditions in Gaza create a resurgence of acute deficiency diseases that induce immediate psychosis, demonstrating the direct biochemical assault on sanity. Pellagra, caused by severe niacin deficiency, can present with dementia and psychotic features like delusional parasitosis, which is reversible with treatment (Prakash et al., 2008). In Gaza, where families burn garbage to cook and lack access to diverse foods, such cases are emerging. This represents necropolitics operating through the most fundamental biochemical means: by depriving the brain of the basic components needed for neurotransmission, it induces a state of madness, thereby completing the cycle of destroying both the body and the mind.

Psychological and Emotional Devastation: The Mental Architecture of Unchilding

The psychological impacts of the armed aggression and genocide reveal unchilding’s systematic dismantling of childhood, a process compounded by the neurobiological effects of starvation. (Shalhoub Kevorkian, 2019) Even before the October 2023 escalation, the mental health of Gaza’s children was in a state of crisis due to the prolonged blockade, with a 2022 report finding that 80% of children reported emotional distress (Save the Children, 2022; GCMHP, 2025 and 2025). The Gaza genocide has intensified this baseline of trauma into what aid organizations have termed complete psychological destruction (Save the Children, 2024), a state characterized by severe anxiety, sleep loss, and pervasive developmental regression.  (GCMHP, 2025 and 2025) This mental health catastrophe is not merely a response to violence but is biologically intensified by malnutrition. Scientific studies directly link early nutritional deprivation to later mental health disorders; for instance, Galler et al. (2010) found that children who suffered moderate-to-severe malnutrition in infancy showed markedly higher rates of depressive symptoms and anxiety by adolescence. In war zones, these effects are severely compounded. A meta-analysis by Charlson et al. (2021) confirms alarmingly high rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression in children exposed to conflict, illustrating how the necropolitical weaponization of hunger and siege synergistically attacks both the body and the mind to foreclose a viable future.

Social and Familial Breakdown: Corrupting the Sites of Resistance

The necropolitical strategy extends beyond physical starvation to systematically corrode family and community structures—the very fabric of social resilience that has historically allowed Palestinian society to endure. This process is vividly exemplified in the perversion of humanitarian relief. Aid distribution points, which should be zones of safety, have instead been transformed into sites of extreme violence and humiliation. There have been numerous documented instances of Israeli forces opening fire on crowds desperately awaiting food, turning the struggle for sustenance into a death zone. In one such attack on February 29, 2024, over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded while seeking aid at the al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, an event witnesses described as a massacre of people who posed no threat (OHCHR, 2024; MSF, 2024). The organization of aid delivery itself often functions as a tool of degradation. There are widespread reports of convoys being subject to lengthy, arbitrary delays at checkpoints, and of soldiers occasionally throwing food parcels from trucks onto the ground, forcing starving civilians to scramble in the dirt for scraps—a calculated tactic designed to compound physical deprivation with profound psychological humiliation and to obliterate the societal values of generosity (karam) and compassion (takaful) that are central to Palestinian culture (Al Jazeera, 2024). This forced atomization, where families must fight for every morsel, severs the bonds of communal solidarity and reduces social relations to a desperate competition for survival.

Within this context, the family unit, the primary site of cultural preservation and resistance, becomes a source of additional trauma. When caregivers cannot fulfill their most sacred duty—to feed and protect their children—the fundamental trust that underpins the parent-child relationship is shattered. This erosion of the caregiver’s role is a core goal of unchilding (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), as it ensures that the home, the last refuge of safety, is compromised. Parents report unbearable feelings of guilt, shame, and powerlessness, which can manifest as withdrawal or anger, further traumatizing children who rely on them for emotional regulation and security (Save the Children, 2024 and Abu Jamei, 2025). For the child, this parental failure—though entirely imposed by external forces—is internalized as a profound betrayal of their world’s basic order. This experience is a direct pathway to debilitating mental health conditions. It fosters learned helplessness—a psychological state where one learns to believe they have no control over their situation—and exacerbates the effects of toxic stress, which disrupts brain architecture and can lead to lifelong impairments in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health (Center on the Developing Child, 2010). The child is thus wounded twice: first by the hunger itself, and second by the destruction of the protective relationships that are essential for healing from such trauma.

This systematic degradation of aid distribution represents a profound assault on the foundational values that have historically sustained Palestinian communities through decades of oppression. The traditional Arab and Palestinian ethics of karam (generosity), neighborly love, and collective solidarity (takaful) have long served as pillars of resistance, enabling communities to endure extreme hardship through mutual support and shared resources. By forcing starving individuals to undertake grueling journeys—often walking miles on foot—to compete for meager rations, the current aid distribution system deliberately corrodes these communal bonds. Where families once shared their last morsel with neighbors, they are now compelled to hoard whatever they can secure, prioritizing immediate family survival over the broader community welfare that has traditionally defined Palestinian social organization. This transformation is captured in the words of one Gaza resident who described the moral devastation: Now we see martyrs on the side of the street and we just keep walking to get the food to save our souls (Rombout, private conversation, September 10, 2025). This statement reveals not merely individual trauma, but the systematic destruction of the moral economy that has enabled Palestinian society to maintain its coherence and humanity under siege. The necropolitical strategy thus operates not only through physical starvation but through the deliberate erosion of the social and ethical infrastructure that has historically enabled collective resistance and survival.

Conclusion: Dismantling the Necropolitical Regime

The weaponization of hunger against Palestinian children exists within a broader global architecture of necropolitical violence that simultaneously manifests in Sudan, where 24.6 million people-half the population-face acute food insecurity, with famine confirmed in at least five areas and projected to expand to five additional areas between December 2024 and May 2025 (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 2024; United Nations News, 2024). The Sudan Doctors Union estimated in January 2025 that 522,000 children have already died, while over 700,000 children have faced acute levels of malnutrition since the conflict began (Wikipedia, 2024). This parallel crisis illuminates how necropolitical starvation operates as a global technology of racialized violence, enabled by the same colonial hierarchies that render Palestinian and Sudanese lives expendable within Quijano’s framework of coloniality of power.

The differential treatment of Palestinian and Sudanese children reveals the unconscious pre-selection mechanisms that determine which children are projected into valued futures and which are discarded as disposable others. As Katie Gentile (2023) argues in her analysis of fetal fetishism, certain bodies-particularly white, cisgender fetuses-are imbued with “magical properties required to create a more certain future in the face of increasing uncertainty,” while racialized children are systematically excluded from this protective temporal fantasy. Gentile’s concept of “dense temporalities” exposes how “temporality itself is formed through colonialism, White supremacy, and heteropatriarchal values,” creating futures that are “a temporal colonial privilege grown only on the violated and tortured backs of Blackness and Indigeneity” (Gentile, 2023, p. 56). Palestinian and Sudanese children, positioned within this racialized temporal hierarchy, are denied access to the protective futurity reserved for those deemed fully human within Wynter’s “genre of man.”

While both Palestinian and Sudanese children experience unchilding, the mechanisms operate differently within the global colonial hierarchy. Palestinian children undergo what Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) identifies as active unchilding—the systematic construction of Palestinian children as “dangerous, racialized others” who must be contained, surveilled, and controlled. This process transforms them from innocent children deserving protection into potential threats requiring elimination. Sudanese children, by contrast, experience what we might term passive unchilding—a form of necropolitical abandonment where they are rendered invisible within international consciousness, effectively placed outside the protective framework of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Their unchilding operates through systematic neglect and the suspension of international legal protections, as if they exist beyond the reach of universal human rights frameworks.

This differential treatment reveals how the coloniality of power operates through both hypervisibility and invisibility. Palestinian children are hypervisible as threats within the Israeli security apparatus and Western media discourse, justifying their systematic targeting. Sudanese children are rendered invisible, abandoned to starvation without the international mobilization that other humanitarian crises generate. The international community’s differential response—mobilizing resources for some humanitarian disasters while maintaining “deafening silence” about others-reflects the embedded colonial logic that pre-determines which children possess futures worth preserving and which may be sacrificed for geopolitical objectives.

Both crises are explicitly described as entirely man-made tragedies (International Rescue Committee, 2025; Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024), revealing how sovereign power deliberately deploys hunger as a weapon to achieve political objectives through the systematic destruction of childhood. In Sudan, as in Gaza, the targeting of children represents a calculated strategy of unchilding, where conflict parties actively obstruct humanitarian access to starving populations. The ongoing starvation operates through “senseless warfare” that includes “entire villages destroyed, civilians executed, women raped, and homes lost to shelling and airstrikes” (Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024)—a pattern that mirrors the comprehensive assault on Palestinian social structures described throughout this analysis.

While Sudan might be perceived by the international community as merely an internal conflict, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine explicitly establishes that sovereignty is not a shield behind which mass atrocities can be committed with impunity. The R2P framework, codified in paragraphs 138-139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document and reaffirmed in UN Security Council Resolution 1674 (2006), creates a clear hierarchy of responsibility: first, each state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing; second, the international community has a responsibility to assist states in fulfilling this protection; and third, when a state “manifestly fails” to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action through the UN Charter, including Chapter VII measures (United Nations, 2005; Ban Ki-moon, 2009). Sudan’s systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid and the deliberate targeting of civilians clearly constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes, triggering the international community’s responsibility to protect.

However, the coloniality of power, embedded racial hierarchies, and economic interests systematically tarnish the implementation of R2P principles. As Chandler (2004) argues, humanitarian intervention often serves as a mechanism for maintaining global hierarchies rather than genuinely protecting vulnerable populations. The selective application of R2P reveals how certain lives are deemed worthy of protection while others-particularly in the Global South-are abandoned to what Mbembe describes as necropolitical calculation. Economic interests further compromise R2P implementation, as powerful states prioritize resource extraction, arms sales, and geopolitical positioning over civilian protection (Hehir, 2012). In Sudan’s case, the international community’s “deafening silence” reflects not merely political neglect but the systematic devaluation of Sudanese lives within a global racial hierarchy that renders their suffering invisible and their deaths acceptable collateral damage in broader geopolitical games.

