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.
As we move further toward governance through coercion, we must be prepared to withdraw our consent to be governed by this regime. Image by Koshu Kunii.
Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself… by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d‘état in miniature every day – [he] throws the whole … economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous—Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1851
So ends Marx’s keen-eyed chronicle of the events in France from 1848-1851 that resulted in the brutal crushing of the French proletariat, along with rise of Napoleon III, first as President (very temporarily) and eventually as Emperor. In the midst of our consternation and concern to understand our own present slide into these dark times, we might look to Marx’s analysis for some much-needed guidance. As Marx himself characterized his goal (in an 1869 preface to a second edition) for the series of articles that became the pamphlet, he was not interested in glorifying Bonaparte or telling a “great man of history” kind of tale, but rather he wanted to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created the circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” Sound like anyone/anything we know?
How about this then? Marx, in this passage, was trying to understand how the French peasantry came to play their unlikely, but essential role in Bonaparte’s rise. It reads as an eerily prescient characterization of the MAGA movement as the seemingly unshakeable center of support for the present regime, along with their dangerous susceptibility to its incessant demagoguery:
Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these [people], and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes [for which we might, of course, read dangerous and unworthy ‘others,’ about which, more in a moment] and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the [MAGAlites], therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
And what about the putative institutional checks and balances on executive power? Here, too, we can find startlingly apt observations that precisely forecast our day-to-day headlines:
By repulsing the army…and so surrendering the army [military] irrevocably to the President, the party of Order [i.e., the Congressional branch along with its war powers] declares that the bourgeoisie has forfeited its vocation to rule. A parliamentary ministry no longer existed. Having now indeed lost its grip on the army and the National Guard, what forcible means remained to it [the Congress] with which simultaneously to maintain the usurped authority of parliament over the people and its constitutional authority against the President? None. Only the appeal to impotent principles remained to it now [or sternly worded letters of concern], to principles that it had itself always interpreted merely as general rules, which one prescribes for others in order to be able to move all the more freely oneself.
So what does all this (and so much more that could be quoted) add up to in terms of insights for coming to grips with the myriad dilemmas we face currently? If we are to follow Marx’s advice, our inquiry should not focus on the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of our own “grotesque mediocrity,” but rather on the circumstances and relationships that have allowed him to “play a hero’s part.” For that, I think it is instructive to return to a particular element of the 2016 presidential primaries and campaigns. It became clear to many observers as these wore on that the vast majority of the electorate, no matter their position on the political spectrum, were avid for change from the then prevailing status quo. For better or worse, quite literally, the two candidates that eventually emerged as the most likely embodiments of such change were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The most unlikely were the virtual clones on the Republican stage, and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side. Although Sanders was shunted aside by the party establishment, I think it is still worth comparing his narrative (then and now) with Trump’s (then and now as well) in order to understand the constellation of factors (including, as Marx observed, unlikely alliances), that have produced the present moment.
I begin with what Marx began with in his assessment (both in this pamphlet and almost all of his other works): peoples’ material conditions on the ground. This is also where both Sanders and Trump located their campaigns, and both recognized that their potential supporters had quite legitimate grievances about essential elements of their lives. Beyond this fundamental agreement, however, the stories diverge immediately and wildly. For Sanders (and, of course, this is a central part of the ongoing anti-oligarchy campaign), the very real problems that people encounter stem from a system that pits the 1% against the rest. And while this diagnosis might resonate with people with quite divergent ideological positions (as Sanders continues to demonstrate in both Red and Blue precincts), the remedies either are, or more realistically are made to appear as, nearly impossible: i.e., fundamental, systemic change. And on top of that, Sanders had/has to contend with the knee-jerk reactions (either existential dread or trivialized utopianism) to his self-declared, though hardly radical, democratic socialism. Returning briefly to the 18th Brumaire, this burden also has a lengthy history:
Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed … speech remained … monosyllabic … As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.
And so what was/is Trump’s tale? As with Sanders, he begins with the presumption and continual public assertion (whether he believes it or not) that the grievances are genuine. The causes, however, do not stem from a system rigged by the rich and powerful, but rather are the result of unworthy “others” illegally and illegitimately impeding the prospects of those deemed deserving by the regime in power. And if that regime is willing to push aside the minimal protections afforded to these identified “others,” it is easy to see why the tangible and visible actionability of this approach is preferable to its supporters, to the vague hand-waving and -wringing of the Sanders’ prescriptions. The flip side of the so-called meritocratic “American Dream” mythology (work hard, play by the rules, you’ll make it) is that if you fail, it’s your own fault. In light of this, it is doubly appealing to be told “no, it is not your fault; it’s ‘theirs’,” and then to see “them” humiliated, de-humanized, and dis-appeared one way or another.
It is also possible, in light of Marx’s assessment, to use this Trumpian narrative to help us understand what appears as an unlikely coalition (the circumstances and relationships) between big capital (finance and big tech in particular) and diverse elements of the working class (e.g., some segments of organized labor). It also serves to explain some of the apparently contradictory demographic shifts that we have seen recently occurring among various populations of color and in age-related cohorts. Referring to the Marx/MAGA quote above, many people are susceptible to demagogic claims of relief and salvation, and this is particularly the case in these fraught moments. When people are undeniably living in precarious circumstances it becomes much more appealing to hear that there is an “easy” remedy (eliminate “those people”) than to hear that fundamental systemic change is required before things improve.
So, what to do? I return once more, and finally, to the 18th Brumaire, and its most famous quote (amended for the present sensibilities): “[People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” There are now just over 400 days until the 2026 mid-term elections, if indeed, they take place. And this is a very big if, given that the regime is now trying every possible way (war with Venezuela, war with the cities, war on “the left”, etc., etc.) to foment an actual or false “emergency” in order to declare martial law and cancel, rather than risk losing, the elections.
But if we have them, in these next 400 days, two paths to making history should be taken simultaneously and with the urgency that our predicament compels. The first is the electoral route and operates under the still valid (for now) presumption that the elections will take place. During this period, and as the effects of the current policies (especially the tariffs and the big ugly bill) take hold and produce material effects in peoples’ everyday lives, every democratic candidate or office holder should make it their top priority to follow Sanders’ lead and share with voters of all political persuasions: 1) precisely where their genuine pain is coming from; and 2) how, specifically, a Democratic controlled congress would work programmatically to alleviate those burdens. Is this realistic? What is the alternative?
The other path that should be taken up is to challenge, in every way possible, the legitimacy of the current administration. As we move further toward governance through coercion (applied if one dares to dissent from current directions), we must be prepared to withdraw our consent to be governed by this regime. If we actually had the “organized left” feverishly conjured and imagined by the broletariat, we could be creatively producing with-holdings of labor and consumption, developing 5-10 minute general strikes, and prevailing upon our allied elected officials to “put their bodies on the gears and wheels and levers of the odious machine and make it stop” or at least slow it to a crawl till we can take charge. In the absence of that coherent left (one of those circumstances transmitted from the past), we must take advantage of those cognate organizations that do exist or that can be created rapidly to implement such a strategy at every appropriate level. Is this realistic? What is the alternative?
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 toldThis 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.
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!”
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.
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.
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 torestore 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).
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.
Screenshot from BBC coverage of Trump at King Charles’ second home in Windsor.
Harry Fairground where is your faint light
now on the corner of sea or black within
that city of your going?
— Adrian Dannatt, Capacity for Loss
Most Londoners had half-forgotten about Trump’s state visit until Air Force One touched down. The capital was that distracted by the Mandelson scandal, Cabinet reshuffles, Tory defections, and brutish Tommy Robinson and his long march to what didn’t feel like freedom, the one at which Elon Musk appeared in Big Brother video-link style, warning us all over here we must fight or die. Thanks, but no thanks, Elon.
By contrast, the Trump visit had barely begun, and already the politics seemed drained from it—sucked out like venom from a snakebite.
Buckingham Palace was under renovation, so the state pageant shifted west to Windsor. Through Berkshire mist, Trump and Melania arrived at the oldest inhabited castle in the world—not just shielded from London’s anti-Trump protests, not just surrounded by a freshly erected ring of steel, but also greeted by the genteel calm of a town not exactly renowned for its Molotov cocktails. ‘Trump received the full Downton Abbey experience, with bagpipes and drums, to keep him on Britain’s side, but away from the Brits,’ noted Sam Kiley of The Independent. In Windsor, there were Grannies Against Trump but no suppression of kulaks and White Guards.
The Windsor household polished its rituals: carriage, salute, banquet. Lord Ricketts called it ‘pomp and pageantry with a purpose.’ Lord Glassman, oddly, compared Trump to Caesar—or was it Napoleon? The point seemed to be that monarchs and emperors knew how to host each other, even when they didn’t want to. Charles was earning his coins—the ones with his head stamped on them.
Around the spectacle buzzed a ragged chorus. London mayor Sadiq Khan denounced the 47th president as an encourager of intolerance: ‘Silence is no longer enough.’ Vance’s earlier summer jibes about the UK were still being referenced, but they pre-dated Trump’s visit. Away from Windsor’s pomp, life carried on with its own absurd counterpoints. My kids and their band were boarding a flight from Stansted to play a gig in Hamburg—sharing an airport, in effect, with the presidential arrival.
I was at Adrian Dannatt’s poetry launch in Mayfair, where I spoke with Trump’s famed chronicler, Michael Wolff. Painter, writer and film producer Danny Moynihan held court, a part-Celt sparkle in his eye. Wolff was affable, is brave; his super-smart wife Victoria I’d met in New York. Yet Wolff wasn’t over here for The Donald, but a new podcast series on Rupert Murdoch—with Alastair Campbell—Murdoch now cast as Trump’s rival nemesis. Murdoch, incidentally, would be at the next day’s Windsor Castle banquet.
The above was a reminder that the ‘real’ London lives elsewhere: in poetry readings, side-room conversations, kids’ gigs. The state visit was theatre. The city itself was still improvising.
Protesters at Windsor were projecting images and texts of Epstein, Prince Andrew, Trump and Melania, on one of the castle towers. It wasn’t exactly Buñuel scandalising Paris with Un Chien Andalou—ink bombs flying in the stalls—but it did join a long, odd history of imagery that caused a ‘wee’ stir, as Trump’s late Scottish mother might have pursed it. The four people arrested were not kept in the Dungeon of the Curfew Tower.
Meanwhile, the real kings arrived: Google pledging £5 billion in data centres, Microsoft £22 billion in AI, Blackstone billions in assets. ‘Blackstone is going to own the housing market,’ said a reliable friend. ‘And believe me it’s not a good thing.’ I am sure Palantir were kicking about somewhere.
A promised tariff deal on aluminium and steel looked like it was collapsing last minute, but the tribute kept flowing—algorithms in place of spices, reactors instead of gold. (Whisky, the Scots whispered, must surely be spared.) In the end, Starmer unveiled a £150 billion investment from US companies, over £300 billion combined, though former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg pointed out that the UK was becoming a ‘vassal state’ of the US. The same Clegg who retained shares worth an apparent $21m at Meta.
On Gaza, meanwhile, the UK was making no headway; two Labour MPs were denied entry by Israel to the West Bank. Was this because of Starmer about to recognise a Palestinian state? Trump, too, appeared at first glance adrift—ignored by Netanyahu, sidelined by Putin, but still glaringly opposed to Starmer on Ukraine.
Jefferson once wrote: ‘Kings are the servants, not the proprietors, of the people.’ Yet Windsor staged two kings—one literal, one metaphorical—each rehearsing mastery, each pretending servitude. It was politics as masque, pomp as emptiness. Gifts, inevitably, were exchanged.
There was another big protest in London, while Trump was cantilevering from Windsor. It saw former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings standing his ground against the American. Anti-Trump disgruntlement was not just the preserve of the left.
At the state dinner, the honoured guest described his visit as ‘one of the highest honours of my life.’ Michael Wolff on BBC’s Newsnight suggested the US president had just been reprimanded by the real King. ‘In two world wars we fought together to defeat the forces of tyranny,’ said the King. ‘Today, as tyranny once again faces Europe, we and our allies stand together in support of Ukraine to deter aggression and secure peace.’ He said this looking down at Trump, without aggression, as Trump, seated, looked up.
Trump said: ‘Shakespeare, Tolkien, Orwell are unbelievable people like we have rarely seen before, probably maybe we won’t even see again.’
Next day at Chequers—the prime minister’s country seat, a sprawling manor house two centuries older than the United States—Trump and Starmer held their much anticipated press conference. If Windsor was a masque, Chequers was the boardroom: all oak panels and Tudor ghosts, where power rehearsed itself in the cadence of questions and evasions. The choreography was pure theatre, man, a ritual of civility for a leader often living on rupture.
Chequers gave Trump what he wanted: cameras, a backdrop of drapes and portraits, the sense that he was speaking not just to Britain but to history itself. Yet it also seemed to swallow him. Against those walls, the bravado thinned. As with Windsor, what is four years—or eight—in a room that has watched so many rulers pass, and mostly be forgotten?
The masque, then, ran its course. Windsor for pageantry, Chequers for diplomacy, London for protest, the City for contracts. A still-fizzing circuit is complete. But the conclusion was less resolution than recursion: the play repeats, each new sovereign or president stepping into the same old rituals, the same negotiations. Kingship, presidency, kinship, precedence, even prime ministerial tenure—all are temporary roles in a drama staged for permanence.
And yet, permanence is the illusion. Beneath the gilt banquets and oak beams, what remains is money, data, algorithms, war, and sleights of hand. The masque is always cover for the ledger. Jefferson’s line about kings as servants has become hollow: they serve capital now, not citizens.
The great takeaway of Trump’s state visit? That Britain can still stage a first-rate costume drama, complete with castles, carriages, and reluctant courtiers. That we are an AI superpower now. Chequers played its role as antique wallpaper. Windsor produced its bagpipes on cue. The visiting monarch praised Tolkien, the resident monarch praised Ukraine, and the rest of the two countries went back to watching Netflix. Curtain down, masque over—until the next sovereign in search of a photo-op arrives.
Redford in shades, lower left, his dark-haired nemesis, upper right.
“If you see anyone not mourning the death of Robert Redford the way you would like them to, please call their employer and get them fired!”
– Covie93
I met Robert Redford in 1986, when Redford thought he could use his personal charm to resolve the fight over the future of the National Forests, which had intensified after the late, great federal Judge William Dwyer issued his first injunctions halting timber sales in Spotted Owl habitat. So he summoned the bigwigs in the timber industry, the environmental movement, the Forest Service and the Bush Administration to Sundance for a long weekend to hash things out over steaks, French wine and long hikes on the flanks of Mt Timpanogos. Redford floated through the gathering in a cloud of beautiful young women as if he were a mountain deity surrounded by mountain nymphs, each one of whom probably had a Ph.D. in ecology from the Yale School of Forestry. Each side played nice for a blissful few days in the Wasatch, then went back to ripping each other’s throats out when they got home. So much for consensus.