The global dimension of this necropolitical project becomes evident in the international community’s response—or lack thereof. As one humanitarian official observed about Sudan: “Twenty years ago, we had presidents and prime ministers engaged to stop atrocities in Darfur. There are today many times as many lives at stake – this is the world’s worst crisis — but we are met with deafening silence” (Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024). This selective attention reflects the racialized calculus of coloniality, where certain populations are systematically rendered invisible and their suffering normalized within global consciousness. The same mechanisms that allow Palestinian children to starve in Gaza enable the world to ignore what has been termed “the most extreme hunger crisis globally” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2025) in Sudan.

Both Gaza and Sudan demonstrate how necropolitical starvation transcends isolated conflicts to reveal the enduring structure of colonial violence that continues to organize global relations. The parallel timing of these crises-escalating simultaneously in 2023-2024—exposes the interconnected nature of systems that determine which children deserve to live and which may be sacrificed for geopolitical objectives. This global pattern of unchilding demands recognition that Palestinian suffering cannot be understood in isolation from the broader architecture of racialized violence that simultaneously consigns Sudanese children to death by starvation.

Reversing the necropolitical trajectory that has systematically targeted Palestinian and Sudanese childhood requires far more than humanitarian aid; it demands a fundamental dismantling of the structures of violence and domination. First, and most immediately, permanent ceasefires must be secured in both Gaza and Sudan. In Palestine, the siege must be entirely and permanently lifted, and arms transfers to the Zionist entity must be halted. In Sudan, all warring parties must cease hostilities and guarantee safe humanitarian corridors. The continuous, unimpeded flow of food, water, medicine, and fuel is the bare minimum required to stop the active destruction of children’s bodies and minds in both contexts. International law is unequivocal: the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited and constitutes a war crime. This law must be enforced, not merely lamented, regardless of whether the perpetrators are state or non-state actors.

Second, we must demand robust, transparent mechanisms to hold the perpetrators of these genocidal policies, war crimes, and crimes against humanity accountable in both Palestine and Sudan. The impunity enjoyed by those orchestrating systematic starvation has been a primary enabler of their violence. This requires supporting international legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), and advocating for national jurisdictions to exercise universal jurisdiction. For Sudan, this means pursuing accountability not only through international mechanisms but also ensuring that regional bodies like the African Union fulfill their responsibility to protect African children. Accountability is not about retribution; it is a necessary step toward justice for the victims and a critical deterrent for future violations. The architects and executors of policies of deliberate starvation and unchilding must be named and face consequences, whether they operate from Tel Aviv, Khartoum, or any other seat of power.

However, these immediate steps, while vital, are insufficient if they are not coupled with a sustained challenge to the root pathology: the coloniality of power and the embedded racial hierarchy that underpins the necropolitics of the modern sovereign state. The dehumanization of Palestinian and Sudanese lives—the calculus that their pain is an acceptable cost or that their children’s deaths are merely unfortunate casualties—is rooted in a colonial logic that constructs them as lesser, dangerous, or simply invisible within global consciousness. This hierarchy is what allows the international community to respond with complicit silence or performative condemnation while continuing to arm and fund the machinery of destruction in Palestine, and to systematically ignore the “world’s worst crisis” unfolding in Sudan.

Therefore, our most important and diligent work is to constantly expose and challenge this coloniality. It is the ideology that allows a state to frame the right to self-defense as a right to exterminate Palestinian children, and that renders Sudanese children’s mass starvation invisible to international consciousness. Ending these genocidal projects requires more than ceasefires; it requires a profound ideological shift that dismantles the racist assumptions granting some people safety and sovereignty while condemning others to systematic elimination or abandonment.

For the generation of children who have already been scarred in both Palestine and Sudan, the path to healing is long. Massive investment in trauma-informed mental health services, nutritional rehabilitation, and the rebuilding of schools and hospitals is critical, drawing on proven models of intervention (Galler & Bryce, 2012). But true healing cannot occur under the constant threat of violence—whether in the open-air prison of Gaza or the war-torn landscapes of Sudan. Ultimately, only just political solutions can truly secure their futures: for Palestinians, this means dismantling the apartheid system, ending the occupation, and guaranteeing equal rights, self-determination, and the right of return; for Sudanese children, this requires genuine democratic transition, equitable resource distribution, and an end to the extractive economic relationships that fuel conflict. Both solutions demand the fundamental principle that all children, regardless of their geographic location or racial categorization within global hierarchies, possess inherent dignity and the right to futures free from systematic violence.

This is the only way to break the necropolitical cycle that currently consigns Palestinian and Sudanese children to premature death and build a future where all children can live in safety, with dignity, and with the freedom to dream. The interconnected nature of these crises demands an interconnected response that recognizes how the colonial architecture enabling Palestinian suffering simultaneously renders Sudanese children invisible. Only by dismantling this global structure of racialized violence can we hope to protect the children who represent our collective future.

Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Dr. Sacha Rombout, founder of the  Australia-Palestine Mental Health Network, for his feedback and invaluable support, and insight as I wrote this essay. 

References

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Galler, J. R., Bryce, C. P., Waber, D., Hock, R. S., Exner, N., Eaglesfield, D., Fitzmaurice, G., & Harrison, R. (2010). Early childhood malnutrition predicts depressive symptoms at ages 11–17. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(7), 789-798. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02208.x

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An umbrella thorn silhouetted by the setting sun near Seronera Camp, Serengeti. Photo: Grahampurse, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Serengeti—whose name means “endless plains” in the Maasai language—is one of the most renowned natural landscapes in the world. Spanning northern Tanzania and extending into southwestern Kenya, this vast ecosystem is home to the largest land animal migration on Earth. Every year, a million or more wildebeest, zebras, and gazelles undertake an epic journey across these grasslands, following the seasonal rains in search of fresh pasture and water. This migration supports a diverse food web that includes predators such as lions, cheetahs, and hyenas, making the Serengeti a critical hotspot of biodiversity. UNESCO recognizes the Serengeti as one of the planet’s most impressive natural wonders, celebrating its rich ecological complexity and the spectacle of the migration.

Yet the Serengeti’s “endless plains” are no longer endless. Over the past several decades, human activities have profoundly altered the landscape. Scientific research spanning 40 years and involving teams from seven countries reveals significant habitat fragmentation due to human development and expansion. This fragmentation has disrupted migration corridors and limited the free movement of wildlife across the ecosystem.

“The activities of people have caused extreme changes to the habitat,” writesJoseph Ogutu, a statistician at the University of Hohenheim, in the Conversation. “It has significantly reduced the amount of grass and, because of farms, settlements, and fences, the landscape has become fragmented. This means animals can’t move freely to find resources or mate.” In Kenya’s Maasai Mara Reserve—the northern section of this ecosystem—wildlife populations have dropped by almost 70 percent since the late 20th century. Wildebeest migration routes to the Mara have diminished by over 70 percent, underscoring the severity of the ecological changes.

The pressures driving these changes are multifaceted and intertwined. The human population surrounding the Serengeti is growing rapidly, and Tanzania is among the countries with the highest population growth rates globally. This demographic expansion places tremendous demand on land and natural resources. Agricultural development and livestock grazing expand to meet the needs of this growing population, converting wildlands into farms and grazing plots. These land use changes, coupled with fences and settlements, disrupt traditional animal movements and reduce the availability of quality forage.

Climate change compounds these challenges. Rainfall patterns are becoming more erratic, with more prolonged and more intense droughts alternating with severe flooding events. These extremes threaten both wildlife and human livelihoods. Water sources are drying up more frequently, forcing pastoralists and wildlife alike to travel further for access to water and food. The result is increased competition and tension between people, livestock, and wildlife, as well as mounting risks to soil health and ecosystem function.

For the Maasai people, who have lived in harmony with wildlife around the Serengeti for centuries, these environmental shifts bring urgent challenges. Traditionally semi-nomadic pastoralists, Maasai communities relied on seasonal cattle movement and access to communal grazing lands to sustain their herds and their way of life. Cattle are more than livestock; they represent wealth, social status, and cultural identity. However, increasing land pressure means that less space is available for grazing, and many Maasai families are turning to farming as a supplementary or alternative livelihood. This shift represents a fundamental change in Maasai society and its deep connection to pastoralism.

At the same time, when herd sizes are enlarged to compensate for shrinking grazing areas, land degradation is exacerbated, leading to a vicious cycle of overgrazing, soil erosion, and a lower quality of forage. Women, who traditionally manage milking and child care, often have limited say in household decisions, restricting the potential for broader social and economic change. Early marriage and limited educational opportunities further challenge the empowerment of Maasai women and youth.

A Community-Led Vision for Sustainable Change

Recognizing these complex challenges, Maasai educator and conservationist Meyasi Meshilieck initiated the Maasai Women’s Dairy Program to foster a sustainable and locally driven solution. The program’s philosophy centers on balancing human welfare with the conservation of biodiversity—that is, improving livestock productivity while also reducing environmental impacts.

The core strategy of the program is to encourage Maasai families to keep smaller herds composed of improved breeds of dairy cattle that produce significantly more milk than traditional local breeds. Larger herds have long been equated with wealth and status among the Maasai, but the ecological and economic realities are shifting. Smaller, high-producing herds can generate more income and nutrition with less pressure on the land.

The implementation of this strategy requires a comprehensive approach. The program incorporates training for Maasai women in improved dairy husbandry, the production of forage, and cooperative management. Women’s involvement is essential because their control over income and resources can transform household decision-making, improve child nutrition, and promote education—especially for girls. By empowering women to manage small-scale dairy enterprises, the program also addresses the gender disparities deeply embedded in traditional social structures.

Moreover, the program emphasizes sustainable land-management practices, such as cultivating drought-tolerant forage grasses and using manure to regenerate soils. This integrated approach fosters resilience to variations in climate by improving soil health, reducing erosion, and maintaining pasture productivity even during dry spells. It also seeks to reduce conflicts over land use by promoting more efficient livestock management and minimizing encroachment on protected wildlife areas.

From Pilot Success to Broader Impact

The program began with an experiment at Saravu Farm, located near Arusha in northern Tanzania. In 2018, Meshilieck sold his family’s own indigenous cows and replaced them with an improved breed. It was a big step. He worked through challenges such as securing consistent supplies of forage and water, managing animal health, and developing marketing strategies for milk products. This initial pilot stage, based on trial and error, became the template for the training program.

A critical component of the program’s success has been ensuring the health and well-being of the dairy cows. These hybrid breeds require careful management, including access to clean water, high-quality forage, and attentive husbandry. Recognizing this, the program provides comprehensive training on the care and feeding of animals as well as the prevention of disease. Veterinary services and support are integrated to address health challenges promptly, thus helping to maintain the cows’ productivity and longevity. Although these cows demand more care than traditional breeds, the program’s emphasis on proper management ensures that the benefits of higher milk production will be sustainable for families and the environment alike.

Among the many challenges faced by the pilot phase were securing reliable water and forage during droughts, managing animal health, and establishing markets for milk products. Through collaboration with local communities and adaptation to environmental constraints, these challenges were gradually overcome. Techniques such as rainwater harvesting and the introduction of drought-resistant forage species helped to ensure the availability of feed and water. Cooperative marketing and the processing of milk extended its shelf life and increased income for farmers.

Initial training has begun to pay off and holds great promise. Participating women are getting increased earnings from milk sales, which will eventually allow them to invest in household improvements and education. Herd sizes per family should eventually substantially increase, while both income and milk production increase—a win-win scenario for families and the environment. Encouraged by these results, Saravu Farm transitioned into a training center, providing hands-on workshops for Maasai women from across the region.

Building on the pilot’s foundation, the program is now scaling up. Training has expanded to additional villages, where women are taught about animal husbandry, the cultivation of forage, and cooperative governance. New groups of women receive improved dairy cattle and access to microloans, enabling them to start their own dairy enterprises.

The program’s design incorporates continuous monitoring and adaptation, recognizing the need to balance technical feasibility with cultural acceptance. It strives to foster community ownership and collaboration among local leaders, pastoralists, conservationists, and government agencies. The aim is to create a replicable model that can be adapted and expanded throughout Tanzania and other regions facing similar pressures on pastoralist lands adjacent to protected areas.

Maasai culture is resilient and often resistant to change, so the program employs a variety of techniques to introduce new ideas and build acceptance. It begins by consulting with elders to secure their support, while also focusing on women as key change agents. Cultural elements such as song and dance are used to convey messages in ways that resonate deeply within the community, and support from local influencers helps reinforce these efforts. To broaden outreach, the program also leverages radio and social media to spread information and shape attitudes. Finally, women who have already been trained serve as mentors for new groups, creating a cycle of guidance and empowerment.

Linking Human Well-being to the Success of Conservation

Threats to the Serengeti habitat and wildlife, and the challenges facing Maasai communities, are deeply interconnected. Conservation efforts cannot succeed without simultaneously addressing the social and economic needs of the people living alongside the park. Poverty, food insecurity, and the lack of alternatives often drive unsustainable land use practices, whereas community well-being enhances the prospects for effective stewardship.

The reduction of herd sizes through improved dairy management directly alleviates overgrazing and soil degradation, thus helping to restore critical wildlife habitats. The restoration of these habitats supports the migratory species that define the Serengeti’s ecosystem, preserving the ecological processes essential to its resilience. Additionally, increased income from milk sales allows families to diversify their diets, invest in health and education, and reduce pressures to convert more wildlands into farmland.

Empowering women is a crucial multiplier in this equation. When women control resources, evidence shows that child nutrition improves, educational attainment rises, and harmful practices such as early marriage decline. These social shifts contribute to more sustainable rates of population growth and greater social stability.

The Maasai Women’s Dairy Program exemplifies how integrating social development and environmental conservation can create synergistic benefits. Rather than pitting people against wildlife, it fosters a shared future where pastoralists and the ecosystems that support them can both thrive, even amid rapid environmental change. This community-driven model offers valuable lessons for similar regions throughout the world that are facing pressures from population growth, climate change, and habitat loss—showing that sustainable livelihoods and conservation can go hand in hand to protect people, animals, and the planet.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photo by Manny Becerra

It is fairly certain that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is the most famous, or rather the most infamous, union in the United States. While one can hope the first thing that comes to mind when the Teamsters come up is trucking, it is just as likely thoughts turn to Jimmy Hoffa and his unsolved murder, Las Vegas, the Mafia, etc. Martin Scorsese made quite a bit of hay on such matters in films like Casino and The Irishman. Hoffa himself will go down as the only figure to be portrayed by both Jack Nicholson (Hoffa) and Al Pacino (The Irishman). 

If all that is firmly entrenched in popular culture, Joe Allen’s new book Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union touches on plenty more. The book features a compilation of pieces Allen wrote for various publications from 2019 to early 2025 and inside we’re reminded of the Teamsters’ undermining of Cesar Chavez’s United Fruit Workers and the union’s longtime and early support for Israel, among other things. 

Then there is the actual business of organizing and running a union. While hauling freight in trucks is probably still what the Teamsters are most known for, that largely went away when the trucking industry was deregulated in the late-1970s. The union now represents workers across the economy in sectors from warehousing to food processing (membership peaked at 2 million in 1976, now it sits at 1.4 million). For a while even the roughly 300 horse-drawn carriage drivers in Central Park who skillfully convince tourists to part with large amounts of money for 20-minute rides were under the Teamster banner. 

But the main thing now is package delivery to homes and United Parcel Service (UPS) is the largest Teamster employer in the U.S. as well as the largest unionized employer in the U.S. As Allen explains, many Teamster locals wouldn’t exist without UPS and the union as a whole would be ‘a ramshackle collection of old freight companies and local employers with little national clout.’ 

The union seems to live in endless contradiction. Back during the pandemic Bloomberg ran a story with the headline ‘Highly paid Union Workers Give UPS a Surprise Win in Delivery Wars.’ The article described how UPS was outperforming its nonunionized counterpart FedEx by meeting the delivery deadline for 95 percent of its packages, as opposed to FedEx’s 85 percent- proving again that an organized workforce gets the job done. Yet that same year NBC News reported at least 107 UPS workers in 23 states had been hospitalized since 2015 for heat illness due to lack of air conditioning in UPS trucks. Yet Teamster leadership was slow to make demands. The latest contract, agreed to in 2023, requires the company to equip its fleet with at least 28,000 new air-conditioned trucks by the time the contract expires in 2028 (that’s roughly a third of the fleet). According to new reports, few appear to have been purchased so far.

As Allen points out, the Teamsters are one of the few major unions that have membership directly elects the top offices. Yet membership turnout has long been on the decline, crashing to 15 percent in 2016 when longtime incumbent James P. Hoffa (son of the Jimmy Hoffa) was nearly defeated. This Hoffa would serve 24 years as union president. When membership voted down a proposed contract and supplements in 2018, Hoffa used an obscure clause in the Teamster Constitution originating in 1940 to declare the contract passed. 

Reform movements within the union bubble up only to fizzle out or be co-opted. In fact, the current president, Sean O’Brien, came out of the longtime Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) faction. He has spent some of his days in office hobnobbing with the likes of Trump and Josh Hawley. O’Brien even spoke at the Republican National Convention in the lead-up to the 2024 election. 

Teamsterland chronicles a period that can be described as both eventful and ultimately uneventful. Besides the election of O’Brien, there was the drama around a national strike against UPS in the summer of 2023 and the long overdue, and thus far fruitless, fight to organize Amazon. 

The last national strike took place in August 1997 under the leadership of Ron Carey. At that time 180,000 workers hit the picket lines for three weeks under the banner ‘Part Time America Won’t Work.’ Allen explains it was the most important industrial struggle in a generation and the strike was victorious. The result was a pay raise, the creation of full-time jobs from part-time positions, and the maintenance of the union pension that UPS wanted to get out of and offer its own company plan. 

However, in the aftermath of the strike Carey was forced out. Allen puts it like this: 

However, in the weeks and months that followed the strike, the combination of a witch-hunt atmosphere created by the Republican-controlled Congress and criminal investigations by President Clinton’s Department of Justice successfully ousted Ron Carey from leadership of the Teamsters, and eventually expelled him from the union. This government sponsored counter-reform coup was a big factor in bringing Hoffa to power for two decades…UPS won on the political battlefield what it couldn’t win on the picket line. The wider potential of the strike, such as organizing FedEx- a virtual twin of UPS and the natural next step in organizing the burgeoning non-union logistics industry of the 1990s, was thwarted. 

It appeared conditions were in place for a possible national strike in the summer of 2023. New leadership was in place, the previous contract had been voted down by membership, SAG-AFTRA was shutting down Hollywood while UAW was leading a successful strike against the car companies. That June, leadership announced that locals representing UPS workers would begin conducting strike votes. Yet the affair ended in a whimper as the union ended up agreeing to a contract that the Wall Street Journal described as win for the company. The contract preserved low pay for new part-time hires and according to WSJ ‘greater flexibility in work schedules and new technology.’

As for Amazon, in 2024 the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) voted to affiliate with the Teamsters. ALU, which successfully won a vote in New York City in 2022, the first successful vote in an Amazon fulfillment center, in the vote that made Christopher Smalls a national sensation, has been stuck the past couple of years. The union lost four subsequent votes at other fulfillment centers and hasn’t been able to get recognition or a contract off Amazon in New York. The affiliation with the Teamsters is meant to bring financial and organizational muscle. 

Last December the Teamsters did attempt to stage something of a five-day strike at eight Amazon locations across four states. However, though the union labeled it ‘the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history’ it had basically no effect on Amazon’s operations as only roughly six hundred workers took part. Allen points out that the letdown from the non-strike at UPS could have lingering effects to organize Amazon.

The Teamsters have managed to get affiliation cards from a majority of drivers at the DGT5 facility in Atlanta, and in Chicago’s Skokie suburb, and several in Southern California, including workers at a mega-warehouse in San Bernardino (these were the sites for the strike). Like in New York, the road to finally getting recognition or contracts from Amazon still appears long. 

In these challenging times anyone, interested in the state of the American labor movement and especially its most iconic union, should make Teamsterland required reading. 