I had two more encounters with Redford over the years. Both of them involved trout streams and internationally-known professors of literature at the University of Chicago. In the fall of 1995, I got word from sources in Montana that Redford the environmental champion was sending out fundraising letters for the state’s perpetually embattled Democratic Senator Max Baucus, despite the fact that Baucus had a dismal environmental record and his family had a stake in a giant open-pit gold mine slated to blasted into the headwaters of the Blackfoot River, a sacred stream to anglers around the world and the subject of Norman Maclean’s celebrated novella, A River Runs Through It, which Redford had recently made into an Academy Award nominated film. ) This is the very gold mine that may have set-off the Unabomber, brooding over the toxic monstrosity from his cabin in Lincoln.
The hypocrisy here was too ripe to pass up, so Cockburn and I investigated further and pitched the story to Jefferson Morley at The Washington Post, where it was eventually printed as the lede story in the Sunday Outlook Section on December 16, 1996.
Redford wasn’t pleased and griped that we hadn’t given him a chance to exculpate himself, although his letter spoke for itself and our repeated attempts to reach him had failed because he was spending the holidays on some remote Hawaiian Island beyond the reach of phone, telegraph or passenger pigeon. I reread the piece the day Redford’s death was announced and was bemused to find that it’s one of the very few occasions in the hundreds of articles and a dozen books we wrote together over 20 years when I got top billing on the byline ahead of my more famous/infamous co-editor, who always justified putting his name first because “C comes before S, Jeffrey. You know that.”
I didn’t receive another personalized invitation to Sundance (Oh, the Sting!), but a few months later, I did get a letter from one of Norman Maclean’s old friends, the acclaimed literary theorist Wayne Booth, who, like Redford, was a native Utahn. Booth was born and raised in American Fork Canyon under the shadows of Sundance Peak and Mt. Timpanogos. Booth, who had taught at the University of Chicago with Maclean, kept a summer place in the canyon and invited me out to Alpine, Utah, to show me how raw sewage was leaking down from Redford’s supposedly benign Sundace resort into the trout streams of the canyon and the American Fork River itself. I wrote up the malodorous saga for Our Little Secrets (the precursor to Roaming Charges) in the old CounterPunch newsletter, earning me the lasting enmity of the Sundance Kid, America’s last real movie star. – JSC
Still from Robert Redford’s film A River Runs Through It.
The Senator, the Gold Mine and the Sundance Kid
by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
December 16, 1996
Washington Post
In recent weeks, letters from Robert Redford have been dropping softly into the mailboxes of the A-list Hollywood liberals. The 10-paragraph missive flails at Republicans for their plans to rape the environment and concludes with an urgent plea to send money to Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. By letter’s end, Redford has managed to convey the impression that Baucus is up there with John Muir and Rachel Carson as a guardian angel of green America.
If Baucus needs a star to rouse sympathetic liberals, Robert Redford is certainly the ideal man to pitch his virtues. Redford lives on a ranch in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and funds environmental causes through his Sundance Foundation. Since he filmed Norman Maclean’s trout-fishing novel “A River Runs Through It,” the Sundance Foundation has given large amounts of money to Blackfoot Challenge, an organization set up to protect and restore Montana’s Blackfoot River, the stream that runs through Maclean’s book.
In a recent speech before the National Press Club, Redford spoke out passionately against the mining companies: “I can only believe that their bottom lines will win out over the health of our lands and our people. I’ve already seen enough bright orange rivers with no fish, thanks to mining companies who swore their operations were safe — like the Blackfoot, for example, in Montana.”
Yet Max Baucus, the beneficiary of Redford’s fund-raising, is an unrepentant, self-described “friend of mining” who stands to profit personally from what is being heralded as the largest open-pit gold mine in North America — which will be located in the headwaters of Redford’s beloved Blackfoot River.
Phelps Dodge, the mining colossus that will operate the mine, says that roughly a billion tons of dirt and rocks will be gouged and blasted out, crushed, dumped into heaps, and then saturated by water laced with cyanide, a process that leaches small flecks of gold from tons of rock. By the time the mine, known as Seven-Up Pete, is tapped out there will be a hole in the earth more than a mile across at one point and 1,000 feet deep. And when the gold runs out in 12 years, Phelps Dodge and its minority partner, a Colorado-based gold mining company called Canyon Resources, will leave behind cyanide-sodden dirt for all eternity, just a few hundred feet from what may well by then be the lifeless waters of the Blackfoot River. Aportion of the mine’s operations will be on land that belongs to the Sieben Co., an 80,000-acre sheep ranch owned by the Baucus family. The Baucus clan now stands to make a great deal of money, since the Sieben Ranch will take home 5 percent of the gross value of any minerals extracted from their land. Phelps Dodge and Canyon Resources expect to gross at least $4 billion overall from the mine.
Landusky Gold Mine, northern Montana.
The Sieben Ranch is managed by the senator’s brother, John Baucus Jr., who also serves as president of the Montana Wool Growers Association. Max Baucus maintains a financial interest in the ranch and receives regular dividend checks from the company.
Asked for his views on the effect of the mine on the Blackfoot, Baucus responded with a written statement saying, “I have a great love and respect for the Blackfoot River, its heritage and its history. Because of the sensitivity of the upper-Blackfoot, if this mine is to proceed I think it should meet a high standard of environmental protection.” Baucus earlier issued a similarly pious statement about the Crown Butte mine near Yellowstone National Park.
Given the awesome amount of boodle due to be collected by the Baucus family, it is not hard to understand why the senator is demure on the subject of Seven-Up Pete. It is harder to understand why Redford is raising money for Baucus. Redford knows first-hand the threat to the Blackfoot. When he came to Montana to film “A River Runs Through It” in 1992, the river had been badly trashed by logging and by mining. There were few trout left and the river’s canyon was heavily scarred with clear-cuts. So Redford shot many of the film’s scenes on the Yellowstone and Gallatin rivers farther south.
Max Baucus.
Over the past few years, though, the Blackfoot River has been starting to heal, thanks largely to the aggressive work of local environmental groups, such as the Clark Fork Coalition and the Montana Environmental Information Center. Now, just as some cutthroat and bull trout runs have returned, progress is endangered. Already exploratory excavations at the Seven-Up Pete site have resulted in the state-approved dumping of millions of gallons of arsenic and lead-contaminated water into the Blackfoot. The larger story here is Baucus’s career role in fighting off environmental regulation. Across the length and breadth of Congress it is impossible to uncover a more tenacious front-man for the mining, timber and grazing industries. For example, it was Baucus who crushed the Clinton administration’s timid effort to reform federal mining and grazing policies and terminate below-cost timber sales to big timber companies subsidized by the taxpayers. In March 1993, Baucus engineered a session at the White House with Mack McLarty, Clinton’s then-chief of staff, and emerged boasting to a Washington Post reporter that this was the last time the Clinton crowd would dare to try and cram public land reforms down Western throats.
Nothing new here. Back in 1991, Baucus voted to kill a bipartisan effort to place a moratorium on the sale of mineral-rich federal lands to multinational mining companies for $5 an acre; the moratorium failed by one vote.
Baucus also has a deep personal interest in the present perquisites of the Western ranching industry. The Sieben Ranch is also one of the largest sheep operations in North America and it enjoys an exceptionally close and profitable relationship with public grazing lands adjacent to the ranch and administered by the U.S. Forest Service. Here, Baucus sheep graze for the standard federally subsidized rate of 22 cents per animal per month, less than a fifth of the going rate on private lands.
Blackfoot River, near Lincoln, Montana. Still from the documentary, Mining Seven-Up Pete.
One of the grazing permits held by the Sieben Ranch is in the Helena National Forest. This wild landscape is home to the threatened grizzly bear, fewer than 800 of which now survive in the Lower 48. The Baucus family ranch holds one of Montana’s only remaining sheep grazing permits in critical grizzly habitat. This is not a happy situation for the bears, since they like to eat sheep and when they do, the ranch manager calls in the government hunter, who duly shoots the perpetrator with sodium pentothal and exiles the bear to another area.
If the bears return, as they sometimes do, they are either captured and placed in a zoo or, more typically, just killed. That’s why sheep grazing permits have been denied in other federal forests in Montana occupied by grizzlies. According to Fish and Wildlife Service reports, there have been four non-natural deaths of grizzly bears on Sieben Ranch allotments since the mid-1970s when the bear was protected as a threatened species. A representative of the Sieben Ranch did not respond to inquiries about grizzly mortality on company grazing land.
Baucus has also criticized local environmentalists for using Hollywood celebrities, such as Woody Harrelson and Glenn Close, to promote their campaign for the ecosystem.
“National money, glitz and glamour are reaching into Montana,” the man who has now corralled Robert Redford as a fund-raiser warned in June 1992. “These interests, mostly based out of California, are doing all they can to see that Montana’s 12-year civil war over the wilderness issue continues on and on.”
Baucus scarcely needs money from the Hollywood liberals. In his last re-election run in 1990 he was the second largest recipient of PAC money in the Senate: $1.86 million in a state with fewer than 500,000 registered voters. What Baucus needs from Redford is political cover. The big question is why Redford is providing it for him. Redford declined to respond to questions about Baucus and the gold mine. An aide to Redford said that the actor (like the national environmental groups based in Washington who have also raised money for Baucus) is willing to work with him because he is a Democrat and any Republican who replaced him would be worse.
But Redford’s fund-raising letter doesn’t even brave that argument. Redford does not excuse Baucus as the lesser of two evils but hails him as a true friend of nature. The Sundance Kid should go back to the Blackfoot and take one last look.
Not recognizing the presence and history of Black people is to render in perception, historical understanding, and official narrative the pronouncement and indoctrination that the United States is a white Christian nation without blemish or scar—image courtesy Library of Congress.
The Trump/MAGA/White Supremacist administration is ordering the removal of information and depictions of the era of slavery in the United States. One of the most emblematic images of enslavement is the graphic and soul-shocking image called “The Scourged Back” that depicts the back of Peter Gordon, photographed circa 1863 in Louisiana. It shows graphically his healed but black keloid bareback. The photograph of his scarred back yells loudly the horrors and brutality of enslavement. The wounds on Peter Gordon’s back were inflicted on him by his so-called owner.
To remove the histories and experiences of Black people in the US is part of the educational pogrom enacted to “whitewash” America’s real history. To “whitewash” history is the political project to change the narrative of America and make that narrative into the blessings and triumphs of white people, while ignoring the blemishes, scars, and overcoming that is as great a part of America’s history as any other.
The institution of slavery in North America’s British colonies began in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. It doesn’t legally end until 1865. A Civil War had to be fought to settle the question and end the legal institution of slavery. And even when slavery had legally ended, new systems and schemes were developed, particularly in the southern US, to re-institute slavery de facto. This system, called Jim Crow, would continue through to its painstaking dismantlement by courageous individuals and movements that exposed it and brought about its demise. This means that formal enslavement lasted for 246 years. Then the era of Jim Crow lasted for at least another 100 years, and its effects still persist for many today.
In 2026, the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday. In those 250 years of existence, in comparison, there are 247 years of enslavement. Then, there is de facto enslavement, called Jim Crow or American Apartheid, that lasts for at least another 100 years. So, there is no way that America was born, existed, or its story told without the story of Black people, and for most of us, our saga from enslavement to liberation, and from hardships to overcoming. To remove the histories and narratives of Black people in North America is like removing the heart from a living body, and along with its heart, it also loses its soul. The body and its story without Black history is really a dead and empty narrative and will remain so until America dares to tell the whole story.
The American narrative is the statue of Liberty greeting scores of people arriving at Ellis Island. The words on a bronze plaque invite: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. And in the statute’s left hand, in the form of a tablet, is the date July 4, 1776.
There is a limitation in knowing the full history of most Black people. This is because we were treated as property and given names for inventory – bought, sold, raped, and worked to death. Doing genealogies, there is usually a brick wall that Black families encounter. What we do know exists through oral traditions that attempt to teach and convey to us experiences and history in a world where we live and work but never existed.
The other story for me is before Ellis Island. My family arrived on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. This was a central marketplace and auction block for the precious and enriching cargo of Black people. When discussing my family with them, it appears from their narrative that they and their descendants were on the same plantation in South Carolina for at least 200 years, 46 years, more or less, before the existence of this historical country.
There have been ludicrous reasons presented for removing images and memories of slavery. One is that it makes white people feel guilty. The Trump/MAGA/white supremacist administration says that it is a “corrosive ideology,” which means that a new ideology is being fomented. Evidently, the current ideological narrative that includes slavery and overcoming that ordeal somehow eats away and corrodes the so-called American narrative. But in reality, it is the people who want to sanitize and de-color the real history of America who are being bothered and feel corroded. It is not that they are embarrassed by the brutal history of enslavement.
Still, for them, they embrace a politically racialized framework proffering that the history, experiences, and existence of Black people don’t really exist. This administration has proven how racialized it is. Their efforts through DOGE cost 350,000 Black women their jobs. Mobs called law enforcement, some in masks and with no identification, roam the streets removing Brown and Black immigrants. They have succeeded in some circles in criminalizing immigrants so that they could carry out their agenda of eliminating non-whites from the population. And not recognizing the presence and history of Black people is to render in perception, historical understanding, and official narrative the pronouncement and indoctrination that the United States is a white Christian nation without blemish or scar.
A scripture says that “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk to them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.” Our story will be told despite this racist agenda of erasure. We will talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. We will tell the story to future generations, and we will become loud about who we are, what we have experienced, how we have overcome the impossible with possibilities, and declare, no matter how hard we have been pressed down and ignored, in the spirit of Maya Angelou, “Still I rise!” And so will the history of our experiences rise to the heavens and invade all of American history, and we will not be erased.
Photo of a drawing by Magnus (pseudonym of Italian comic book artist Roberto Raviola) at Palazza del Fumetto Pordenone, Italy. Photo: Paul Cochrane.
Britain is no stranger to genocide. It has carried out many in the past, and today it is enabling another by being a willing participant in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians. Britain wants to hide its crimes by concealing the truth about all the ways it’s helping Israel commit genocide: by sharing its airbases, its intelligence, and generous arms exports, and by providing political cover. It is also trying to silence any pro-Palestinian activism by deeming non-violent civil disobedience, as carried out by Palestine Action, as a terrorist act, with support for the group punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
This increasingly censorial and Draconian approach follows a well-thumbed textbook used by the British establishment to deny, downplay, spin or hide the country’s role in conflicts and occupations across the globe—both historically, and more recently, especially when acting as the USA’s wingman during the ‘War on Terror’ decades.
Britain’s decision to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the US, as Prime Minister Tony Blair famously put it in 2001, at the start of the War on Terror, led to an immense toll on human life, with direct and indirect deaths estimated at 4.5–4.7 million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Yet Britain’s warmongering and its contribution to this horrific death toll is not hammered home by the legacy media in the same way as Russia’s war on Ukraine or the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel. By not doing so, the media is able to manufacture consent for Britain’s participation in the ‘Forever Wars’, and stifle any serious public debate about why the country has such a militaristic foreign policy. The media not exposing the UK’s bloody track record also allows prime ministers to get away unchallenged with rhetoric such as current leader Keir Starmer saying that “Britain is united, with Israel, against terror, for international law and the protection of innocent lives.”
It was a rare admission by Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch as to why Britain is standing shoulder to shoulder with the US and Israel when she blurted out: “Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK, just like Ukraine is on behalf of western Europe against Russia.” The proxy war is to “eliminate Hamas” and deal a blow to Britain’s “enemy”, Iran.
The underlying rationale here is that the Palestinians are not part of Western civilization – and are therefore untermenschen, ‘unpeople’, not worthy of the same rights or equality; and the corollary is that any opposition against the ‘West’ by them should be, and can be, violently repressed.
Britain’s imperial administrators considered those they ruled, and those fighting for freedom in Britain’s colonies, as ‘unpeople’, such as the violent repression of the Kenyans and Malaysians.
This mindset continued despite the end of the Empire and the rise of the American Empire as London scrambled to retain some form of global influence by siding with Washington.
Since the end of World War II, British foreign policy contributed, directly and indirectly, to the ‘deaths of between 8.6-13.5 million people, or around 10 million, according to Mark Curtis, founder of Declassified UK, in his book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses (2007).These figures do not, however, include the death toll from much of the War on Terror, with Curtis listing 10,000-55,000 killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and 15,000 to 25,000 killed in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Curtis lists British support for Israel from 2000 to 2007 being responsible for the ‘indirect deaths’ of 2,723.
To these figures should be added over 65,000 massacred in Gaza, possibly as high as 200,000, as research has indicated, and the Costs of War project figures for the War on Terror. Totaled up, Britain is directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of around 15 million over the past 80 years.
A further 38 million excess deaths (around 564,258 a year) from 1971 to 2021 due to unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union (which includes the UK), according to a study published in The Lancet, could be added to the toll. That would bring the total death toll of Britain’s support for wars and economic sanctions to a staggering 53 million.
As Curtis wrote: “Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945, including Nigerians, Indonesians, Arabians, Ugandans, Chileans, Vietnamese and many others. Often, the policies responsible are unknown to the public and remain unresearched by journalists and academics.”
There is a danger that, unless pressure is brought to expose the UK’s role in aiding and abetting genocide, and hold those responsible accountable, such atrocities will happen again and again. Britain’s role could also be forgotten about when the next war or crisis dominates the news, and the truth only known in decades to come when governmental archives are opened up (if, by then, there is still a Freedom of Information Act, and if key documents are not redacted for ‘national security reasons’). The USA will have taken most of the blame for bankrolling and supporting Israel’s brutality, with the UK’s role a mere footnote, as with so many Anglo-Saxon military ‘adventures’.
The amnesia around Britain’s crimes leaves no room for acknowledgment and culpability. Nor does it make space for a reckoning with the grisly truth. All of this silence erases our ability to understand why people resist and oppose invasions, occupations and Western hegemony.
In Iran, two nations in particular are considered troublemakers, the USA and Britain (warranting governmental minders for tourists from these countries, unlike other nationalities). This is typically attributed to the belligerent stance against the Islamic Republic since 1979, and the 1953 US and UK-backed coup against Mossadegh for nationalizing Iran’s oil and reinstating the Shah.
The reasons to dislike ‘perfidious Albion,’ however, go much further back – all the way to one of, if not the darkest chapter in Iranian history, one that was so devastating that British archives on the topic are reportedly still withheld from the public.
During Britain’s occupation of Iran in 1917-19, an estimated 8-10 million Iranians, roughly 40% of the population, died from famine.Dr Mohammad Gholi Majd attributes this staggering death toll to three things: Britain’s reallocation of food to the armed forces during World War I; Britain’s deliberate destruction of food supplies, so as to not let them fall into the hands of the Turkish enemy; and the deliberate policy to use land for cultivating cotton and opium as cash crops for export, rather than for growing food. It was Iran’s second devastating famine, with a third to follow, resulting in the loss of 25 million lives over a 75-year period, from 1869-1944. There are only two books on the topic, both by Majd, who drew from US archives and diaries, rather than British archives.
The Great Persian Famine and Britain’s perfidious role in it has been almost entirely forgotten. Other famines and atrocities during Britain’s empire have not been, but are nonetheless not given the attention they deserve, such as the Irish famine, which killed 2 million, and the Bengal famine in 1943 that killed some 3 million. Only in recent decades has more research unearthed the true cost of colonialism, such as Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, although a full audit has yet to be carried out.
Research into genocides in Australia reveal the staggering impact on the indigenous population. In the province of Victoria for instance, “within twenty years of settlement, the Aboriginal population of Victoria declined by eighty percent. As the British spread over the whole continent, countless nations were extinguished”.
In India, between 1880 and 1920 – the height of the British Raj – there were 100-165 million excess deaths, while trillions of pounds were plundered from the sub-continent. Figures for the colonisation of much of Africa, North America and other parts of Asia mean Britain has a bloody legacy of hundreds of millions of excessive, unnecessary deaths (and this does not include the death tolls of the World Wars or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
The victors write the history, and Britain has not had to reckon with its past. Its policies however do have lasting impact and repercussions, while the policies utilised during Britain’s imperial past are still in play. The Israelis are using ‘divide and rule’, land encroachment and dispossession, police harassment, cultural destruction, starvation and immense violence (among other policies) to achieve its colonial-settler ends.
There is also a historical arc from the genocides and colonial policies of the 19th century and earlier, to the first use of concentration camps by the British in South Africa, to Nazi Germany’s warmongering and the Holocaust. World War II was after all a war of imperialisms, brought to Europe’s shores rather than elsewhere – if Britain had an empire, why could not Germany? – with the non-Ayrans the untermenshen, as well as the non-whites of the world. Indeed, the war against the Palestinians is a continuum of that, and part of Britain’s legacy, as has been argued by the likes of Sven Lindqvist in his book Exterminate All the Brutes, and in Raoul Peck’s documentary series of the same title.
While history should not be forgotten – for how can we know how we got to where we are, and may be going? – the UK’s current actions and policies should be under intense scrutiny – and the government put under pressure – to stop the genocide in Gaza or risk Britain’s role being overlooked as in so many of its past atrocities, confined to the proverbial ‘dustbin of history’. Britain has for so long been on the ‘wrong side of history’, and if more people realised that, perhaps Britain would stand, finally, on the ‘right side of history’.
Amid the brouhaha over Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Russia’s threatening drones in Poland, Israel’s now confirmed genocide in Gaza and aggression against its neighbors, is it worth talking about the United Nations’ 80th anniversary? Counterintuitively, now is perhaps just the right moment. Calls for ceasefires and peaceful solutions to state-to-state fighting are similar to U.S. calls for depolarization and dialogue. The U.N.’s failures to secure international peace and security reflect U.S. domestic political failures to foster civilized dialogue and full human rights for all. At best, the U.N.’s 80th anniversary is a proper reminder of values beyond misplaced nationalism, tribal fidelity, and wanton violence. The U.N. should be proud it has lasted longer than the League of Nations, only 26 years, but conscious that as being 80 is critical for individuals, the U.N.’s 80th anniversary is critical for its continuing relevance.
The U.N.’s 80th anniversary
The U.N’s 80th anniversary focuses on attempts to revitalize the organization. The UN80 Initiative, launched in early 2025, is less a victory celebration of reaching the ripe age of 80 than an attempt at a serious reworking of an organization seemingly in intensive care on life-support. Institutions, like individuals, need constant re-energizing, and 80 years-old is a crucial moment. Officially, according to a March 2025 U.N. press release, “the ‘UN80 Initiative’ builds on ongoing efforts, including the Pact for the Future and UN 2.0, which aim to update the UN’s structures, priorities, and operations for the 21st century.” The Initiative “seeks to develop proposals in three key areas,” the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said; “identifying efficiencies and improvements, reviewing the implementation of mandates from Member States, and a strategic review of deeper, more structural changes and programme realignment.”
As with any private enterprise, the public U.N.’s reworking priorities begin with dollars and cents. First and foremost, the U.N. is in a financial crisis. “For at least the past seven years, the United Nations has faced a liquidity crisis because not all Member States pay in full, and many also do not pay on time,” Guterres explained. As of March 11, 2025, the press release noted, “only 75 of the 193 Member States have paid their assessed contributions in full towards the $3.72 billion 2025 budget for the Organization.”
Out of cash, unable to provide a primary function of securing peace and security in the Middle East and Ukraine, why shouldn’t the United Nations follow its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations?
A premature announcement of the U.N.’s death
But all should not be negative at reaching 80. An interview with Georges Abi-Saab, eminent legal expert, former professor and judge and friend of U.N. Secretary Generals, gave me the following three optimistic insights:
1) “The United Nations is the only universal forum which can express and legitimize the collective will of the international community,” Abi-Saab observed.As an example, the vetoed-blocked Security Council (SC) was able to condemn the recent strike on Qatar’s capital Doha even if it did not mention Israel. All 15 members of the Security Council agreed. Withstanding the SC blockage can be overcome by other means, Abi-Saab mentioned, such as the General Assembly’s Uniting for Peace Resolution as Richard Falk described in an interview with Daniel Falcone. (The United Nations Must Act in Gaza Under the Uniting for Peace Resolution (U – CounterPunch.org) Israel has until September 18, 2025, to comply with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice to withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territory, dismantle its settlements, and evacuate its settlers. If Israel does not comply, which it probably won’t, the General Assembly can implement several measures based on historical precedents. It could, for example, deploy a UN peacekeeping mission or civilian protection force; the United Nations does deploy 60,000 peacekeepers around the world.
2) “Talking about the successes and failures of the United Nations should not be limited to peace and security,” Abi-Saab noted. “Attention should be given to its lateral, specialized agencies such as those that deal with the environment.” Recently, the World Trade Organization (WTO) held a ceremony to celebrate the entry into force of a trade deal to curb subsidies for harmful fishing. At least two thirds of member states had to ratify the deal for it to enter into force, a significant victory for the environment and multilateralism. (Abi-Saab was a former president of the WTO Appellate Body Dispute Settlement Organ.)
3) “There are signs of resistance to Donald Trump’s anti-multilateralism, evidence of a coalition of the willing to counter Trump,” Abi-Saab explained. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), he added, is not an alternative multilateral structure to the U.N.; China is interested in smooth external state relations within the U.N. system while opposed to domestic criticisms coming from bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council. According to Abi-Saab, the SCO aims to create an alternative multilateral system of payments outside the dollar rather than replacing the United Nations system as a whole.
U.N. and U.S. renewal?
Is the inability of the United Nations to implement many of its guiding principles similar to failures within the United States? Where is a sense of community or common good internationally (Erga omnes)and domestically? While people complain about renewed populism/nationalism/isolationism hindering international cooperation, the assassination of Charlie Kirk reflects a lack of serious dialogue across the American political spectrum as well. There are obvious similarities between blocked international cooperation and polarization within the United States. Negotiation and compromise are essential between states as they are between people.
Speaking at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863 following the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln spoke of the possibilities for American renewal. “Four score and seven years” after the founding of the United States, Lincoln referred to a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The Preamble of the United Nations Charter begins “We the Peoples of the United Nations.” Lincoln emphasized people, the Preamble begins with peoples. And if Lincoln said that “this nation…shall have a new birth of freedom” some 80 odd years after it was “brought forth” by the Founding Fathers, the UN80 Initiative tries to give the only universal intergovernmental organization a new birth of freedom as well. When Lincoln said that “the government…shall not perish from the earth,” could the same be said about the United Nations? In only 57 countries/regions around the world do people have life expectancy above 80 years. Will the United Nations have a life expectancy and relevance after 80?
Conservatism isn’t about principles. It’s about preserving cruelty, hierarchy, and blood-soaked tradition. Image by Andrea De Santis.
What’s it like to always be wrong? You have to wonder, really, what it’s like to always be on the wrong side of history. We all know that acquaintance — the one who, when given two options, will always, without fail, pick the wrong goddamn one. The poor bastard who stands in the supermarket, eyes darting like a junkie rabbit, and still ends up in the line that moves slower than a Soviet bread line. The same schmuck who dissects a menu like it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls, only to order the dish that tastes like an ashtray soaked in cough syrup. Put a seemingly clear-cut choice in front of them and you know which way the house is betting with absolute certainty: whatever they pick, the opposite is salvation.
And that, in essence, is the conservative condition, a mutant gift for error masquerading as “principle.” Strip away empathy and compassion, and what’s left is this infallible divining rod for disaster. It’s one of the foolproof traits that has always kept me from even considering the Tucker Carlson-flavored red pill and falling into the sociopathic trench of conservatism: the sheer horror of being wrong every.single.time.
I suppose I can see the fentanyl appeal of clinging to the status quo. It’s safe, it’s warm, it’s the rancid blanket you’ve been dragging around since childhood, soaked in norovirus stains and nostalgia. Some hunter-gatherer must have looked sideways at the maverick who sprinkled rock salt on her mastodon steak and muttered, “We’ve always eaten it raw, why change now?” But there’s a substantial line between skepticism and suicide. When it’s so bleeding obvious the status quo is a flaming garbage barge sinking into a tar pit, insisting on “tradition” isn’t noble — it’s grotesque. It’s suicidal, or worse, ecocidal. It’s strapping yourself to the Titanic’s smokestack, singing Dixie to statues of traitors and calling it heritage.
Conservatives, Yahweh help them, would rather drown clutching the captain’s log than use those new-fangled lifejackets and swim to shore. And that’s why, from slavery to segregation, from witch trials to climate denial, from Jim Crow to Gaza, they are always there — standing squarely on the wrong side of the burning stage, waving the flag of tradition while the whole tent collapses on the crowd.
Conservatives don’t just pick the wrong line at the checkout counter — they pick the wrong war, the wrong massacre, the wrong blood-soaked “moral stand” every goddamn time. Slavery? They fought for it. Segregation? They bled cops and dogs into the streets to keep it alive. Women’s suffrage? They swore civilization would collapse if women so much as touched a ballot. Civil rights? They howled like rabid hyenas about “tradition” and “order” while black kids had to be escorted into schools under armed guard.
And now Gaza. Jesus Christ, Gaza — a 21st-century concentration camp where the children die first, crushed in rubble, starved in hospitals, bombed in breadlines. And still the conservatives line up like obedient meat puppets, chanting about “self-defense” as though history hasn’t already marked them for what they are: collaborators in carnage, cheerleaders of genocide. You can practically hear the bones of Pontius Pilate, J.Edgar, Kissinger, and the Gipper rattling in their graves, nodding along in approval.
They are wrong about restaurant menus, and they are wrong about genocide. They were wrong about apartheid, wrong about gay marriage, wrong about climate change, wrong about smoking, wrong about Galileo’s goddamn heliocentric solar system for Odin’s sake. And now, faced with the deliberate obliteration of an entire people, they remain predictably, fatally, obscenely wrong.