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Photograph Source: Erin Scott – Public Domain

The Trump administration’s latest attack on the First Amendment has again raised questions about the meaning of the freedom of speech in the present-day United States. First, I happen to agree with Trump that Jimmy Kimmel is neither funny nor talented. A performer this bad could only have a show in a culture like ours. That said, this firing or dismissal—or whatever it is we’re watching right now—clearly came at the behest of the FCC chair Brendan Carr and is based purely on Kimmel’s Democratic Party politics and is therefore about as clear a violation of the First Amendment as you could have. It is not the kind of tricky hypothetical law professors might use to test their students on the requirements of the Constitution. It is not hard. 

But I would submit that the law, even as found in the First Amendment, is the wrong object of focus and inquiry. The meaning of legal terms does not spring forth from the mind of god in some perfect form, but depends on us and what we think and believe. The meaning of something like the Constitution’s First Amendment is socially constructed through constant interpretation and contestation, always in flux, never a stable metaphysical given. The proper object of attention is our normative values and the ways they show up in our culture and way of life: are we committed to the freedom of thought and expression and do we show that we are? The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are perhaps symbols of our commitment to the freedom of speech, but they aren’t the commitment itself. When it comes to political values like the freedom of expression, there is either a felt and lived normative anchor or we won’t have that value as a reality in our society. 

For as long as there has been a United States and a First Amendment, there have been widespread myths about the country’s normative commitment to free speech as a perceivable social reality. Throughout American history, citizens and others living peacefully in the U.S. have been punished, imprisoned, and even murdered by the U.S. government for no more than expressing their political thoughts and opinions. This week, Jimmy Kimmel joins a long and distinguished list that includes free speech heroes like Ezra Heywood and Eugene Debs.

Donald Trump is no different from past presidents in kind, even if he represents a new degree of lawlessness and authoritarianism. Many past presidents—indeed virtually all—have aggressively attacked the First Amendment-guaranteed freedom of speech and political expression, often during times of war or perceived crisis, when Americans felt less able to push back against new assumptions of arbitrary power. This is a longstanding and thoroughly bipartisan tradition in the United States, and media outlets and performers have always been censored by the federal government. Presidents throughout our history have deployed a broad range of tactics to suppress dissident speech and throttle the press in the name of national security and public order.

Presidents, like the rest of us, have their pet political issues and objects of annoyance, but they have all reflexively bristled at the thought of genuine freedom of speech for people who sharply criticize the policies of the United States. Our history is filled with stories of the Palmer Raids under Wilson, prosecutions under the Smith Act during the FDR and Truman regimes, the severe and violent FBI repression under J. Edgar Hoover, and the aggressive Obama-era prosecutions of whistleblowers. We have never cared about the freedom of speech in the way we have enjoyed pretending to. Well, the ruling class hasn’t anyway; the people have always fought for their right to express themselves freely and many have done so bravely in the face of sustained attacks from the state and capital. Hoover led the FBI for decades and pushed surveillance, harassment, infiltration, and violence against organizers and activists, most notoriously under the COINTELPRO program, which oversaw operations to systematically destroy the civil rights, Black Panther, and anti-war movements, among others. 

Even media darling Barack Obama’s administration became infamously hostile to the First Amendment in its unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers (for example, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou and others). President Obama used highly aggressive campaigns against journalists, leading to a severe chilling of speech and a palpably hostile climate for critics of U.S. government policy, particularly its foreign policy and its unconstitutional domestic surveillance and police statism. Debs understood that it is only challenging and controversial speech that requires protection, and he argued that if this crucial freedom means anything, then it should hold in wartime no less than in peacetime. Debs understood our country’s myths and hypocrisies better than most then or now. He noted with irony that it “is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe for the world.”

Donald Trump has always been openly hostile to the idea of free speech and expression. He has questioned the recognized constitutional right to burn the flag; he has overseen a violent crackdown on peaceful protesters, including sending the U.S. military; he has deported lawful residents and citizens for their criticisms of the government’s role in the genocide still ongoing in the Gaza Strip; he has retaliated against law firms and other organizations for their political viewpoints; he has attempted to erase the story of American history and made government funds contingent on partisan politics; he has restricted press access to his White House based on political views; and the list goes on. 

If Trump’s second term does not mark a rupture, then it can be regarded as an intensification of a longstanding policy and practice of U.S. government hostility toward free speech, targeting critics in times of perceived crisis. His regime’s attempts to silence dissent, manipulate and deeply alter historical narratives, and punish political opponents are part of a bipartisan legacy of repression. If we want freedom, we can’t leave it up to people like those who have occupied the White House.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a bilateral exchange with Israel Minister of Defense Israel Katz at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., July 18, 2025. (DoD photo by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Noel Diaz)

Israel’s war minister, Israel Katz, declared with characteristic Zionist hubris: “Gaza is burning.” His words were not a battlefield report or a measured account of military progress. They were a boast—almost celebratory—as though the incineration of a city, a gas chamber for a million human beings, were what defined Israel’s notion of military achievement. In those three words lies the distilled truth of Israel’s project since 1948: a state that has built its very identity on the destruction of Palestinian life, priding itself on the ruins of villages emptied by force and the massacres buried beneath them.

Israeli officials claim that burning Gaza will secure “victory,” just as they once said before assaulting Rafah. In 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu described the invasion of the city of Rafah as essential to achieving “total victory.” On February 10, 2024, he told This Week on ABC that “victory is within reach,” calling Rafah the “last bastion” of the Resistance. Two weeks later, in an interview with CBS, Netanyahu echoed his earlier remarks. He told Margaret Brennan that “total victory is our goal, and total victory is within reach — not months away, weeks away once we begin the operation.”

Yet, a year and a half later, and with every so-called final battle, “total victory” remains nothing more than a mirage. Netanyahu is still chasing the same phantom, shifting the goalposts from massacres to starvations, and each time, reality exposes his lies. In May 2025, he revised the definition of “total victory” to include the destruction of Gaza City, insisting: “We will achieve full victory in Gaza — total,” and claiming that “a Gaza takeover is necessary for victory.”

The scale of devastation tells the story. Gaza has been pummeled from air, sea, and land with such ferocity UN officials and residents describe it as “insane,” the scene is “nothing short of cataclysmic.” Almost half of the City’s population have been displaced, but the majority have no safe place to go.

For those who remained in the ruins under the raining Israeli bombs, escape was not an option. Families are too poor to pay for transport or even a tent. Ordered by Israel to evacuate UN designated shelters, they are enduring bombardment with no protection. “It is like escaping from death towards death, so we are not leaving,” said Um Mohammad from the Sabra neighborhood. Her words capture the bleak calculus facing Gaza’s residents: risk being entombed in rubble or on Gaza’s roads of death.

Netanyahu, beleaguered by corruption charges and flanked by Jewish nationalist ministers, has doubled down on his maximalist strategy, dismissing warnings from his own military leaders. His plan is unmistakable: prolong the war—no matter the human cost—to delay his political demise. For Netanyahu, there is nothing to lose in continuing the genocide, and everything to gain by feeding the Zionist arrogance that animates his racist government. Gaza is not a war zone; it is Netayahu’s last stand to survive Israeli politics.

The phrase, “Gaza is burning” reveals more than a military operation, it’s about an ideology. For decades, Israel has relied on fire as both weapon and metaphor: burning homes in Lydda and Deir Yassin in 1948, torching homes in the West Bank in 2025, and now reducing entire Gaza neighborhoods to dust. Each inferno is framed as a necessary act of “security,” in reality, though, it’s part of a systematic effort to erase Palestinians from the map, physically and politically.

To describe Gaza’s annihilation in terms of fire is no accident. Fire purges, fire consumes, and it leaves behind nothing to return to. Katz’s words expose that ambition with brutal clarity: not merely to defeat the Resistance, but to erase a people. The burning and razing of Palestinian villages in 1948 was no unintended consequence, it was a deliberate Zionist strategy of erasure. Today, the flames consuming Gaza follow that same logic, with the same malevolent intent.

The genocide in Gaza is eroding what remains of Israel’s moral legitimacy. The International Association of Genocide Scholars and the United Nations Commission of Inquiry have concluded, separately, that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israeli apologists cried, again, “antisemitism,” nevertheless, the weight of evidence is shifting. UN Secretary-General António Guterres described Gaza as “morally, politically, and legally intolerable.” Even the European Union, albeit too late, is considering suspension of trade privileges with Israel.

For decades, Israel leaned on Western governments to shield it from accountability. That cover is wearing thin. A state boasting that “Gaza is burning” while starving children’s ribs protrude through thin skin and bodies decompose beneath the rubble is too hideous to conceal. What was once excused as the “fog of war” now stands exposed as a clear pattern: collective punishment of civilians, cynically hiding behind the cries of “victim.”

Israel is delusional in believing that by reducing Gaza to ashes they end the resistance to occupation. History teaches otherwise: when resistance is forged in the crucible of injustice, even a catastrophe does not extinguish it; it intensifies it. The orphans will grow up, and the displaced will not forget. Unlike the Zionist’s experience, Palestinians will rise again to confront their tormenters; they will not abandon their homes to steal someone else’s land.

“Gaza is burning,” three words that will haunt the human conscience long after the embers die out. What Israel celebrates, Palestinians have endured across generations: each living its own version of al-Nakba, from the smoldering ruins of 1948, to the 1982 massacres of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, to the ruins of Gaza and the West Bank in 2025. What is truly burning is Israel’s false moral façade, and with it, Western civilization.

Netanyahu’s “total victory” is “Burning” every Palestinian life in Gaza, step by step. In the West Bank, armed mobs of Zionist Youth burn olive groves and terrorize Palestinian homes. Netanyahu does not lose by slaughtering Palestinians; he loses only if he stops fueling the flames of Zionist hate.

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Photograph Source: World Coalition Against the Death Penalty – CC BY-SA 2.0

The US government should not kill Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin. State-sponsored murder won’t stem the rising tide of political violence looming over all of us. And Utah is one of only five states in the US that allows execution by firing squad. Though rare, the prospect of the state shooting Mr. Robinson to death for the unspeakable act of doing the very same to Mr. Kirk threatens to inflame an already volatile political climate.