And what’s even more frightening is that they no longer even recognize they are wrong. There’s no more shame. It’s no longer a social scarlet letter to be an out-and-out racist, not if it’s wrapped in irony, a flag pin, and a pressed Brooks Brothers shirt. You can say that prominent black women do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously, that Martin Luther King Jr. was ‘awful’ and that America made a huge mistake when it passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, and be praised by the Vice President as he thumbs his dog-eared copy of Unhumans. You have to be a special kind of stupid not to grasp the benefit vaccines have given humanity, yet in today’s America, you can reject a century of science and still get booked for primetime on Fox or even land yourself a Cabinet job and be promoted to be United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Foxes are guarding the chicken coop, and the coop is already on fire.
To be one of these conservatives is to be embalmed while still breathing, wrapped in the bandages of tradition, scripture and hierarchy, pumped full of the formaldehyde of fear. It’s not politics, it’s necrophilia with history itself. The record is there, inked in blood and ash, page after grotesque page: always late, always loud, always dead wrong. The ongoing genocide in Gaza will be no different. Fifty years from now, schoolchildren will look back and spit on the names of the politicians, preachers, and pundits who not only allowed but justified this slaughter. And conservatives will shrug, as they always do, muttering about hindsight while fumbling for the next catastrophe to endorse.
Because that’s the conservative birthright: to pick the wrong side of the fire, to go down in flames clutching the lies, to mistake barbarism for order. Always wrong. Forever wrong. A movement built on the sacred art of being history’s punchline.
And let’s be clear in the madness of it all: this isn’t about supporting Hamas — a pack of fundamentalist zealots with duct-taped Kalashnikovs and martyrdom hangovers — nor is it about Capital, that bloated reptile conservatives bow to like altar boys at a golden calf, no matter its vice. No, this is about human rights, the most basic law of the jungle — don’t murder children and call it justice, don’t turn hospitals and other designated safe places into tombs and call it security. History will carve it in neon fire across the sky: conservatives, once again, gnawing on the wrong side of the bone, smearing the Constitution in innocents’ blood like it was a disposable napkin and babbling about ‘order’ while the ghosts of the blameless circle overhead like vultures with flaming wings.
The fact that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has not brought felony charges against JPMorgan Chase as it did against the bank’s Madoff involvement, raises more questions about the heavy hand of Donald Trump—image by Leiada Krözjhen.
As the summer from hell fades to an anxious autumn, Americans’ worst dystopian nightmares have evolved into their daily reality. A 34-count felon, convicted unanimously by a 12-member jury, sits behind the Resolute Desk in the White House, barking out threats or actual orders to send troops to the streets of American cities—even though no emergency exists—as he files billion-dollar lawsuits against newspapers that fail to accept subservience to authoritarian rule.
Millions of Americans believe Trump’s increasing displays of force are to distract and redirect the public’s attention from the Trump administration’s refusal to release the now infamous “Epstein files”—a government archive built over two decades detailing why and how a college dropout named Jeffrey Epstein was able to defy the FBI and Justice Department under at least four presidents as he raped or sexually assaulted “over one thousand victims.” That victim count comes directly from a July 7 memorandum from Trump’s own DOJ and FBI. Many of Epstein’s victims were girls as young as 13 and 14 according to court filings.
That same July 7 unsigned memorandum from Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice and Kash Patel’s FBI revealed the shocker that these taxpayer-financed federal law enforcement agencies would not be releasing the most critical Epstein files to the American people: Documents that would show the names of everyone who financed Epstein’s sick lifestyle for decades and the written reports given by Epstein’s victims to the FBI detailing how they were trafficked to Epstein’s clients or pals at his luxury residences in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico, Paris, U.S. Virgin Islands, and potentially, other locations.
The contours of the Epstein coverup by the Trump administration took on greater clarity on Tuesday, September 16, when FBI Director Patel testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and provided a stunning new narrative. Patel is now effectively calling Epstein’s victims liars on their allegations that Epstein trafficked them to his rich or powerful pals for sex.
This new narrative from Patel comes notwithstanding that some of the victims making these allegations have provided sworn statements and/or sworn depositions naming the men that Epstein trafficked them to; notwithstanding that Prince Andrew has settled one case and was stripped of his military titles by the late Queen Elizabeth; notwithstanding that a former top executive at JPMorgan Chase, Jes Staley, has admitted to sleeping with a woman who was trafficked by Epstein; and notwithstanding that there are multiple eyewitnesses to some of Epstein’s sex parties with trafficked girls.
Patel was sworn in for the September 16 hearing. That puts him in legal jeopardy if it can be shown that he intentionally perjured himself on a multitude of his answers that were deemed suspect to members of the Committee.
It should be noted that Patel had zero criminal law enforcement experience when he was tapped by Trump to head the 36,000-person FBI.
When asked during the Senate Judiciary hearing by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) who Epstein had trafficked his victims to, Patel stated this: “There is no credible information, none. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals. And the information we have, again, is limited.”
The evidence is not limited. The July 7 joint memorandum from the DOJ/FBI stated that the Justice Department has “300 gigabytes” of data on the case. That’s the equivalent of 19.5 million Word documents. Thus far, the Justice Department has turned over approximately 34,000 documents to the House Oversight Committee.
Two already revealed clients of Epstein, who paid him $170 million and at least $100 million, respectively, according to court and Senate Finance Committee documents, are Leon Black, former CEO of the private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, and Leslie Wexner, former Chairman and CEO of the retailing juggernaut, L Brands, which owned Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works among numerous other retail chains at one time or another.
Both Black and Wexner have been named by Epstein’s victims as men he trafficked them to. Both men have denied the charges. Black paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle its investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking on the secluded island compound he owned there and Black’s involvement in it.
Epstein, Wexner and Black all had accounts at the same financial institution—JPMorgan Chase. This bank is both a trading juggernaut on Wall Street as well as owning the largest federally-insured commercial bank in the United States—Chase Bank, which operates over 5,000 branches from coast to coast. Chase Bank takes in saving deposits from unsuspecting moms and pops working in the corn fields of Iowa to the fishing villages of Maine.
We use the term “unsuspecting” mom and pop depositors because in 2013 the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 300-page report documenting how JPMorgan Chase had used deposits from its federally-insured Chase Bank to gamble in derivatives in London and lose “at least” $6.2 billion. Scandals and crimes at JPMorgan Chase are so ubiquitous that they require their own name by the business press. This one was called the “London Whale.”
Credit for resurrecting the trading/banking structure that brought down the U.S. financial system after the Wall Street crash of 1929 goes to the Wall Street cozy Bill Clinton administration. It repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 that had barred commercial banks from merging with trading firms on Wall Street for 66 years. That repeal allowed Wall Street’s trading houses to merge with the largest taxpayer-backstopped, deposit-taking banks and become unruly behemoths. It took just nine years after the repeal of Glass-Steagall for Wall Street to blow up the mega banks in the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve has been quietly propping up these mega banks with tens of trillions of dollars in bailouts ever since.
JPMorgan Chase settled the London Whale abuses with its regulators in September 2013 for $920 million. The ink was barely dry on those agreements when the bank in January 2014 admitted to two felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over the bank and its predecessors laundering money for decades for the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history—the one operated by Bernie Madoff.
The way that JPMorgan Chase facilitated money laundering for Epstein sounds uncannily similar to how it facilitated money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff. Both Epstein and Madoff used JPMorgan Chase as their primary bank according to court records. And the bank made multi-million dollar loans to both men.
FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos said this in a formal statement when the two felony counts were lodged against JPMorgan Chase in 2014 over its Madoff conduct:
“J.P. Morgan failed to carry out its legal obligations while Bernard Madoff built his massive house of cards. Today, J.P. Morgan finds itself criminally charged as a consequence. But it took until after the arrest of Madoff, one of the worst crooks this office has ever seen, for J.P. Morgan to alert authorities to what the world already knew. In order to avoid these types of disasters in the future—we all need to be invested in making our markets safer and more equitable. The FBI can’t do it alone. Traders, compliance officers, analysts, bankers, and executives are the gatekeepers of the financial industry. We need their help protecting our markets.”
Let that carefully sink in for a moment. JPMorgan Chase, then and now headed by media darling Jamie Dimon (as both Chairman and CEO) was simultaneously laundering money for two of the biggest criminal masterminds in U.S. history. Exactly what was it that these two Machiavellian marauders found so comforting about running their financial affairs out of JPMorgan Chase? The answer is more than likely found in a three-letter acronym—SAR, short for Suspicious Activity Report. If you were running illicit billions of dollars through the bank, and generating big profits for the bank, that pesky detail of filing those SARs in a timely fashion with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as legally mandated, somehow gets forgotten at the bank, at least in both the Madoff and Epstein cases.
Despite enormous red flags on weird money transactions, JPMorgan Chase failed to file any Madoff-related Suspicious Activity Reports until Madoff confessed to his crimes in December 2008 after being turned in to prosecutors by his sons. What the bank did do, however, was to blow the whistle not to law enforcement in its home country but to a foreign regulator. On October 29, 2008, according to the Justice Department, JPMorgan filed a report with regulators in the United Kingdom, telling them that Madoff’s portfolio returns, as reflected on its clients’ statements, were “probably” “too good to be true.”
According to a federal court filing in 2023 by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein trafficked underage girls for rape and sexual abuse at his luxury island compound, JPMorgan Chase processed 9,000 transactions totaling $2.4 billion for Epstein from 2005 through 2019, without ever filing the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). From 2008 on, Epstein was a registered sex offender, a fact known to the bank according to internal emails obtained in discovery and filed with the court. Epstein was also taking tens of thousands of dollars each month in hard cash from his accounts at JPMorgan Chase. The bank waited until after Epstein’s death in 2019 to file its SARs.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, part of the Justice Department, criminally charged JPMorgan Chase for its Madoff-related crimes in 2014 and made it pay $1.7 billion to the victims of Madoff’s fraud. We’ve heard nothing from that same office about charging the bank for its involvement for at least 15 years in Epstein’s money laundering to facilitate his sex crimes against children.
Just Epstein and one of his procurers, Ghislaine Maxwell, have been charged by federal prosecutors. Epstein died in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. The New York City Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for “heinous crimes against children,” including sex trafficking. She was moved this year from a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida to a minimum-security, dormitory style facility in Bryan, Texas following her bizarre interview by Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, now the Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department. In that interview, Maxwell said she never saw anything inappropriate by Trump. What is inappropriate to a woman capable of heinous sex crimes against children and what is inappropriate to decent Americans may be very different things.
The fact that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has not brought felony charges against JPMorgan Chase as it did against the bank’s Madoff involvement, raises more questions about the heavy hand of Donald Trump, dating all the way back to his first administration.
In Trump 1.0, Geoffrey Berman was the U.S. Attorney in the SDNY when Epstein was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges after getting a sweetheart deal in Florida 11 years earlier that saw him serve just 13 months in a work-release program at the county jail. But Berman was not willing to be the easily-molded lieutenant that Trump demanded of his lackeys. So late on a Friday evening, June 19, 2020, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr told a lie to the American people: Barr announced that Berman was resigning his post as U.S. Attorney for the SDNY. As for who was going to replace Berman, Barr wrote this: “I am pleased to announce that President Trump intends to nominate Jay Clayton, currently the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to serve as the next United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”
Leaving Barr with egg all over his face, two hours later Berman released his own statement indicating that Barr had just told a brazen lie to the American people. Berman’s statement was this: “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.”
The following day, Barr issued another statement indicating that Donald Trump was removing Berman from his post but would leave Berman’s Deputy in charge of the office on an interim basis. Barr had stated the prior Friday evening that he would be putting in Craig Carpenito, the sitting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, as acting head of the office until Clayton could be confirmed by the Senate. The acknowledgement by Barr that Berman’s Deputy would be allowed to fill the post until a confirmation occurred appeased Berman and he agreed to step down.
Clayton had never served a day as a criminal prosecutor at a state or federal level. At the time of Clayton’s confirmation hearing in 2017 to serve as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Clayton was a partner at Wall Street’s go-to law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, which had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street mega banks, including JPMorgan Chase.
At the time of Berman’s dismissal by Trump, JPMorgan Chase was under criminal investigation by that office. And JPMorgan had notched a third felony count in its belt having been criminally charged in 2015 for rigging foreign currency markets as part of a cartel. Once again, the bank was handed a deferred prosecution agreement by the Justice Department and Jamie Dimon was left in place as Chairman and CEO.
If Berman had remained in charge at the SDNY, this serial recidivist bank might not get, in the future, the deferred prosecution agreements it had received routinely in the past—where it is put on probation, pays a big fine, promises to go straight, then goes right back to its crime spree. (See its breathtaking Rap Sheet here.)
The U.S. Attorney for the SDNY has a long history of holding a big press conference with easels and big posters to illustrate clearly why it is charging a big Wall Street name with criminal acts. But there was no press conference this time around.
The attempted Friday night coup at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan put both Barr and Clayton under an unflattering spotlight. Both New York Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, indicated that they would not give the greenlight to Clayton’s nomination to move into the U.S. Attorney spot. Senator Lindsey Graham, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, indicated he would not move Clayton’s nomination forward without the approval of those two Senators, following a longstanding policy of the Judiciary Committee.
A majority of faculty from Barr’s alma mater, George Washington University Law School, sent a letter after the attempted coup stating that Barr’s actions “have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and of the Department of Justice.”
Following Trump’s presidential election win in November 2024, Trump wasted no time in resurrecting his effort to install Clayton as the top prosecutor and head of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY. Just nine days after the election on November 5, 2024, Trump nominated Clayton. Rather than being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Clayton is serving as the result of a federal court appointment.
In Trump’s world, there increasingly seems to be only three degrees of separation. After Leon Black’s relationship with Epstein was revealed, the Apollo Board of Directors hired an outside law firm to investigate. Black stepped down as CEO at Apollo and Jay Clayton, following his departure as SEC Chair, became Chairman and Lead Independent Director at Apollo Global Management. According to Apollo’s annual proxy filed with the SEC, Clayton was simultaneously serving as “a Senior Policy Advisor and Of Counsel to Sullivan & Cromwell.”
The July 7 joint memorandum from Trump’s DOJ/FBI said there was no evidence that any other third party should be charged with crimes related to Epstein. Another law enforcement office saw that quite differently. In late 2022 the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands filed a civil complaint against JPMorgan Chase in federal court in Manhattan. In a July 2023 Memorandum of Law arguing for partial summary judgment in the case, the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General made the following points regarding JPMorgan Chase’s active engagement in Epstein’s crimes:
“Even if participation requires active engagement…there is no genuine dispute that JPMorgan actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019. The Court found allegations that the Bank allowed Epstein to use its accounts to send dozens of payments to then-known co-conspirators [redacted] provided excessive and unusual amounts of cash to Epstein; and structured cash withdrawals so that those withdrawals would not appear suspicious ‘went well beyond merely providing their usual [banking] services to Jeffrey Epstein and his affiliated entities’ and were sufficient to allege active engagement.”