We, the more than 4,000 members of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty, therefore urge prosecutors to change course and no longer pursue the death penalty against Mr. Robinson. Let there be no doubt: we are profoundly distressed by the deadly attack of which the state accuses Tyler Robinson. Our hearts and prayers extend to the neshama (soul) of Charlie Kirk, Zichrono Livracha, of blessed memory. May his wife, children, and loved ones be comforted among all the mourners of the world. Many of us in L’chaim disagree with most of Mr. Kirk’s beliefs, including about the death penalty, but it should go without saying that regardless of these facts, we abhor his assassination, just as we do all killings. It is tragic that we must make that abhorrence explicit in a day and age when people are quick to assume the worst about others’ intentions, even those who have no connection to the tragedy. This pattern includes antisemitic conspiracy theories now proliferating that incriminate the Jewish community for complicity in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

A death sentence for Mr. Robinson will only increase his platform for espousing violent hatred. Killing him will not deter any would-be copycats. On the contrary, it would only embolden them, rendering him a martyr for violent extremists on any side of the aisle. This reality is just one of the reasons we oppose the death penalty in all cases, but especially for killers with any socio-political motivations. A lengthy prison sentence would hold him accountable while severely punishing him for his heinous actions.

We follow the guidance of Holocaust survivor and death penalty abolitionist Elie Wiesel, who famously said of capital punishment: “Death is not the answer.” By the end of his life, Wiesel expressed this unconditionally, clearly stating:  “With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory, I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don’t think it’s human to become an agent of the angel of death.” For members of L’chaim, this stance applies universally; there are no exceptions. It encompasses Nazi perpetrators such as Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann, the Hamas terrorists who attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, the infamous Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, the antisemitic murderers of Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the United Arab Emirates, the killer of two human beings at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, and, now, Mr. Robinson in this case.

As with any murder, we never would claim to speak for the victims’ loved ones. I have served as a hospital and community chaplain for years. I regularly counsel mourners that they should be ready to experience the whole gamut of human emotion while grieving, including rage where appropriate and even the inevitable desire for vengeance. Let no one ever judge anyone in such a position. If I ever were to lose a loved one to murder, I could very well find myself desiring—and perhaps even advocating for—the death of my loved one’s killer. A civilized society is responsible for protecting and honoring all such mourners while also upholding the most basic human rights upon which this world stands. Fundamental to these is the right to life. Partly for this reason, more than seventy percent of the world’s nations have abolished the death penalty in law and practice.

While traditional Jewish law allows for capital punishment, it does so with prodigious safeguards and caveats that render it virtually impossible to justify in the 21st century. Recall the words of some of the loftiest rabbinic voices: Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah, Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva, as found in the Talmud, Makkot 7a:

A Sanhedrin [the highest ancient Rabbinic legislative and judicial body] that affects an execution once in seven years is branded a destructive tribunal. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: once in 70 years. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say: Were we members of a Sanhedrin, no person would ever be put to death. [Thereupon] Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel remarked: they would also multiply shedders of blood in Israel!

Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel’s above retort to his peers reveals his belief in the effectiveness of deterrence. We can certainly forgive his misinformed opinion, which reflects the mindset of his time, two millennia ago. He, of course, would not have been privy to recent sociological meta-studies that have found no meaningful evidence that the use of the death penalty deters crime in any way. For this reason alone, most traditional Jewish arguments for the death penalty no longer apply.

But there is more that all Jews must realize in the wake of the Holocaust and the events of the twentieth century. Many of the members of L’chaim, including this author, are direct descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors. We know more than most that capital punishment differs entirely from the Shoah. And yet, the shadow of the Holocaust is inextricably linked to our rejecting it in all cases.

The most common form of execution that the federal government and most states employ is lethal injection. Were the state of Utah to execute Mr. Robinson today, it would quite possibly be via this method, which is a direct Nazi legacy. The Third Reich first implemented lethal injection as part of its infamous Aktion T4 protocol to kill people deemed “unworthy of life.” Dr. Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, devised that program. Utah’s infamous option of death by firing squad also inescapably evokes Nazi atrocities.  If this were not enough, across the United States, more and more jurisdictions are erecting gas chambers, including one in Arizona that usesZyklon B, the same lethal gas used in Auschwitz. Alabama and Louisiana already put their prisoners to death with nitrogen gas, with more states eager to follow their lead. Jewish arguments about the death penalty today dare not ignore these proven, direct Nazi legacies. It is a relationship that mandates us to view capital punishment as one of the worst kinds of institutionalized evils that stain the souls of the United States, Israel, or any nation that seeks to employ it. This association commands us to declare “Never Again!” to state-sponsored murder.

The day after Charlie Kirk’s slaying marked 24 years since September 11, 2001. The United States elected to invade Iraq in response to that day’s horrid terror attack, ostensibly for the sake of fictitious “weapons of mass destruction,” but in actuality, motivated by a misplaced and misguided urge for retribution. We now know that the war in Iraq did nothing to stop that cycle of killings. If only American citizens and leaders had learned a lesson from their government’s vengeful reaction. Yet, the missteps of the past continue to repeat, with potentially disastrous consequences with every passing day. Even now, in response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the political Right has declared “war“ on the entire Left, which it has blamed for his killing. Similarly, just this past week, Israel bombed Hamas negotiators in Qatar in a misplaced vengeful response to a deadly attack in Jerusalem that Hamas did not even perpetrate. However displaced, from the death penalty to the Gaza genocide, the cycle of violence and retribution does not seem to end.

Rather than perpetuating that cycle by reacting to Charlie Kirk’s recent assassination with more killing, we must redouble our efforts to put an end to it, once and for all. In the wake of the inexcusable atrocity of his death, we respond not by chanting “LaMavet”—“To the death”—but rather by intoning with mournful hearts and renewed vigor: “L’chaim—to Life!”

This originally appeared on The Jurist.

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U.S. Military Forces conduct a strike against Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists, 2 September 2025.

The Trump administration is escalating U.S. drug wars in Latin America as a cover for imperialism.

While the administration directs a military buildup in the Caribbean, killing people who it claims are drug smugglers, it is preparing to intervene in Latin American countries for the purpose of opening their markets to U.S. businesses. The administration’s priority is gaining access to Latin American resources, a main focus of its foreign policy, just as the highest-level officials have indicated.

“Increasingly, on geopolitical issue after geopolitical issue, it is access to raw material and industrial capacity that is at the core both of the decisions that we’re making and the areas that we’re prioritizing,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in June.

Drug War Imperialism

One of the major contributions of the United States to imperial history is drug war imperialism. Developed as part of the so-called “war on drugs,” which the Nixon administration began in the 1970s and the Reagan administration expanded in the 1980s, drug war imperialism has been one of the primary means by which the United States has intervened in Latin America.

During the late 1980s, the United States set the standard for drug war imperialism in Panama. After discrediting Manuel Noriegawith drug charges, officials in Washington organized a military intervention to remove the Panamanian ruler from power.

Under the direction of the George H. W. Bush administration, the U.S. military invaded Panama, captured Noriega, and brought him to the United States, where he was tried, convicted, and imprisoned on drug charges. U.S. officials framed the operation as part of the war on drugs, but their primary concern was bringing to power a friendly government that acted on behalf of U.S. interests. U.S. officials valued Panama for its location and for the Panama Canal, a critical node for U.S. trade.

In the following decades, the United States exercised other forms of drug war imperialism in Latin America. In 2000, the administration of Bill Clinton implemented Plan Colombia, a program of U.S. military support for the Colombian government. U.S. officials framed Plan Colombia as a counter-narcotics program, but their objective was to empower the Colombian military in its war against leftist revolutionaries, especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In 2007, the administration of George W. Bush pushed forward a similar program in Mexico. With the Mérida Initiative, the Bush administration empowered the Mexican government to intensify its war against drug cartels. U.S. officials saw the program as way to forge closer relations with the Mexican military and confront the country’s drug traffickers, who were making it difficult for U.S. businesses to operate in the country.

Multiple administrations faced strong criticisms over the programs, especially as drug-related violence increased in Colombia and Mexico. A Colombian truth commission estimated that 450,000 people were killed in Colombia from 1985 to 2018, with 80 percent of the deaths being civilians. There have been hundreds of thousands of drug-related deaths in Mexico, with the numbers still increasing by tens of thousands every year.

Although most U.S. officials insisted that criminal organizations in Latin America bore primary responsibility for drug-related violence, some began to question the U.S. approach. They wondered whether U.S.-backed drug wars were ignoring root causes of the drug problem, such as the U.S. demand for drugs.

“As Americans we should be ashamed of ourselves that we have done almost nothing to get our arms around drug demand,” Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said in 2017. “And we point fingers at people to the south and tell them they need to do more about drug production and drug trafficking.”

In recent years, some critics have even cast the drug wars as a failure. Decades of U.S.-backed military operations, they have noted, have brought terrible violence to Latin America while failing to stop the flow of drugs to the United States.

“Drugs have kept flowing, and Americans and Latin Americans have kept dying,” Shannon O’Neil, who chaired a congressionally-mandated drug policy commission, told Congress in 2020. “Something is not working.”

Trump’s Embrace of Drug War Imperialism

Despite the recognition in Washington that drug wars do not counter drugs, the Trump administration is using them to create a justification for military operations across Latin America.

The Trump administration laid the groundwork for an intensified version of drug war imperialism shortly after entering office. On day one, Trump issued an executive order to designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations, claiming they “present an unusual and extraordinary threat” and declaring a national emergency to deal with them. The State Department quickly followed by labelling drug cartels and other criminal organizations as terrorist organizations.

In July, Trump secretly ordered the Pentagon to start attacking drug cartels.

Earlier this month, the U.S. military began to implement Trump’s orders by launching a drone strike on a speedboat in the Caribbean that was carrying 11 people. Administration officials accused the people on board of being Venezuelan drug smugglers, but critics questioned the Trump administration’s claims and argued that its actions were illegal. Some accused the Trump administration of murder.

Trump and Rubio discredited the administration’s justification for the attack by making different claims about the destination of the speedboat. Whereas Rubio said that it was headed toward Trinidad, Trump said that it was destined for the United States. Wanting to be consistent with the president, Rubio then changed his story, claiming that the speedboat was going to the United States.

Critics have also questioned whether the administration has been acting over concerns about drugs. One of their main points has been that Venezuela’s involvement in the drug trade has been overstated.

When Rubio faced questions about the administration’s attack on the speedboat, he dismissed reports that attributed less importance to Venezuela, including those by the United Nations.

“I don’t care what the UN says,” Rubio said.

Trump displayed the same disregard when he announced on social media on Monday that he ordered another strike on a boat in the Caribbean, saying that it killed 3 people. “BE WARNED,” he wrote. “WE ARE HUNTING YOU!”

For many years, in fact, several of the highest-level officials in the Trump administration have been eager for the United States to play a more aggressive role in Latin America not for the purpose of countering drugs but with the goal of acquiring greater access to the region’s resources.

It has long been known that Trump values Venezuela because it is home to the largest known oil reserves in the world.

“That’s the country we should be going to war with,” Trump is alleged to have said in 2017, during his first year in office. “They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

Several high-level officials in the first Trump administration shared the president’s views. In 2018, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis commented that Venezuelan leaders “sit on enormous oil reserves.”

When the first Trump administration rallied Venezuelan opposition forces in 2019 in a failed attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government, several high-level officials boasted about the potential riches of Venezuelan oil, suggesting that it would be a boon to U.S. investors.

“It is a country with this incredible resource of petroleum, the greatest in the world,” then-Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams told Congress. “So I think you will find that with a change of leadership and a change of economic policy, that there will be lots of people who are ready to invest, and I think the World Bank and the IMF in particular will be ready to help start that engine.”

Since the start of his second administration, Trump has continued to think about the country’s oil, even as he has brought different people into his administration.

“You’re going to have one guy sitting there with a lot of oil under his feet,” Trump said in February, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “That’s not a good situation.”

Ulterior Motives

While the Trump administration has forged ahead with its expansion of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean, giving special attention to Venezuela, it has deployed a familiar argument. Just as past administrations have done, the Trump administration has claimed that it is going to war against drugs.

“On day one of the Trump administration, we declared an all-out war on the dealers, smugglers, traffickers, and cartels,” Trump said in July, referring to his executive order to target drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

Administration officials have supported the president’s approach. Leading the way, Rubio has repeatedly insisted on the need to take military action against drug traffickers.

“The president of the United States is going to wage war on narcoterrorist organizations,” Rubio said earlier this month.

Still, U.S. officials have gestured at ulterior motives. When Rubio has spoken about the administration’s drug wars, he has indicated that he is focused on creating conditions in Latin America that will enable U.S. businesses to operate there more effectively.

“It’s nearly impossible to attract foreign investment into a country unless you have security,” Rubio said during a recent visit to Ecuador, where he acknowledged ongoing negotiations over a trade deal and a military base.

In fact, the Trump administration has made it clear that it is focused on creating new opportunities for U.S. businesses and investors in Latin America. Concerned that Latin American countries have been growing close to China, the Trump administration has been using drugs as an excuse for a more aggressive U.S. role in the region.

What the Trump administration is doing in short, is going to war against drugs as a cover for opening Latin American markets to U.S. businesses. Turning to a familiar playbook, it is implementing drug war imperialism.

This first appeared on FPIF.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Trump has created a crisis for U.S. agriculture with his Cold War weaponization of foreign trade with China and Russia, for manufacturing as a result of his steel and aluminum tariffs, for consumer price inflation mainly from his tariffs, and for affordable housing with his tax cuts that have kept long-term interest rates high for mortgages, auto and equipment purchases, and deregulation of markets giving a free hand to monopoly pricing. 

1. Trump’s Impoverishment of U.S. Agriculture

Trump has created a perfect storm for U.S. agriculture, first in his Cold War policy that has closed off China as a soybean market against and Russia, second in his tariff policy blocking imports and thus raising prices for farm equipment and other inputs, and third in his inflationary budget deficits that are keeping interest rates high for housing and farm mortgage loans and equipment financing – while keeping farmland prices low. 

The most notorious example is soybeans, America’s major farm export to China. Trump’s weaponization of U.S. foreign trade treats exports and imports as tools to deprive foreign countries dependent on access to U.S. markets for their exports, and on U.S.-controlled exports of essential commodities such as food and oil (and most recently, high technology for computer chips and equipment). After Mao’s revolution in 1945, the U.S. imposed sanctions on U.S. grain and other food exports to China, hoping to starve out the new Communist government. Canada broke this food blockade – but it has now become an arm of U.S. NATO foreign policy. 

Trump’s weaponizing of foreign trade – keeping open a constant U.S. threat to cut off exports on which other countries have come to depend – has led China to totally stop its advance purchases from this year’s U.S. soybean crop. China understandably seeks to avoid being threatened by a food blockade again, and has imposed 34% tariffs on U.S. soybean imports. The result has been a shift in its imports to Brazil, with zero purchases in the United States so far in 2025. This is traumatic for U.S. farmers, because four decades of soybean exports to China have resulted in half of U.S. soybean production normally being exported to China; in North Dakota the proportion is 70%.

China’s shift in its soybean purchases to Brazil is irreversible, as that country’s farmers have adjusted their planting decisions accordingly. As a member of BRICS, especially under President Lula’s leadership, Brazil promises to be much a more reliable supplier than the United States, whose foreign policy has designated China as an existential enemy. There is little chance of China responding to a U.S. promise to  restore normal trade by shifting its imports away from Brazil, because that would be traumatic for Brazilian agriculture and would make China an unreliable a trade partner.

So the question is, what is to become of the enormous amount of U.S. farmland that has been devoted to soybean production? Unable to find foreign markets to replace China, farmers are reported to suffer a loss on their soybean production, which is piling up in excess of existing crop storage capacity. The result is a threat of farm foreclosures and bankruptcy, which would lower prices for farmland. And as interest rates remain high for long-term loans such as mortgages, this deters small farmers from acquiring troubled properties. The result is to accelerate the concentration of farmland in the hands of large absentee financial funds and the wealthy.

This shift is irreversible. Despite the Supreme Court ruling that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional and therefore illegal, it seems likely that Trump could simply have the bipartisan anti-China Congress and Senate impose these tariffs. In any case, Trump’s policy represents a sea change, a quantum leap into U.S. coercive trade aggression. 

There is zero chance of U.S. China trade in soybeans or other basic Chinese needs from being revived. Neither it nor other countries threatened by U.S. trade aggression can take the risk of depending on the U.S. market.

America’s agricultural cost and income squeeze goes far beyond soybean sales. Production costs are also rising as a result of Trump’s tariffs, especially on farm machinery, fertilizer and credit tightness as the risk of farm debt arrears increase.

2. Trump’s Tariffs are Raising U.S. Industrial Costs of Production

Trump’s tariff anarchy also is causing losses and layoffs of two thousand employees for John Deere and Company, with a demand also falling for other manufacturers of farm equipment. The most serious problem is that its harvesting equipment, like automobiles and all other machinery, is made out of steel, along with aluminum. Trump has broken the basic logic for tariffs – to promote the competitiveness of high-profit capital-intensive industry (especially for established monopolies), largely by minimizing the cost of raw materials. Steel and aluminum are basic raw materials.

These tariffs have hit John Deere in two ways. For its domestic production, sales are low because of the depression of farm income cited above. Yields have soared this year for corn as well as soybean, leading their prices and farm income to decline. That limits the ability of farmers to buy new machinery.

Deere imports about 25 percent of the components of its products, whose cost of is increased as a result of Trump’s tariffs. Deere’s manufacturing facilities in Germany have been especially hard hit. Trump surprised Deere by ruling that over and above his 15% import tariffs on imports from the EU, he is imposing a 50% tax on the steel and aluminum content of these imports.

That also hits foreign producers of farm equipment, leading to new complaints by EU about Trump’s constant “surprises” in adding to his demand for “givebacks” in exchange for not raising tariffs on imports from the EU even further.

3. Trump’s Fight to Accelerate Foreign Reliance on Oil and Hence Global Warming 

Opposing any alleviation to global warming, Trump has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and has cancelled subsidies for wind power, and also for public transportation. This is the effect of lobbying by the oil industry. Not only is U.S. foreign policy dominated by the demand to control oil as the key to weaponizing foreign trade sanctions, but also U.S. domestic economic policy. Soon after World War II ended, Los Angeles tore up its streetcars, forcing its inhabitants to join the automobile economy. Dwight Eisenhower initiated the interstate highway program to favor auto transportation – and with it the consumption of oil. 

Also plaguing U.S. agriculture is a deepening water shortage for crops and destruction caused by flooding, drought and other extreme weather. One cause is the extreme weather resulting from global warming, which Trump denies as part of his policy to support U.S. oil and coal while actively fighting against wind and solar energy production. He has withdrawn U.S. support for the Paris Agreement with other nations to de-carbonize world production.

Insurance costs are rising to unaffordable levels for many areas most prone to storms and flooding, much as the annual cost of housing has soared in Miami and other Florida cities and the southern border states threatened by hurricanes.

A parallel disruption is the rising electric price as well as a water shortage caused by the rising demand to cool the computers needed for Trump’s support of automatic intelligence and quantum computing. The increasing demand for electricity far beyond the investment plans by power utilities to increase their production. Such planning takes many years – and utilities are happy to see the shortages push demand far above supply, enabling prices for electricity to be one of the major contributors to inflating the cost of production.

Trump and his cabinet have made fun of China for spending so much money on its high-speed train service. Western calculations of economic efficiency leave out the all-important balance-of-payments effects of this rail development: It avoids forcing Chinese to drive cars using imported oil. China has no domestic oil industry to dominate its economic planning or foreign policy. In fact, its foreign policy aims regarding the oil trade are the opposite of those in in the United States.

4. Trump’s Sanctions to Weaponize U.S. Exports to Its Designated Enemies

Trump’s (and Congress’s threat) to sabotage exports of computer switches with secret “kill switches” to turn them off by U.S. fiat has led China to cancel its planned purchases from Nvidia. The company has warned that without the profits from exports to China, it will be unable to afford the R&D needed to keep competitive and maintain its monopoly on chip manufacturing.