David Boies, an attorney who also sued JPMorgan Chase in 2022 on behalf of Epstein’s victims, alleged in a court filing that the bank had even used the corporate jet of its hedge fund, Highbridge Capital, to transport Epstein’s victims for sex trafficking purposes.
JPMorgan Chase ended up settling the Boies case on behalf of victims for $290 million while paying the U.S. Virgin Islands $75 million to settle its case to avoid a public jury trial and the details of its behavior being aired in a public courtroom.
This summer of madness shows no signs of relief as Americans move into the darkening skies of autumn. A 2003, leather bound, 50th birthday book of notes and sketches celebrating the life of the worst sex trafficker of underage girls in U.S. history, has been released to the public after having its existence exposed by the Wall Street Journal (which Trump is suing for $10 billion). Among the depraved writings and scribblings by Epstein’s powerful debauchery cabal is one allegedly signed by Donald Trump. The text attributed to Trump is placed inside the outline of a headless, armless, naked woman’s body and includes this prophetic sentence: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump, whose propensity for falsehoods is now legendary, denies writing or signing this birthday card, even after the birthday book in which it was professionally bound 22 years ago, was subpoenaed and released by the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer. The book came directly from the Epstein estate.
The birthday note from Wexner to Epstein, professionally bound into the same 22-year old book, is a sketch of a woman’s breasts with this text: “Dear Jeffrey. I wanted to get you what you want, so here it is….Happy Birthday Your friend Leslie.”
On July 23, 2023 we sent the following email to the Public Records department at taxpayer-subsidized Ohio State University, where Wexner’s name adorns the Medical Center and Arts Center. The request was made under the state’s sunshine law:
This is a request under the Ohio Public Records Act…
We have recently been reporting on disturbing ties between Leslie Wexner, the former long-term Chairman and CEO of The Limited, subsequently renamed L Brands, and Jeffrey Epstein, a man with a detailed history of sexual assaults of underage girls who was indicted in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Justice for sex-trafficking of underage girls, was a registered sex offender, and previously served jail time in Florida for sex with a minor.
Mr. Wexner’s ties to Epstein were extensive: the L Brands corporate jet ended up being owned by Epstein; Wexner’s ownership of a mansion on the upper East Side of Manhattan was transferred to Epstein; a 10,600 square foot home in New Albany, Ohio that was previously owned by Wexner was transferred to Epstein; Epstein held a power of attorney for Wexner’s financial dealings from approximately 1986 to 2007, and so forth.
Given this history between the two men, and the fact that Wexner’s name adorns numerous buildings at Ohio State University and that Wexner has been a large donor to Ohio State University’s facilities, we seek the following records:
(1) copies of any investigative reports conducted by, or on behalf of, Ohio State University into the relationship between Wexner and Epstein;
(2) copies of any investigative reports into the relationship between Wexner and Epstein conducted by the law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, or Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
(3) any communication, electronic or written, that was provided by Leslie Wexner or his representative to Ohio State University (or has come into its hands) that provided Wexner’s version of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
After more than a month of prodding by us, we received the following response from Ohio State University:
“The university has found no responsive records to your request. In 2020, the university completed a review of giving by Jeffrey Epstein. The results of that review, along with public records associated with that review, can be found here: https://news.osu.edu/statement-from-the-ohio-state-university-regarding-completion-of-jeffrey-epstein-review/.”
Last week, we came by another curious piece of information involving Wexner. After the U.S. Virgin Islands filed their federal lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, one of the documents they obtained in discovery and filed with the court was a list of the “Epstein-related” accounts that Epstein oversaw at the bank. In addition to multiple accounts with the name Wexner, there were two accounts called “Ranch Lake II” and “Ranch Lake III.” The JPMorgan Chase document described these accounts like this: “Jeffrey Epstein is a longstanding client. He has established these C corps. to hold property in Colorado and to pay staff and maintenance cost.”
Documents at the Colorado Secretary of State’s archive of business entities in the state show that Ranch Lake II and Ranch Lake III share the same address in New Albany, Ohio as the Wexner Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Leslie Wexner.
As far as we are aware, properties in Colorado have never been disclosed or investigated as a place where Epstein might have abused his victims or trafficked them for abuse by others.
A drawing from 2003 Epstein 50th Birthday Book, released by the House Oversight Committee, September 2025. Author of drawing not identified. This sketch vivifies how Epstein’s crowd all knew what he was doing.
On July 7, the Justice Department and FBI announced that billionaire Jeffrey “Epstein harmed over one thousand victims” – mostly young females, many of them underage. But those thousand victims vanished when President Trump announced the Epstein scandal was a “hoax” and a conspiracy by the Democratic Party.
Happily, neither Congress nor the media have kowtowed to Trump’s order to “move along, nothing to see here.” Trump’s credibility has already taken a wallop from his Epstein connection and coverup but far worse damage could be around the next bend.
Last week, the New York Times delivered the “full story of how America’s leading lender enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator.” JPMorgan Bank continued assisting Epstein’s crime sprees long after he pled guilty and spent time in prison for soliciting a minor for prostitution. That sentence was part of a sweetheart deal that involved granting him and all his co-conspirators immunity for all federal charges.
Epstein’s case exemplifies how federal law doesn’t apply to the financial elite. In 1970, Congress enacted the Bank Secrecy Act, making it a crime for banks to keep secrets from the government. Banks were required to file a federal report for any cash transaction exceeding $10,000. The IRS has devastated many small businesses for inadvertently violating that law, as I detailed on Sunday in a New York Post piece.
Epstein was pulling out $800,000 in cash each year from the bank, “much of which was used to procure girls and young women,” the Times details. Shortly after Epstein’s death in a New York prison cell, in late 2019, JPMorgan “filed a report with federal regulators that retroactively flagged as suspicious some 4,700 Epstein transactions — totaling more than $1.1 billion.” Banks are obliged to make such reports within 60 days of the suspicious activity but JPMorgan was 17 years late with some of those reports. Never mind.
Those financial crime potential alerts included “hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women” brought to the U.S., according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). But Epstein never paid a cent in penalties for the belatedly reported squirrelly dealings that would have doomed average Americans if the IRS targeted them.
Epstein used a $7.4 million transfer from his JPMorgan account “to buy a green Sikorsky helicopter to fly people to Little Saint James,” his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Times noted that JPMorgan “was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him.”JPMorgan has paid more than $350 million to settle lawsuit claims from Epstein victims.
After Epstein served time for his child sex crime, JPMorgan paid him $9 million in 2011.“The fact that he remained a client in good standing conferred on him respectability and helped him foster new ties to corporate elites,” the Times noted.After his prison term, Epstein helped arrange a meeting between “JPMorgan’s investment bankers in Israel” and Bibi Netanyahu.Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, was the daughter of legendary Mossad operative and British publisher Robert Maxwell.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) are leading the push for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a congressional edictthat would compel federal agencies to speedily disclose all they have on theEpstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The White House is fighting tooth-and-nail to block their resolution.
Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act(PETRA)to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to give Senate investigators the Suspicious Activity Reports tied to Epstein and his co-conspirators within 30 days. Wyden notes that those files “detail Epstein transactions totaling at least $1.5 billion dollars, and they include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the identities of individuals whose involvement with Epstein may put them at risk of blackmail or other foreign corruption.”Wyden commented: “In this era of misinformation, these reports are the coin of the realm.” Wyden and his staffers have been pursuing the Epstein case for more than three years.
Uncovering the sourcesand beneficiaries of Epstein’s tainted windfalls could break the dam on the scandal. Trump’s Justice Department is seeking to stonewall all further disclosuresby touting their devotion to protecting Epstein’s underage victims.But there are plenty of ways to disclose damning information without re-tormenting those females.
The Trump administration is using shameless pretexts to withhold a vast trove on Epstein’s crime sprees just like the Biden administration covered up racketeering by the Biden crime family. A 2023 House Oversight Committee analysis exposed “the Biden family’s pattern of courting business in regions of the world in which the then Vice President had an outsize role and influenced U.S. policy.” The Committee asserts the Bidens and their associates “established a network of over 20 companies” that collected at least $10 million from abroad. “The Bidens took steps to hide, confuse, and conceal payments they received from foreign nationals,” the Committee reported. Banks and other entities filed 170 suspicious-activity reports tied to foreign payments the Biden family or their associates allegedly received. But the Treasury Department blocked congressional access to the Biden dirt.
Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, declared, “The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t.”Are federal banking laws mere pretenses to empower prosecutors to punish wayward citizens as they please while letting the biggest and richest violators skate free?
The New York Times’ bombshell last week focused primarily on JPMorgan’s inside operations.Can members of Congress deliver a similar blockbuster on the Epstein-related conniving in the White House, the Treasury Department, and other federal agencies? Can Congress compel disclosure of why Epstein and all his co-conspirators were given blanket federal immunity in 2007 for their sex crimes?
Trump’s Epstein shenanigans are draining his support from MAGA.How many more disclosures of items such as Trump’s birthday card can Trump’s credibility survive?And will disclosing Epstein’s dirt finally explain why some U.S. politicians have scorned America’s national interest?
An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.
Photograph Source: Prime Minister’s Office – GODL-India
A strong economy is essential for becoming a superpower, a proven historical formula. India is projected to be the world’s second-largest economy by 2050, surpassing the U.S. However, obstacles remain. No region or country is actively supporting India’s efforts to overtake the U.S. as a global power. Even China would prefer a distant hegemon over a nearby one. Pakistan and even some Western nations oppose India becoming a superpower, a move that would give India a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, which India would rightfully demand and deserve, perhaps replacing the United Kingdom or France.
This commentary argues that the U.S. and India’s neighbors may actively hinder India’s rise as a superpower. The competitors and rivals have numerous options, including imposing tariffs and trade barriers, reducing the exports of Indian goods and services, withholding essential exports to India, and curtailing remittances from Indian workers. Suppose India continues to advance despite obstacles. In that case, some rivals might even encourage separatist movements in Khalistan, Kashmir, and the Northeastern states (Assam, Nagaland, and others), which have tenuous geographical, ethnic, and cultural ties to the mainland.
This analysis does not suggest a global conspiracy or active collusion against India. Instead, it highlights possible strategic moves within the contested space that India’s competitors and rivals recognize but do not openly voice, which is the most effective form of complicity. Though the comparison is somewhat unreal, just as the fall of the Soviet Union diminished Russia’s global influence and economic weight, strategies targeting India’s economy and territorial cohesion involve similarly high stakes. This article does not address whether India will succeed in overcoming resistance to become the second-largest global economy.
Western Perspectives
Geopolitical arguments that are valid in one era might not hold true in another. Consider three reasons why the Western perspectives on India’s rise as an economic superpower are no longer supported. Losing the active backing of Western allies would be a significant setback for India.
First, free trade faces growing pressure. In theory, nations buy and sell without tariffs or quotas. The World Trade Organization (WTO) rests on principles that promote open trade. Yet, India and other countries often seek to export more than they import to shield domestic industries. This protectionism, clashing with WTO ideals, is also expanding in the West and could cause substantial harm to India.
Second, Western policymakers once supported India’s trade privileges by pointing to its democratic credentials. That logic is losing relevance. In today’s competitive landscape, democracy does not entitle a country to concessions that undermine U.S. or European economies, just as autocracy no longer disqualifies trade partners when mutual interests align. The form of government is no longer decisive; what matters is the economic advantage.
Third, for decades, Western strategy rested on strengthening India as a counterweight to contain China. That policy is under review. India itself shows little willingness or capacity to shoulder that burden. Supporting India risks creating a rival that might outpace the U.S. If both China and India rise to occupy the top two spots in global economies, the U.S. would fall to third, with Western Europe even further behind. At that point, the world’s economic center of gravity would shift decisively eastward. Resisting India from overtaking the U.S. makes far more sense strategically than clinging to the illusion that India can restrain China, an unstoppable economic superpower. However, this clarity has not yet moved beyond doubt.
India By 2050
The idea that India will surpass the U. S. in its share of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050 has attracted a lot of attention in long-term economic forecasts. GDP is the total monetary value of all goods and services produced within a country for one year. Global GDP is the sum of all individual countries’ GDPs. In 2025, the U.S. accounts for about 25% of the world’s GDP, while India makes up roughly 4%. China is close to 18%. For now, India is far behind China and the U.S.
The likelihood of India surpassing the U.S. is drawn on projections from reputable institutions such as PwC and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Analysts emphasize the difference between nominal GDP, measured in current U.S. dollars, and purchasing power parity (PPP), which adjusts for cost-of-living differences and often provides a more accurate measure of economic strength in emerging markets. On a PPP basis, India has a realistic chance, estimated at 70–80%, of surpassing the U.S. by 2050 to become the world’s second-largest economy after China.
These projections assume annual growth rates of 5–6%, supported by India’s large working-age population, expanding digital infrastructure, and ongoing reforms. If growth rates remain steady, India’s economy could reach $15–25 trillion by mid-century. Meanwhile, slower U.S. growth of 1–2% annually might allow India to close the gap more quickly. Nevertheless, these scenarios heavily depend on India’s ability to sustain reforms and address structural challenges.
India’s Oil Trade
India’s top five exports include refined petroleum ($55-79 billion), generic pharmaceuticals ($21 billion), diamonds ($20 billion), telephones ($19 billion), and jewelry ($12 billion). India maintains a trade surplus with 151 countries worldwide, including the U.S., showing it has successfully developed foreign markets to sell more products than it imports, resulting in a surplus.
India runs trade deficits with Russia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, all major oil producers. Because domestic crude production is insufficient, India imports heavily to meet its internal energy demand. Yet India has converted this weakness into its top export. It buys crude oil, refines it into petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, and then exports these, forming the largest share of its trade surplus. India now operates some of the world’s largest oil refineries.
The U.S. has increasingly criticized India’s trade in refined petroleum derived from Russian crude, framing it as indirect support for Russia’s economy amid the Ukraine conflict. This scrutiny has intensified with targeted measures, such as U.S. tariffs on Indian refined petroleum exports and threats of sanctions against major refiners like Reliance Industries, which reportedly earned $5 billion from Russian oil imports in 2024. The U.S. actions aim to curb India’s oil trade surplus, which constitutes the largest source of its export revenue, thereby posing a strategic challenge to India’s economic ascent. By undermining India’s largest export sector, the U.S. seeks to slow its trajectory toward becoming the world’s second-largest economy.
U.S. Shift
In his second term (2025-29), President Trump’s sharp turn toward a confrontational stance with India has startled many observers, since earlier administrations cultivated closer ties. Yet this shift becomes more understandable in the context of economic rivalry. India openly aspires to surpass the United States in global GDP rankings, and Washington sees no advantage in facilitating that outcome. If India continues running a growing trade surplus with the U.S., the American economy gains little while risking its own relative decline.