These trade policies slashing U.S. export markets and imports are just one reason why the dollar is weakening. Other causes are declining tourism as a result of U.S. harassment, especially of foreign students from China, on which U.S. universities have depended as the highest-paying students. 

These non-trade balance-of-payments trends explain why Trump’s high-tariff policy has not led the dollar’s exchange rate to strengthen despite its effect on discouraging imports. Normally that would increase the trade balance. But Trump’s war against all other countries (mainly his European allies, Japan and Korea) has led to a shift of their dependency on U.S. exports (such as soybean) and products against which they are retaliating in order to protect their own balance of payments, e.g., cutbacks in foreign tourism to the U.S., foreign students, dependency on U.S. arms exports – and most of all, financial capital flight seeing that the shrinking U.S. home market must cut into foreign profits and the dollar’s decline will reduce its valuation in foreign-currency terms.

Also, as BRICS and other countries conduct trade in their own currencies, this reduces their need to hold foreign-exchange reserves in dollars. They are shifting to each others’ currencies, and of course to gold, whose price has just soared over $3,500 an ounce.

5. Trump’s Sharp Increase in Inflation, From Electricity and Housing to Industrial Products Made Out of Aluminum and Steel, or Subject to Crippling Tariffs on the Supply of Parts and Necessary Inputs.

Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on basic inputs, headed by aluminum and steel, are increasing prices for every industrial product made out of these metals.

And of course, his tariffs generally are rising prices across the board as companies have waited a polite month or so before raising prices as their existing inventories of goods produced by China, India and other countries are exhausted.

Trump’s deportation of immigrants has increased the cost of construction, which relied largely on immigrant labor – as did agriculture in California and other states at harvest time. It is not clear who, if anyone, will replace this labor.

Instead of attracting foreign investment as Trump has demanded that Europe and other trade “partners” provide, he has made this market much less desirable. What he has done is provide an object lesson in what other countries need to avoid in creating regulations, tax rules and trade policy to minimize their costs of production and become more competitive.

6. Trump’s Monetary Policy is Sharply Rising Long-Term Interest Rates, even If Short-Term Rates Decline.

Long-term interest rates determine the cost of mortgages, and thus the affordability of housing. Trump’s inflationary policy also increased interest rates for long-term bonds. The effect is to concentrate borrowing at short-term maturities, concentrating the problems of rolling over debt in times of financial crisis. This impairs the resilience of the economy.

Many consumer goods imports are bought by the ultra-rich – the 10% of the population who are reported to account for 50% of consumer spending, For them, higher prices simply increase the prestige of such conspicuous-consumption status items (including expensive food delicacies).

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Drawing from sources as audacious as Bernie Sanders, to the savvy street-smarts of a New York City film production team, Mamdani has given voice to a new generation and forever changed the way progressives will win elections.

He didn’t do it by himself. His policies, creativity and undeniable charisma were seamlessly fused in a new political art form so compelling that it catapulted the 33-year-old Muslim to a surprising 12-point primary victory over his main rival, former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, who just one month earlier, according to one poll, enjoyed a 24 point lead. Cuomo funders forked over $25 million (by some counts, as high as $36m) to run a tired, formulaic campaign dominated by “nasty, negative, unfair” TV ads, and the postage stamps needed to send the same content over snail-mail. Yet even with millions of dollars and their best efforts to villainize him, Mamdani’s ability to counter the slurs attacking his identity, and the care and promise he expressed for New Yorkers reached a generation feeling the pain of living in a city that had for too long bowed to the Wall-Street ethos, fueled by elite political power. The campaign energized a new youth vote and defeated the cynical politics we’ve long suspected to be only a cosplay of democracy.  

From the beginning, Mamdani was a longshot, labeled a “Muslim socialist,” by Andrew Cuomo, but Zohran Mamdani’s momentum was building over social media and his creative, human-center media spoke a compelling language of compassion that was absolutely believable.

Commentators have listed his most celebrated videos—they were fun and crisp. He talked about running for mayor while running in a marathon (:34) and illustrated his promise to freeze NYC rents by jumping into frigid waters off Cony Island (1:00) in a suit and tie. With Bollywood scores and clips inserted, and speaking Urdu (with English subtitles) to a group of “aunties,” in a (2:24) video, Mandani explained ranked-choice voting using mango lassi, a yoghurt-based drink from the Punjab region of India.

The videos shot on location all over the city depended on the film production expertise developed over recent years by New York City Indy-filmmakers. Quirky, conversational and inviting, impromptu interchanges and stories of love and yearning were woven into the matrix of the city at eye-level.  

A Valentine Message

A Valetine story (1:18) opens with Zohran in the subway surrounded by dozens of heart-shaped red balloons carrying a huge box of chocolates, where the candidate, the camera and his message are at home on the streets, and even below ground level. Mamdani walks through the subway, up the stairs, through a turn-style, then finally out of an elevator as the balloons struggle to make it past the obstacles. In the frame, a single saxophonist serenades him. Outside he walks across the street, it’s dark out and we hear him speaking softly, “I see us riding on a bus. The bus is fast and free.” Passing steal garage doors he continues, “We’re on our way back to our union-built, rent-stabilized home.” He turns a corner under a classic neon sign for a New York City steak house and continues “Maybe we’re shopping for cheaper groceries at a city owed supermarket.” The saxophone player follows him, and in the next frame he passes the sax player. It’s a magical view of the city that occupies the dreams of youthful New Yorkers, yet Mamdani makes that fanciful place seems attainable. But his vision is not without a condition. It comes as he reaches his destination, sitting at a table across from a partner we don’t see, that could be us. He says, “I know it’s not yet Valentines Day, but I can’t wait any longer,” and with a cheeky smile be presents the open box of chocolates, saying, “Will you be my Democrat?” After details of how and when to register, and another visual of the sax player, he sings “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” with words “Will you be my Democrat,” and we hear a female laugh. “I just need you to vote June 24,” he croons.^” It’s as cheesy as it affective, confirmed by comments on Instagram saying it’s cheesy, but I love it anyway, and lauding the producers who should get a raise. The campaign “drew tens of thousands of new voters to the polls.” 

Halalflation

From the subway to the streets, and into a food cart, another 1:32 long video begins with Zohran in front of a vender’s halal cart announcing there’s a crisis in New York called “Halalflation.” After taking a big fork-full of rice he talks while chewing, “Today, we’re going to get to the bottom of this.” It’s a speedy-paced montage set to Arabic music showing Zohran inside a bunch of different food carts, asking venders how much a plate of halal costs. They are all saying $10. They go through the costs, and the biggest expense is the outlay of up to $22,000 for a permit to sell food on the street. But here’s the rub–they don’t buy the permit from the city, they buy it from a broker, as one vender says, “a random guy.” A city permit would cost them only $400 or so, but the venders have been waiting on a list, one for 2 years and he’s still only number “3,800 something.” Next Zohran fast-steps around the cart and points to 4 bills seen on the screen, “that are sitting in the city council right now.” They would “give these venders their own permits… and make your halal more affordable, but Eric Adams hasn’t said a single word about them.” Back in the cart he asks how much they would charge for a plate if they had a permit, and they respond with 7 or 8 dollars. He then stops people on the street asking, “Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8.” Of course, we know which price they choose, and the candidate promises, “If I were the Mayor, I’d be working with the City Council from day one to make halal 8 bucks again. On the podcast “Start Making Sense,” Jonathan Wiener called it “irresistible.”

The story is brief and direct, yet complex and fun with a doable, fair solution to an obvious injustice. Such narratives diverge from the bland vagaries of corporate-media driven campaigns so dominant, yet so lifeless. They caught the eye of social media consultant Rachel Karten who found them intriguing, “cleaver and entertaining,” recognizing their knack for engaging viewers. They are filmed in a “style that makes viewers want to stick around to the end.” 

The videos sprang from a collaborative effort that included Melted Solids, a small production team that opened shop in 2019, founded by Anthony DiMieri and the supercut wizard, Debbie Saslaw. The team drew on the production skills and strategic knowledge they learned in corporate advertising. As DiMieri once told me during a chance encounter at Grand Central Station, he was “working for the man.” From there they polished their political vision by providing comms for campaigns and progressive candidates; “we built longstanding relationships with so many brilliant and talented people along the way,” Debbie Saslaw said. They helped Jamaal Bowman, worked with Bernie Sanders, and filmed Amazon Labor Union’s successful unionization efforts in Staten Island, a campaign driven by workers and immigrants. As DiMieri told Karten, “We recognize that well-produced media is a weapon in any fight.”

Ideas, pitches and discussions of the videos often originated in a group chat, during a process that included Mamdani, the Melted Solids team, comms director Andrew Epstein and videographer Donald Borenstein, who handled the Urdu video. Borenstein took the lead as video producer and was responsible for the daily feeds of short, vertical video content. Like Dimieri, he graduated from New York’s Fordham University. Mamdani’s campaign photographer Kara McCurdy, who’s worked with the candidate since 2020, was part of the team.

As a low-budget Indy-filmmaker in New York, Anthony DiMieri learned from filming on location all over the city, producing his first web-series Bros, and an award-winning short that opens in the subway, called “My New Boyfriend,” a chronicle of a young woman’s romance with a 12 foot skeleton from Home Depot. He had “great bone structure…she says, and “was patient and a great listener.” DiMieri’s upcoming independent feature film, Love New York, a series of vignettes of amorous couples, was shot on the streets, in cafes and small apartments from Bushwick to the Village. Two New York City retired cab drivers from the upcoming film Love are featured in a Mamdani campaign video. 

Titled, “The Political Menu is Getting Stale. It’s Time for Something Different,” it opens with the brassy drivers eating and arguing over a choice between Mario Cuomo and Eric Admas. One even handles Cuomo’s book, while they grope for reason to choose one over the other, revealing information about both candidate’s faults. Zohran walks in and grabs their attention with “You both know that New Yorkers have more of a choice than just Adams or Cuomo this election, right?” They grill him about what he’s done for the city, allowing Zohran to highlight his significant wins as Assembly member with policies shaped with the help of community groups and political coalitions. In the end the drivers comically turn back to arguing with each other and Zohran gets up and leaves, a short, engaging take (2:11) on a typical New York political conversation that to date has racked up almost 2 million YouTube views. 

Throw Away the Script: Authenticity and Documentation  

Riskier formats were added to structured storytelling, in a campaign milieu willing to try different things. Anthony DiMieri recounted the time when Jamaal Bowman’s team wrote him a script he would read from cue cards, but DiMieri said, “the delivery felt stilted.” So Saslaw and DiMieri suggested, “Why don’t we just try improvising… tell us how you feel.” The result was stunning, “his monologue reads like one of the most visionary political speeches in recent memory.” Now, even if a candidate comes with a script DiMieri says, “we give them moments to just riff, and the gold that comes from someone speaking from the heart is really unmatchable.” Developing a platform dedicated to improving the well-being of most people animates authenticity and leads to a political vision that bestows upon the person the ability to speak off-script. It is no wonder that impromptu eloquent articulations of complex policies are a rare quality for most politicians, beholding as they are to the often anti-democratic agendas of superPACs and the dictates that come along with the dark money from corporate and political elites.  

The campaign’s first viral video in November was a compilation of person “on-the-street-style” interviews, conducted by Zohran, in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations that moved toward voting for Trump in 2024. To help prepare for the shoots, the campaign’s communication Director Andrew Epstein, referred to Bernie Sanders interviews with mall punks in the 1980s. At the time, DiMieri admitted he thought it “was a little overkill, but looking back he now thinks “it was actually genius.” The interviews demonstrate that 2024 voters thought Trump would bring down prices, and help Bronx residents, and a good portion cited anti-genocide views the had turned them against Biden and by extension, Kamala Harris. DiMieri added that Democrats have “massively” failed at talking with people that disagree with them.

Everything about Cuomo’s campaign fits that observation, evident when the former governor declined an invitation to appear at a candidates forum organized by The Nation magazine. As the magazine’s President Bhaskar Sunkara, told Jonathan Weiner, “He was scared.” Kamala skipping Joe Rogan after pressure from staffers was a big mistake, DiMieri observed. “You should talk to everyone, not just those in our socio-political-cultural ashrams.” 

Mamdani also appeared on podcasts not sympathetic to his candidacy, like the one hosted by two former NYPD officers who largely disagreed with his positions. After the podcast one of the hosts said, “At least he speaks from a place of honesty.” 

This type of freedom is anathema to corporate politicians who hire consultants to search for talking points formulated from opinion polls or focus group probes, often seeking negative, hot-button issues used as the persuasive meat for dark, nasty political adverting. Candidates and politician are coached to repeat the text, and “stay on point,” a format now so obviously contrived we must wonder why it persists. 

Countering Cuomo on @SubwayTakes 

Captivating chatter and contending opinions fly along the rails of New York City subways, or sometimes roll along slowly, in the viral TikTok hit @SubwayTakes that Anthony DiMieri has directed for 10 years. The show introduced vibrant dialogue among New York riders and has amassed over 1 million followers. Comedian host Kareem Rahma and his guest hold metro cards up to their mouths like small square microphones, and he starts the conversation asking, “What’s your take?” He often disagrees with the person next to him and the fun begins. As Rahma asked Ayman on MSNBC, haven’t you ever wondered what the person next you on the subway is thinking? When Mamdani appeared on the show, after Rahma asked the question, he responded saying, “I should be the mayor.” Kareem draws out a long, “Iyyyeee don’t know,” explaining that he’s been seeing a lot of stuff saying that “you shouldn’t be the mayor.” He pulls what’s left of a folded mailing from his pocket, and after some banter, they get to the claim that Zohran will raise your taxes, a notion easily dispelled when Zohran asks, “Do you make more than a million dollars?” the income group that will be affected by the increase. Of course, the answer is no. Mamdani proceeds to deconstruct the glossy, now shredded mailing sent out by the Cuomo campaign filled with distortions about his policies. The last claim, that Zohran has a “radical plan to put homeless people in the subway system,” is too ridiculous for comment and Zohran says, “three for three,” another lie. He grabs the mailing and holds it up to the camera pointing to the “fine print” of funders, who are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, and Bill Ackman, who is a “Trump supporting billionaire.” He informs viewers that Bloomberg dropped $8.3 million dollars on Andrew Cuomo’s supper Pac, and says, “That’s the same amount of money we raised from more than 20,000 people,” making the distinction between ordinary people and billionaires. 

DiMieri told me that the content of the video had not been planned, and it was only that morning, when over a cup coffee looking at his mail before leaving for the shoot, did he discover those “crazy anti-Zohran ads.” So, he took the mailers with him and offered a proposal to the team, “You know it might be fun to do some prop-comedy” adding, “the more we talked about it the more it just became the most obvious thing to do…to respond bullet by bullet to these allegations from the negative mailing.” To date, episode number 407 of @SubwayTakes, where Zohran Mamdani takes down Cuomo’s ‘campaign literature’ fabrications point by point, has received 872.8K likes on TikTok.

By contrast, Cuomo tried to evoke fear of the subway as a campaign theme, calling for a “50% increase in transit police” in an ugly, badly-produced graphic posted on Instagram. Since late March 2025, it’s received 5 likes. 

Most of Zohran campaign videos have a clear, well stated message. This one comes at the end when he says, “These guys would rather lie to you every single day rather than admit the fact that the policies they have perused for so long have left us with the city that we actually have today.” 

Another comedic theme runs through the @SubwayTakaes video, as Kareem repeatedly asks Zohran what he will do to bring down the price of a Matcha Latte. Zohran responds with, “100% not sure.” 

Cuomo filled New York City with a different kind of media blitz—his ads were everywhere. In campaigns, negative ads are used not only to attack one’s opponent, they are known to turn voters off and discourage them from participating in election politics. But at every turn, Zohran’s campaign drew on conversational milieus or created new explanatory formats that were inspirational, always extending an invitation to participate in enlivening ways. As Late Night host Stephen Colbert observed Mamdani won with “relentless positivity” and cheerfulness. 

While Mamdani’s appealing up-beat energy and humanity shine through the camera, the videos of working-class struggles were not without stories of hardship, and sometimes loss. 

Storytelling in a Cab

In Keep the Meter Running: Ramadan Edition! Zohran gets into a yellow cab where Kareem Rahma is also a passenger. The driver’s name is Mouhamadou and he’s on his way to an Iftar dinner. Over the course of the ride Mouhamadue tells the story of the successful action by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance in 2021, when both he and Zohran joined the hunger strike for 15 days that ended in a historic victory for debt relief. Zohran explains the crisis to Kareem that began when Mayor Bloomberg “inflated the cost of a medallion from $200,000 to $1million to bridge a budget deficit.” Zohran was arrested at city hall, and Mouhamadue says he was $750,000 in debt.” And “don’t forget,” he adds, “9 of my fellow brothers committed suic*de.” The remembrance offered by the African cab driver from the Côte d’Ivoire is not done gratuitously, or for shock value. It’s sometimes just the price of struggle. 

The dialogue is followed by a fast-paced comedic sequence in the last third of the tape that takes place at a Chinese Halal restaurant that serves Bengali food, where the Iftar takes place. Zohran speaks at the dinner and Kareem plays the role of scruffy-looking outsider trying to insert himself into numerous photos ops, but few take him up on it. 

My favorite video might be the one where the candidate explains why “we walked the length of Manhattan,” and tells viewers, “because New Yorkers deserve a Mayor they can hear, see and even yell at if they need to.” It’s classic Zohran walking with people in the streets talking directly to the camera and featuring footage of endearing interactions with New Yorkers in a video that definitely shared the love of diversity and gleeful enthusiasm.

Many have written about the strengths of his social media campaign, sometimes referring to it as a model to emulate for progressives. The Washington Post wrote that Mamdani’s Instagram engagement rate was 14 times more than that of Cuomo’s during June, and across social media conversations about him outnumbered mentions of Cuomo more than 30-to-1. “His digital presence felt savvy and authentic,” they said. And of course it will be copied by what the Post calls, “National Democrats” who are “eager for an edge in the internet era.” But Mamdani’s campaign won’t be easily copied by corporate Democrats trying to make their presence feel authentic. The campaign was a tectonic shift in visual and narrative structures, with esthetic sensibilities eagerly embraced by youthful New Yorkers as they expressed dedication to change with doable justice actions and inventing a new political art form. It was experimental and innovative, as it abandoned political hackery, “staying on message,” repeating dreary talking points and campaigns designed to silence conversation and discourage participation. Its intricacies will require inclusion and engagement with political and community actors working with city-wide, and even national organizations. For Mamdani that involved collaborating with talented members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and “coordinated efforts with tenant organizations across the city,” who went on an offensive against Real Estate, among many others. 

In a cringeworthy production, Cuomo has already mimicked Mamdani in a new post-primary ad that has him dressed as “everyman casual,” in unbearably drab clothes, though Zohran is mostly attired in a suit and tie, in colors crafted and inspired by NYC taxis and Bollywood posters, cobalt blue and marigold yellow. Washed out and looking tired Cuomo tries to say with conviction, “I am in it to win it,” but the campaign seems to have lost any sense of irony when in the next breath Cuomo accuses Mamdani of using “slick slogans, but no real solutions.” He then walks down city streets meeting and greeting residents, but they are silent props, we never hear their voices, they never speak on camera. It’s Cuomo who speaks, scripted, about lower rents… and childcare that “won’t bankrupt you,” without offering a single policy proposal. He promises to earn your votes, and he’ll be talking to you…maybe soon, eventually. But my bet is those interviews won’t be televised. 

Yet Debbie Saslaw hasn’t given up on more traditional adverting that she believes can still play a role. When asked to think about ideas for working on upcoming elections, after noting that there is a ceiling for audience reach on social media, she said a life goal is to create something as “universally poignant” as Sanders’ America ad. And I’m absolutely sure she’ll do it, while working with partners on this new filmic political art form that will continue to evolve.

Note: Anthony DiMieri was a student of the author’s at Fordham Unversity.

The post How Zohran Mamdani’s Video Team Reinvented the Visual Art of Political Conversation and Storytelling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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