India’s goods trade surplus with the U.S. reached above $45 billion in 2024, a 5.9 percent increase ($2.6 billion) compared to 2023. The U.S. has a small trade surplus of $100 million in services. India is thus a net gainer by a vast margin. The U.S. wants India to open its markets for American agricultural products, but India is reluctant because it doesn’t want to harm its domestic agriculture, which supports millions of people.
The U.S. is unlikely to compromise its exports in the name of free trade or democratic solidarity and allow India to benefit from its unequal views on trade reciprocity. High tariffs on Indian goods make sense not only for trade balance reasons but also strategically to slow India’s progress to the second spot. U.S. manufacturing companies are being asked to relocate from China to India, a move that does not align with the U.S. strategy to prevent India from surpassing the U.S. in global rankings.
Additionally, the U.S. has little interest in allowing Indian immigrants to send substantial amounts of money back to India, which fuels the Indian economy. “Indians . . . received nearly two-thirds of H-1B temporary visas for highly skilled workers issued in 2023.” The U.S. may reverse this policy to reduce Indian remittances. Sending illegal Indian immigrants back to India on U.S. Air Force aircraft reflects President Trump’s views on illegal immigration. It takes on a different meaning when considered in the context of slowing cooperation with India.
Evidence now shows that the U.S. has decided not to treat India as a counterbalance to China. If India succeeds in surpassing the U.S., it may shift policy and team up with China to weaken U.S. influence regionally and globally. President Trump will not attend the Quad meeting in India, an alliance of the U.S., India, Australia, and Japan. The Quad is meant to contain China. But if the goal is to stop India, the Quad does not make sense.A massive demonstration against Indian immigrants in Australia is also an early signal of the Quad’s diminishing value. India-sponsored assassinations in Canada and the U.S. have also been identified and condemned.
A pattern of facts and policies is emerging, indicating that the U.S. is trying to build multiple barriers to prevent India from becoming the world’s second-largest economy before the U.S.
The shifting tone of U.S. foreign policy is evident. Trump invited Pakistan’s Army Chief to lunch at the White House after a brief India-Pakistan short war (May 7-10, involving Operation Sindoor by India and retaliatory strikes by Pakistan). Trump even insinuated that India lost several planes during the military clash with Pakistan. Sensing a deterioration in U.S.-India relations, Pakistan nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for halting the war. Courting Pakistan, the prime rival of India, is more than cosmetics or a tactic to wring trade benefits from India. This move seems like a strategic hedge against India’s ascent.
Regional Rivalry
India, once seen as South Asia’s natural leader, is gradually losing influence to China, whose economic investments and strategic alliances are reshaping regional dynamics. China’s rapid rise as a global economic and military power has given regional countries more options between India and China. China now appears to surpass India in establishing relationships that were supposed to be under New Delhi’s control. Countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal—neighbors India long thought fell within its sphere of influence—are increasingly leaning toward Beijing. China’s investment policy often leads to debt traps. Still, nations accept it for short-term gains. Meanwhile, India’s method of using economic sanctions to change other countries’ behaviors is seen as disrespectful.
The territorial disputes with both Pakistan and China have only intensified the geostrategic shift. The ongoing conflict over Kashmir strengthens the China–Pakistan alliance, creating a two-front challenge for India. Even more distant countries, such as Iran and Afghanistan, are being drawn into China’s growing sphere. In any future war with Pakistan, India would most likely face both Pakistan and China.
Meanwhile, the collapse of the pro-India Hasina Wajid government in Bangladesh has created fresh openings for China and Pakistan to exert pressure along India’s vulnerable eastern flank. Analysts warn that such developments, if unchecked, could even stir separatist currents among India’s nine northeastern states, where loyalty to the center has historically been fragile.
OIC Concerns
Among India’s adversaries, Pakistan remains the most persistent and troubling, with influence that extends well beyond South Asia due to its key role in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of fifty-seven Muslim-majority countries. During armed conflicts with India, Pakistan consistently gains moral, diplomatic, and sometimes even military support from some OIC members, though most Arab states remain neutral. Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have increasingly prioritized economic pragmatism, blocking stronger anti-India language in OIC forums.
Yet, India lacks a comparable group of states to rely on. Instead, its close relationship with Israel, which is strategic, alienates many Muslim nations that strongly support the Palestinian cause. This allows Pakistan to position itself not only as India’s regional rival but also as a religiously connected partner within a broader Muslim world.
However, the OIC is not only a political challenge for India; it is also a vital economic arena, though it does not function as a unified bloc like the European Union. Millions of Indian workers in Gulf states remit billions of dollars yearly, and trade with Muslim countries generates substantial revenue. India enjoys surpluses with several OIC economies, making these markets critical for growth. Gulf states regard India as both a promising investment destination and a trading partner.
India’s economic ties with OIC nations remain fragile due to two critical factors. First, the rise of Hindutva politics and policies perceived as targeting India’s Muslim minority, such as the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes certain Muslim groups, and the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy, have sparked condemnation in Muslim-majority capitals like Ankara and Kuala Lumpur. In 2020, the OIC issued a resolution criticizing India’s Kashmir policies, straining diplomatic relations.
The economic dimension exacerbates these tensions. Nearly eight million Indian workers in the Gulf remit about $50 billion annually, and India maintains a $60 billion trade surplus with OIC economies. If discontent over Kashmir or Hindutva politics deepens, Gulf governments could reconsider trade preferences or investment flows, undermining one of India’s most vital external revenue streams. Thus, religious and political disputes risk spilling directly into the economic sphere, exposing a vulnerability that could slow India’s global ascent.
Second, the ongoing rivalry with Pakistan means that the OIC states, despite their strong financial ties with India, cannot abandon Islamabad during armed conflicts. For them, Pakistan, despite its weak economy, remains a brotherly nation, connected by history, religion, and shared security concerns. Iran’s support for Pakistan in the May 2025 military conflict with India, disguised as mediation, surprised Indian foreign policy analysts. Turkey and Azerbaijan were even more open in siding with Pakistan, even though these countries have significant economic interests in India.
India finds itself caught in a complex paradox. Muslim nations value India as an economic partner and investment hub. Yet, India is mistrusted in a region where religious solidarity and historical grievances remain powerful forces. India’s rise as a global power will depend not only on countering China’s growing regional influence but also on managing the delicate currents of identity, religion, and rivalry that continue to shape South Asia. A foreign policy that relies heavily on coercion against smaller neighbors risks undermining the stability and goodwill that India needs for long-term economic and geopolitical success.
Conclusion
India is rapidly advancing to become the world’s second-largest economy by 2050. Once this milestone is reached, India will seek a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a position it deserves. The U.S. and other Western countries might see limited strategic advantage in this change. If China and India become the top two economies, the U.S. risks losing its long-standing economic dominance. This could accelerate the shift of geopolitical power toward Asia, challenging Western influence; however, India’s rivalry with China may complicate such a realignment.
Driven by strategic interests, the U.S. seems to be creating barriers to slow India’s emergence as a leading economy. Tariffs, criticism of India’s oil exports, H-1B visa restrictions, and closer US-Pakistan ties indicate reluctance to support India’s superpower ambitions. Caught between China and India, the U.S. policy of viewing India as an economic rival remains unclear.
The growth of Hindutva politics risks alienating OIC countries by increasing tensions over India’s Muslim minority and Kashmir policies, potentially harming economic relationships with Gulf nations. Although unlikely, prolonged unrest in Punjab, Kashmir, or the Northeast could weaken India’s unity. In the worst-case scenario, as rivals might imagine, India could face foreign-engineered secessions, which would significantly diminish its economic and political influence. Viewing these obstacles, India needs to review its regional and global policies.
Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this war with its brutal attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages. Israel, as any other country, had a right to defend itself from Hamas.
But, over the last two years, Israel has not simply defended itself against Hamas. Instead, it has waged an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people. Many legal experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Association of Genocide Scholars concluded that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.” The Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have reached the same conclusion, as have international groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Just yesterday, an independent commission of experts appointed by the United Nations echoed this finding. These experts concluded that: “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”
I agree.
Out of a population of 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has now killed some 65,000 people and wounded roughly 164,000. The full toll is likely much higher, with many thousands of bodies buried under the rubble. A leaked classified Israeli military database indicates that 83% of those killed have been civilians. More than 18,000 children have been killed, including 12,000 aged 12 or younger.
For almost two years, the extremist Netanyahu government has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza and thrown up every possible hurdle to the United Nations and other aid groups trying to provide lifesaving supplies. This includes an 11-week total blockade in which Israel did not permit any food, water, fuel or medical supplies to enter Gaza. As a direct result of these Israeli policies, Gaza is now gripped by man-made famine, with hundreds of thousands of people facing starvation. More than 400 people, including 145 children, have already starved to death. Each day brings new deaths from hunger.
But it is not just the human cost. Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s physical infrastructure. Satellite imagery shows that the Israeli bombardment has destroyed 70% of all structures in Gaza. The UN estimates that 92% of housing units have been damaged or destroyed. At this very moment, Israel is demolishing what’s left of Gaza City. Most hospitals have been destroyed, and almost 1,600 health care workers have been killed. Almost 90% of water and sanitation facilities are now inoperable. Hundreds of schools have been bombed, as has every single one of Gaza’s 12 universities. There has been no electricity for 23 months.
And that is just what we know from aid workers and local journalists — hundreds of whom have been killed — as Israel bars outside media from Gaza. In fact, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than have been killed in any previous conflict. The result: there is likely much we don’t know about the scale of the atrocities.
Now, with the Trump administration’s full support, the extremist Netanyahu government is openly pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. Having made life unlivable through bombing and starvation, they are pushing for “voluntary” migration of Palestinians to neighboring countries to make way for President Trump’s twisted vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Genocide is defined as actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The actions include killing members of the group or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The legal question hinges on intent.
Israeli leaders have made their intent clear. Early in the conflict, the defense minister said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” The finance minister vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed.” Another minister declared: “All Gaza will be Jewish … we are wiping out this evil.” Israeli President Herzog said, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Another minister called for, “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth.” Another Israeli lawmaker said, “the Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there — death. We have to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map. There are no innocents there.” Yet another Knesset member called for “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth.” And, just recently, a minister in Israel’s high-level security cabinet said: “Gaza City itself should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins.”
The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
I recognize that many people may disagree with this conclusion. The truth is, whether you call it genocide or ethnic cleansing or mass atrocities or war crimes, the path forward is clear. We, as Americans, must end our complicity in the slaughter of the Palestinian people. That is why I have worked with a number of my Senate colleagues to force votes on seven Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to stop offensive arms sales to Israel. The United States must not continue sending many billions of dollars and weapons to Netanyahu’s genocidal government.
Having named it a genocide, we must use every ounce of our leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid facilitated by the UN, and initial steps to provide Palestinians with a state of their own.
But this issue goes beyond Israel and Palestine.
Around the world, democracy is on the defensive. Hatred, racism and divisiveness are on the rise. The challenge we now face is to prevent the world from descending into barbarism, where horrific crimes against humanity can take place with impunity. We must say now and forever that, while wars may happen, there are certain basic standards that must be upheld. The starvation of children cannot be tolerated. The flattening of cities must not become the norm. Collective punishment is beyond the pale.
The very term genocide is a reminder of what can happen if we fail. That word emerged from the Holocaust — the murder of six million Jews — one of the darkest chapters in human history. Make no mistake. If there is no accountability for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals, other demagogues will do the same. History demands that the world act with one voice to say: enough is enough. No more genocide.
The Madleen before departure. Source: Tan Safi/Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
One needs only to examine the actions and rhetoric of the Israeli government to fully appreciate the profound significance of the solidarity flotillas bound for Gaza. As the latest and most significant of these efforts, the Global Solidarity Flotilla sets sail, Israel’s hostile discourse has intensified, articulated most forcefully by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The extremist minister has ominously declared that all the volunteers on board the Flotilla are “terrorists,” vowing that they will be treated as such. To grasp the chilling meaning of treating non-violent activists as terrorists, one must consider a recent investigation by The Guardian newspaper. The report exposed that of the 6,000 Palestinians detained in Gaza during the first 19 months of the genocide, all were held under a law that classifies them as “unlawful combatants,” thus terrorists, allowing for indefinite imprisonment.
This investigation revealed that the vast majority of those incarcerated by Israel are in fact civilians, including medical workers, teachers, journalists, civil servants, and children. The fact that Israel would extend this same draconian definition to international activists, whose declared mission is to break the siege on Gaza, powerfully underscores the political and strategic value of these missions in Israel’s eyes.
Israel’s deep-seated fear of civil society involvement in its military occupation and war on the Palestinian people is not a recent development. The ongoing genocide has merely highlighted the utter failure of the international legal and political system and, in turn, the rising importance of civil society.
When the first solidarity boat, sent by the Free Gaza Movement, reached Gaza in 2008, Israel was incensed. The activists served as crucial ambassadors, educating their communities about the Israeli siege on the Strip. Tel Aviv’s response to the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which included the MV Mavi Marmara, was lethal. Israeli commandos killed 10 activists, sending a stern message that Israel would not tolerate any interference, even from well-known and respected Western-based charities, in its war against the Palestinians.
Since then, treating activists as criminals has become standard operating procedure, bolstered by the fact that not a single Israeli has ever been held accountable for the outrageous violence against civilians. This, however, has not deterred solidarity activists, who have attempted to sail again and again – in 2011, 2015, and 2018. The eventual infrequency of these missions was not due to a lack of interest, but rather the fact that some European countries, in coordination with Israel, did everything in their power to prevent the activists from setting sail.
This dynamic has shifted dramatically with the current genocide. Solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza has surged and now dominates many European societies, eventually winning the support of various governments, including Spain, from which the latest Global Solidarity Flotilla has embarked. Starting from Barcelona, the boats are to be joined by others along the way. They will collectively carry vital supplies to Gaza, knowing full well that their chances of being intercepted and seized, along with their life-saving cargo, are far higher than their chances of reaching the besieged coastal Strip.
This stark reality has been reinforced by recent events. The Conscience flotilla, for instance, was targeted by drones off the coast of Malta last May. Meanwhile, the Madleen and Handala were seized and confiscated in June and July. Prior to the targeting of the Madleen, Defense Minister Israel Katz described Greta Thunberg, the renowned international activist who joined the flotilla, as “antisemitic.” He issued a warning: “You’d better turn back .. because you will not reach Gaza. Israel will act against any attempt to break the blockade or to assist terrorist organizations.”
This fury echoes the angry language and violent actions consistently used by Israeli governments against anyone or any entity that dares to challenge the Israeli siege on Gaza. But why such fury? These seemingly small, underfunded initiatives are, on their own, hardly enough to break the Gaza siege or to feed the two million people who are experiencing both a genocide and famine.
Israel is fully aware of the potent effectiveness of civil society action in the case of Palestine. In fact, most of the advocacy for Palestinian rights globally does not originate from those who purport to represent the Palestinian people, but from civil society at large. This includes a wide range of actions: political advocacy that lobbies governments, legal advocacy that holds states accountable to international law, economic pressure through divestment and boycott initiatives, cultural and academic boycotts, and massive grassroots mobilization.
The solidarity flotillas are therefore a powerful expression of how far civil society is willing to go to do the work that should have been the responsibility of governments and international institutions. Ben-Gvir’s explicit threat to treat activists as “terrorists” is a direct reflection of Israeli fears and, paradoxically, a powerful acknowledgment of the international solidarity movement’s growing influence.
While it is ultimately the Palestinian people, their sumud (steadfastness), and resilience that will defeat the Israeli stratagem, one must not underestimate the critical role of international solidarity. The freedom flotillas are not isolated acts to be judged based on their ability to reach Gaza. Instead, they are a vital piece of an intricate global process that will ultimately lead to Israel’s profound isolation on the international stage — a process that has already begun with considerable success.
If your house is not clean, then the ants will come through the door and draw in the snakes.
The crisis in Nepal escalated in early September, bringing down the center-right government of Prime Minister KP Oli. The immediate spur was the regulation and banning of social media on September 4. Protests over this action were met by police firing, which resulted in the killing of 19 protestors. This escalated into major manifestations, leading to attacks on the homes of politicians and the national parliament building as well as the presidential building.
Several narratives are circulating about the current upheaval, but two dominate:
Systemic governance failure: Years of unmet promises, corruption, and opportunistic alliances produced a legitimacy crisis not for this or that party, but for the establishment. The present upsurge is explained as a popular backlash due to the cumulative neglect.
Color Revolution thesis: That the protests are engineered by an external force, most of the fingers pointing at the United States and at the US Congress’ National Endowment for Democracy’s funding towards Hami Nepal (established in 2015).
Both theories make it easy for the stakeholders within Nepal to deflect responsibility – either onto foreign meddlers or onto a vague idea of the “political class”. There is no discussion in these theories of the underlying bourgeois order and its problems in Nepal: a century-long patronage economy, the control of land, finance, and government contracts in the hand of an oligopoly with close ties to the monarchy, and a growth paradigm depending on the export of migrant workers and of debt-financed infrastructural development. The structural sources of peoples’ grievances are flattened into simplistic, but evocative concepts such as “corruption” and “color revolution”.
Neither of these theories are totally incorrect or correct but are only partial and their partiality can be very misleading. This article cannot by itself correct that partiality, but it hopes to offer some ideas for discussion. The five theses below are intended only to frame the debate that we hope will be held not only over Nepal’s predicament, but that of many countries in the Global South.
Mismanagement of the opportunity
After the new Constitution was enacted in Nepal in 2015, there was immense hope that the broad left would be able to advance the social situation of Nepalis. Therefore, in 2017, the various communist parties won 75 percent of the seats in the national parliament. The following year, the larger communist parties joined together to form the Nepal Communist Party – although the unity was not very deep because the parties had their own structures and their own programs and could not truly form a unified party, but mainly a unified electoral bloc. The lack of a common program for communist political activity, and a common agenda to solve the people’s problems through the instrument of the State led to the dissipation of the opportunity provided to the left.
The unified party split in 2021, and since then the various left parties rotated in power, which people saw as individualism and opportunism. When the Home Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha (2023-2024) of the Maoist Center tried to use the instruments of the state to investigate corrupt practices – even in his own party – he was hounded out of office. Since 2024, the government in Nepal included a rightist fraction of the left (led by K. P. Oli) and the one fraction of the right (the Nepali Congress), which made it a center-right government. The long fight for democracy that began with the 1951 Revolution, deepened with the 1990 Jana Andolan, and then appeared to be cemented with the 2006 Loktantra Andolan only appears to be defeated, when in fact that long struggle will reappear in another form.
Failure to tackle the basic problems of the people
The problems in Nepal in 2015, when the new Constitution was adopted, were grave. A massive earthquake in Gorkha devastated the province, leaving over 10,000 people dead and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless. At least a quarter of Nepalis lived under the poverty line. Caste and ethnic discrimination created a great sense of despair. The Madhesh region along the Nepal-India border was particularly angered by the sense of disadvantages and then by an analysis of being further marginalized by the 2015 Constitution. Weak public healthcare and education – underfunded for a century – could not meet the aspirations of the emerging middle class.
The left governments did put forward various policies to address some of these issues, lifting large sections of the population from poverty (child poverty went from 36 percent in 2015 to 15 percent in 2025) and from infrastructural abandonment (electricity access now at 99 percent and a registered improvement in the Human Development Index).
There remains, however, a huge gap between the expectations and the reality, with inequality rates not dropping fast enough and migration at startlingly high levels. Corruption levels also remained too high in the country as corruption perceptions deteriorated (ranked 107/180 in 2024). Corruption, inequality, and inflation could not be contained by the government, which made very poor deals for trade and for finance (the return to the IMF’s Extended Credit Facility narrowed its fiscal possibilities).
The tendency to seek refuge in the idea of the Hindu Monarchy
The Nepali petty bourgeoisie, which sent their children to English medium schools, and often come from oppressed or “backward” Hindu castes are frustrated by the continual domination of upper castes and are inspired by the right-wing Hindutva petty bourgeoisie politics of India’s Uttar Pradesh, one of the states that borders Nepal. That is why there were many posters in the protests of Yogi Adityanath, a leader of India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the leader of the Uttar Pradesh government. This fraction of the population is also in the mood to “return” to monarchy, which is a Hindu monarchy. Several political forces back these tendencies, such as the pro-monarchy party (Rashtriya Prajatantra Party or RPP) and its broader allies (Joint Peoples’ Movement Committee – formed in March 2025 as part of the return to monarchy protests, Shiv Sena Nepal, Vishwa Hindu Mahasabha).
Since the 1990s, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the Indian RSS’s international affiliate, has quietly built shakhas (groups) and cadre since the 1990s. The HSS – along with a tentacular group of organizations such as the Shiv Sena and the RPP – has campaigned against secular policies and for a return to Hindu Raj. Rather than merely target secularism, the Hindutva bloc has focused attention on what it says is a revolving door of elites in Kathmandu that has held power ever since the monarchy was abolished in 2008. They frame their civilizational rhetoric around anti-corruption and charity, with mobilizations through Hindu festivals and through online influencers as well as selective outreach to marginalized and oppressed castes in the name of Hindu unity. This bloc, powerfully organized unlike the youth, has the capacity to seize power and to restore order in the name of the Hindu state and the monarchy, bringing back authoritarianism in the name of anti-corruption.
Tired of the Migration Escape Valve
If we ignore small countries such as Montserrat and Saint Kitts and Nevis, Nepal is the country with the highest per capita rate of migration for work. With a population of 31 million there are currently 534,500 Nepalis (recorded) who work overseas – 17.2 people per 1,000 Nepalis. The numbers have surged in recent years. In 2000, the recorded figure for Nepalis who obtained foreign employment permits was 55,000, now it is ten times higher. There was a new record in 2022-23 with 771,327 permits issued).
Large sections of youth are angry that they have not been able to meet their needs for employment within Nepal but are forced to migrate and often to horrible jobs. A terrible incident in February 2025 took place in Yeongam (South Korea), when a 28-year-old migrant, Tulsi Pun Magar, likely committed suicide because the employer at the pig farm where he worked kept revising the wage rate downwards. Tulsi came from the Gurkha community in Pokhara. In the wake of his suicide, reports came that 85 Nepalis have died in South Korea in the past five years, half of them by suicide. News of stories such as these increased the frustration and anger at the government. Online, many shared the sentiment that the government was more considerate of foreign direct investors than of its own migrants, whose investment in Nepal through remittances is far higher than any foreign capital.
The external influences of the United States and India
The center-right government of KP Oli had been close to the United States. Nepal had joined the US government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in February 2017, a decision by a left government that was hugely contested by large sections of the left. Due to the pressure from below, Nepal’s government stayed away from the MCC, but Oli’s center-right government welcomed John Wingle (Deputy Vice President of the MCC) to Kathmandu in August 2025 to hold talks about resumption of US aid and to discuss the continuation of infrastructural projects. Meanwhile, India’s far-right government of Narendra Modi sought to promote the role of the Hindu nationalist far right party in Nepal, which has thus far been at the margins. If there was any external activity in the 2025 protests, it is more likely that India, and not the US, had a hand in the events. However, even here, it is possible that the far-right wing in Nepal will merely take advantage of the collapse of the Oli government and the enormous sentiment against corruption.
It is important to recognize that no home or office of the RPP was attacked, whereas in March the RPP cadre attacked one communist office – a foreshadowing of what happened in September.
The army appears to have restored some calm in Nepal. But this is a calm that is one of disorder and danger. What comes next is to be seen. It will take time for the dust to settle. Will the army invite one of the online celebrities to take over such as Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah? The protestors have suggested Sushila Karki, who is a highly respected former Chief Justice of Nepal (2016-2017), who has made a career of being independent of political parties. These are caretaker choices. They will not have the mandate to make any significant changes. They will pretend to be above politics, but that will only disillusion people with democracy and plunge the country into a long-term crisis. A new Prime Minister will not solve Nepal’s problems.
Students for Quality Education (SQE) at CSU Sacramento Lobby Lawmakers.
Despite educator opposition to AB 715 (Zbur/Addis), the California Senate and Assembly passed a bill in the middle of the night on Saturday, September 13, 2025, to establish an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to police teachers during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Of course, no one in the state Assembly or Senate said the word “genocide” out loud, nor acknowledged the extent to which AB 715–if signed by the Governor–might chill educators or drive them from the profession during a teacher shortage, screaming, “I can’t take this anymore! Free Palestine!”
During the floor votes, Democratic lawmakers cited a litany of problems with AB 715 legislation that could target teachers for encouraging classroom debate on Israel/Palestine. The threat of false charges of antisemitism comes at a fraught time when The Daily Californian reports UC Berkeley turned over the names of 160 students to the Trump administration investigating alleged antisemitic incidents.
AB 715 co-authors Assemblywoman Addis (D-Morro Bay), Assemblyman Zbur (D-Hollywood), Assemblyman Gabriel (D-Encino) and Senator Wiener (D-SF) promised under pressure from colleagues that they would work with skeptics, like Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta, to “clean up” the bill after passage.
Grassroots activists with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace-Action (JVP-Peace-Action), Arab-Resource Organizing Committee (AROC), the American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee (ADC), Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC), and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters amplified those objections, while citing others below:
Objections to AB 715
#AB 715 disrespects Latino, Black, Indigenous and AAPI students by establishing a singular Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator in a newly formed Office of Civil Rights. The bill fails to designate a coordinator to address other forms of discrimination, instead linking to another bill (SB 48) that only “intends” at some indeterminate time–maybe never–to address other forms of discrimination, such as attacks on immigrant students whose families are being disappeared.
The authors of AB 715 reiterated four times the urgency of protecting Israeli students in CA, yet only mentioned once concerns about Black, Brown, Indigenous and AAPI students. The bill never mentions concerns over discrimination against Palestinian-American students whose families are being killed or displaced in Gaza and the West Bank during US-backed Israel ethnic cleansing. The words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were erased from the final iteration of the bill.
#AB 715 sets up Jewish students for resentment from other students who want and deserve equal protection under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
#AB 715 adopts backdoor censorship by failing to explicitly define antisemitism, while supporting the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a document that supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) conflation of constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
#AB 715 threatens to defund California public education by encouraging lawsuits from right-wing extremists who cite the bill’s language requiring all instruction be “factually accurate,” a requirement that could also result in fiction book bans.
#AB 715 requires school districts remove any book, article, film, resource material that the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator deems to be factually inaccurate. School districts that fail to take “corrective action” will be fined; their teachers threatened with dismissal.
#AB715 will siphon money from meeting urgent needs for lower class size, increased nursing staff and additional instructional resources to, instead, defend against lawsuits and implement a bureaucratic nightmare that privileges one group of students over all others and prioritizes one category of discrimination above all others.
Grandstanding
In a bizarre scene straight out of a Monty Python movie, the legislators-turned pastors-turned rabbis took to their pulpit or bimah to cheer for the establishment of an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator. This coordinator, to be appointed by the Governor, confirmed by a politically-beholden state Senate, would recommend strategies on antisemitism prevention beginning in transitional kindergarten with four-year-olds. The coordinator would also oversee teacher training that, despite legislators’ denials, would unconstitutionally link criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and elevate complaints against teachers to the California Department of Education (CDE) for school district scolding, compulsory remediation and potentially career-ending penalties.
Senator John Laird (D-SLO) told the Senate he had met with Palestinians who had concerns about AB 715, and received emails, 8-1, in opposition to the bill. Laid warned the Senate AB 715 would bankrupt school districts up and down California.
Then he voted for the bill, even though he plans to retire soon.
Senator Chris Cabaldon (D-Napa), a veritable ping pong ball, voted for AB 715 in the Senate Education Committee, but came out swinging against the bill in the Senate Appropriations Committee, only to take to the floor of the Senate to beat the drum for the expensive bureaucratic bloat he warned about previously.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said during an informational hearing on AB 715, “fool me once, don’t fool me twice,” to suggest the State School Superintendent candidate would reverse earlier support for the bill. Muratsuchi’s opponent in the Superintendent race, educator Nichelle Henderson had long ago declared her opposition to AB715.
The best Muratsuchi could do on the Assembly floor, however, was abstain, along with nine others in the Assembly and five others in the Senate. AB 715, the top priority for the Zionist Legislative Jewish Caucus and the Jewish Public Affairs Council (JPAC), passed the Senate and Assembly with zero NO votes, but 14 abstentions, which count as opposition votes because bills must pass with majority support of the entire body.
The 14 lawmakers who resisted the Israel lobby
Those who abstained in the Assembly included Arambula (D-Fresno), Caloza (D-Los Angeles), Elhawary (D-South Los Angeles), Garcia (D-Cucamonga), Kalra (D-Santa Clara), Lee (D-Milpitas), Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), Ortega (D-Hayward) and Solache (D-Paramount). Those who abstained in the Senate included Choi (R-Irvine), Cortese (D-San Jose), Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), a co-author of AB 715, Valladares (R-Valencia) and Wahab (D-Freemont).
“Despite overwhelming opposition from teachers unions, civil rights groups, and education advocates across California, lawmakers advanced a bill that will silence Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Jewish and other marginalized voices in our classrooms,” reads a CAIR alert to “bombard the Governor” with calls and emails to veto AB 715. This is the same Governor Gavin Newsom who has his eye on the White House and whose office, according to AB 715 author Zbur, advised backers of the bill how to write the legislation.
Kari Aist, a public school teacher in Ventura, urged Newsom not to approve “racist censorship” legislation. “At a time when academic freedom is under attack across the country, California should not set a precedent for censorship. Do what you were elected to do,” she wrote to the Governor. “Protect our educational system and veto AB 715.”
Opponents vs. supporters of AB 715
California Teachers Association (CTA), California Faculty Association (CFA), California Federation of Teachers (CFT), Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), California School Boards Association (CSBA), California Nurses Association (CNA), ACLU and over 100 grassroots organizations opposed the bill.
In contrast, the bill was top priority legislation for JPAC (Jewish Public Affairs Council), which includes at least 40 organizations, chief among them the Jewish Federation, the JCRC (Jewish Community Relations Council), Mosaic United and the Anti-Defamation League. Although JPAC mobilized fewer people to testify in support at committee hearings, the umbrella organization that raises funds to elect pro-Israel candidates scored a home run with a story about a Jewish student whose schoolmates slapped a Nazi flag on his back.
“This kind of hateful incident needs to be addressed at the local community level with restorative justice, not by a state-level Orwellian censor,” said Christine Hong, member of the UC Ethnic Studies Council and professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism
Senator Wiener, AB 715 co-author and chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told his Senate colleagues AB 715 would not equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
“Either Wiener did not read his own bill or he is misrepresenting it,” charged Hong, pointing out Wiener also co-sponsored now-abandoned legislation to rip out the guts of Ethnic Studies. “Previous iterations of AB 715 were nakedly anti-Ethnic Studies in their intention. They explicitly targeted the field in order to curb critical classroom examination of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Despite Wiener’s assurances that the bill does not conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the language of AB 715 repeatedly references Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism to provide a backdoor for censorship. Page 16 of the document upholds the International Holocaust and Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples that include “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
In case anyone had doubts about the co-authors’ agenda, former special education teacher Dawn Addis complained about a teacher who introduced an article on Zionism that made some students feel “othered.” In reference to the need for an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, Addis repeatedly invoked a military slogan to say “we need boots on the ground.”
The censorship quarterback
Senator Sasha Perez (D-Pasadena), chair of the Senate Education Committee, acted as the linchpin in advancing AB 715 past the legislative finish line. Daughter of a mother social worker and father union electrician, Perez collaborated with the Legislative Jewish Caucus to join Mike McGuire, senate president, in promising the Israel lobby to deliver antisemitism legislation before the end of the current session in September.
Playing both sides of the street, her pedal to the end-of-session metal, Perez–the former mayor of Alhambra–held a cringe-worthy education committee hearing in which she refused to call on a teacher sitting directly in front of her waving his hand to testify in opposition. She also skipped over concerns from CTA lobbyist Seth Bramble who objected to the bill’s requirement that educators not engage in any form of advocacy. “Would it be unlawful to celebrate Black History Month?” asked Bramble.
During her committee hearing, Perez tried to prove her street bonafides by calling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a “war criminal.” A day later when speaking to the Senate floor, Perez championed passage of the censorship bill while sharing that certain members of the body had scolded her for criticizing Netanyahu.
The backroom deal
In a Machiavellian move, AB 715 authors reportedly made a deal with the chairs of the “diversity caucuses” – Latino, Black and AAPI –Senator,Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), Senator Weber-Pierson (D-San Diego) and AssemblymanFong (D-Alhambra)– to attach their name to AB 715 in exchange for guaranteed funding for Ethnic Studies. To date, the chairs of the state budget committees–Wiener and Gabriel, co-authors of AB 715 “have not lifted a finger to fund Ethnic Studies,” said Hong.
The diversity caucus chairs, picketed and slammed as sell outs, mid-way into the controversy tethered AB 715 to another piece of legislation, SB 48. Brokered by Isaac Bryan, vice-chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, this “intent” bill states that some day the legislature will establish Office of Civil Rights coordinators to address discrimination based on religion, race and ethnicity, gender and LGBTQ.
Rank and file resistance
Even if the Governor signs AB 715, opponents of the bill promise to mount political and court challenges while forming defense networks for teachers falsely accused of antisemitism.
“Though we are startled that California Democrats chose to turn their backs on educator unions when making educational policy, we think this represents a larger trend in turning towards overt white supremacy across the country–and we are here to resist that,” said Maya Suzuki Daniels, a Los Angeles educator with the Educator Defense Network.
“The lessons for us have been many,” said Jessica Rodarte, another educator with the defense network. “Through this struggle we learned about the legislative process and we learned about leveraging our communities. We are not alone in this struggle and it’s important to remember this. La lucha sigue y el pueblo unido jamás será vencido..”
Palestinian-American Mirvette Judeh, chair of the Arab American Caucus in the California Democratic Party, lamented the willingness of lawmakers to “strip teachers and schools of their ability to teach honestly.” She added, “At the very moment a genocide is being committed against Palestinians in Gaza, our state legislature has chosen to silence the history of Palestinians.” Judeh, who also co-chairs the party’s caucus titled California Democrats for Justice in Palestine, added, “We urgently need a champion in the current legislature willing to stand up for academic freedom and propose protections for our teachers, our schools, and our students against the harm this law will cause.”
In response to the bill’s passage, Democratic Socialists of America-Santa Barbara (DSA-SB) will flyer schools with “Know Your Rights” sheets and “Recommended Book Lists on Palestine” while joining with DSA National to refrain from endorsing candidates who accept Israel lobby money.
In a similar fashion, rank-and-file teacher members of a new union caucus, CTA Jewish and Allied Educators 4 Palestine (CTAJewsandAllies4Palestine on Instagram), will “advocate for teachers falsely accused of antisemitism for talking about Palestine in their classrooms,” said Maya, a Sacramento special education teacher. The new CTA caucus plans to also distribute book lists and lesson plans at upcoming State Council meetings attended by 800 union delegates from throughout the state. Additionally, CTA rank and file delegates, members of the 330,000-member union, hope to deny candidate endorsements to lawmakers who rammed AB 715 down the throat of the state legislature to deny students a relevant education.
Candidates subject to CTA teacher fury and a withheld endorsement are Wiener, a congressional hopeful for Pelosi’s SF House seat, McGuire, a much-talked about candidate for a redistricted northern California congressional seat, and Addis who may run for Laird’s Senate seat on the Central Coast.
Despite the legislature’s betrayal, Rodarte remains optimistic. “Our people will see the promise of Ethnic Studies for all California students. We will continue to fight for academic freedom and due process for all educators because our communities’ stories, struggles, and triumphs must be told!”
With the student debt crisis spiraling out of control, some media outlets have called it a “national emergency.” Outpacing most other borrowings by consumers, Americans who owed federal student loans more than doubled between 2000 and 2020, “from 21 million to 45 million, and the total amount they owed more than quadrupled from $387 billion to $1.8 trillion,” according to a 2024 article in Brookings.
A notable demographic shift has also emerged, with older borrowers now outnumbering younger ones, holding more debt despite having taken out smaller loans many years earlier. According to my analysis of the 2024 second quarter figures from the Department of Education, there are now 2.1 million more people over the age of 35 (23.7 million) with student loans than under the age of 35 (21.6 million), and they owe 160 percent more on average ($43,680 versus $27,250).
Approximately 5.3 million borrowers who had taken federal student loans are “in default,” states an April 2025 PBS article.
Improving access to education is integral to ensuring the economic success of any nation, leading to substantial returns in terms of salaries and gross domestic product. “When more individuals hold high-value credentials, workforce participation increases, financial security becomes attainable for more families, and economic growth accelerates. But these benefits won’t materialize without action. Federal and state governments must prioritize education funding, align learning with workforce needs, and reaffirm education as a public good,” according to an opinion piece in the nonprofit news publication, The 74.
Unlike the U.S., many other countries are prioritizing investing in education to support economic growth. If America doesn’t rectify its policies, which have led to “declining confidence in the value of a degree,” the situation could become irreparable in the future.
The Vicious Cycle That Has Made Education Inaccessible
Student loans were introduced to make education more accessible for students from low-income backgrounds, which would eventually lead to better job opportunities. Far from achieving this goal, the flawed loan system has been monetized by politicians and companies over the years, keeping students in an endless cycle of debt.
“A generation ago, Congress privatized a student loan program intended to give more Americans access to higher education. In its place, lawmakers created another profit center for Wall Street and a system of college finance that has fed the nation’s cycle of inequality. Step by step, Congress has enacted one law after another to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans—and the best kind for banks and debt collectors,” states ABC15 Arizona.
The consequences of this financial burden are severe and worsening, leading to tragedy in some instances, like in the case of the Nelson family from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. They filed for bankruptcy in 2020 as their debt grew, “most of which was unpaid student loans,” according to the New York Post. The family, including six children, was found dead in 2022 in what was termed a “murder-suicide,” owing mainly to their financial circumstances.
The Ballooning Student Loan Debt
The student debt exceeds the state budget in most states (particularly Southern states), based on the first quarter 2025 data I analyzed. The increasing debt has resulted from a significant increase in borrowing and the cost of education over the years. The lending system, by all rational metrics, is a catastrophic failure.
Unfortunately, the political dynamics that have taken hold of both Congress and the White House over the past couple of decades—from both parties—have only solidified against student loan borrowers, perpetuating this broken and dangerous loan program. It is crucial that the public understand the history of how we arrived at this point, the current political and other dynamics at play, and, most importantly, how we can move away from the ledge we, as a nation, now find ourselves on.
How Sallie Mae Monopolized the Lending Industry
The debtor’s revolt in Western Massachusetts, which took place in the 1780s and came to be called “Shays’ Rebellion,” was believed to have compelled the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which called for uniform bankruptcy laws ahead of the power to raise an army, coin currency, and declare war in Article I, Section 8.
When President Lyndon Johnson came to power, he signed the Higher Education Act (HEA) into law in 1965. The HEA “created… guaranteed loan programs establishing that loans borrowed by students from private loan companies were now guaranteed by the federal government if students defaulted,” according to the Boston University website. During the signing ceremony, Johnson declared that the loans would be “free of interest,” pointing out that the act would ensure that “the path of knowledge is open to all… [who] have the determination to walk it.”
In 1972, a hybrid, public-private company, Student Loan Marketing Association, which was later called Sallie Mae, was established to serve as a repurchaser and guarantor for federal student loans made by private banks. The company had all the profit-making incentives of a private company, but also had the full backing of the U.S. Treasury, whose money it used for its operations. This created a monopoly over the nascent student loan industry, and the company became the de facto expert and driving force, along with Congress, on legislative matters.
“In the mid-1990s, skyrocketing demand for student loans prompted by escalating college tuitions, expanding eligibility for student loans, and a host of new types of lending combined to make the student loan industry infinitely more complex, larger, and more lucrative. And Sallie Mae emerged as the industry’s biggest player,” stated a 2007 report, “Leading Lady: Sallie Mae and the Origins of Today’s Student Loan Controversy.”
In 1976, bipartisan legislation—pushed by Sallie Mae and other related financial interests in Washington—was enacted by Congress, which made federal student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy for five years after the repayment period started, unless borrowers could show “undue hardship.” The reason given for this unprecedented removal of standard bankruptcy rights from student loans was that there was a crisis of graduates flocking to bankruptcy court in droves to expunge their debts.
According to a 2013 policy brief by the nonprofit Reason Foundation, however, “the narrative that students are routinely graduating from college with debt and immediately declaring bankruptcy after graduation was pushed by Sallie Mae and other student lending companies in the hopes that these measures would even further reduce the risk shouldered by lenders when issuing student loans.” The discharge rate of student loans in bankruptcy at that time turned out to be far less than 1 percent—lower than almost all other debts in bankruptcy court.
While a waiting period for bankruptcy discharge surely seemed inconsequential to most in Congress at the time, Sallie Mae was just getting started. In the ensuing years, this unique exception to discharge was extended to include loans made or insured by nonprofit companies. Then, the waiting period was extended to seven years in 1990.
In 1991, Sallie Mae (and the lending industry it essentially controlled) successfully convinced Congress to remove statutes of limitations from federal student loans. And in 1998, Sallie Mae and the student loan industry managed to end any “waiting period” for bankruptcy discharge with the passage of the Higher Education Amendments.
Policy Changes That Helped the Lending Industry Thrive
The number of loans made annually between 1990 and 2000 doubled from 4.5 million to 9.4 million, according to the American Council on Education 2001 brief. “This increase in student borrowing was fueled, in large part, by legislative changes enacted early in the decade.”
To keep up with the increasing demand, Sallie Mae went on an acquisitional drive, purchasing two of the largest student loan guarantors, USA Group and Southwest Student Services, in 2022, and also “went on to purchase the student loan collection companies, so that by 2006 it dominated all aspects of the student loan industry,” according to a 2010 article by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). These companies generated most, if not all, of their revenue from collecting on defaulted student loans.
Sallie Mae eventually became a completely private company in 2004. “Sallie Mae’s moves to acquire numerous guarantee, origination, and collections companies under a single corporate banner had fundamentally altered the student loan marketplace and made Sallie Mae the undisputed leviathan of the student loan industry,” stated the Reason Foundation brief.
But Sallie Mae and the student loan industry weren’t finished. In 2005, they managed to convince Congress, after spending millions of dollars in lobbying, to end bankruptcy rights from all student loans—including those made by private lenders—as a part of the landmark bankruptcy bill, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. At the time, they argued that this would allow the industry to lend to more needy students. But this never happened. Instead, they began demanding cosigners (typically parents or grandparents) for nearly all of their private loans.
These were truly the “happy times” for the student loan industry. Sallie Mae’s stock price shot up. “In 2005, Sallie Mae was named by Fortune as the second most profitable company in the U.S. (Microsoft was 18th that year),” according to WSWS. The company’s CEO at the time, Albert Lord, was the “highest-paid CEO in Washington, D.C., that year.” He built his own private luxury 18-hole golf course.
By 2004, Lord even bragged to shareholders that the company was actually “writing checks” to the Treasury at the end of every year—a reference to the fact that the government was making a profit on defaulted student loans through Sallie Mae’s collection activities.
No lender makes a profit on defaulted student loans in any other lending industry. The fact that the federal government profits from defaulted loans is a defining hallmark of a predatory lending system, resulting from the removal of bankruptcy rights and statutes of limitations. It is even more true today for the Department of Education, as it now owns the loans outright, rather than the old-style lending model where it only guaranteed the loans.
How Politicians Supported the Growth of the Student Loan Industry
The federal student loan servicers (who were largely the lenders and guarantors under the older FFELP program) can generate more revenue from defaulted loans than from those that remain in good standing through a program called “student loan rehabilitation,” where a defaulted borrower is coerced into making nine payments for 10 months and ultimately signs for a new, much larger loan. The private companies that facilitate these loan rehabilitations receive 16 percent of the value of the new loans, for instance, on a $50,000 defaulted loan that is rehabilitated into a new $100,000 loan, a $16,000 payment is made by the taxpayer to these companies. This, of course, gives the industry a perverted incentive to want loans to default.
Wall Street and Washington had found a way to make profits on a lending instrument: Remove all standard consumer protections, hyperinflate loan balances—including and especially through defaulting loans—and use collection powers that would “make a mobster envious,” as stated by Senator Elizabeth Warren, to extract the money from the borrowers and their families.
This is precisely the sort of lending tyranny that the founding fathers wanted to avoid when they called for uniform bankruptcy rights and equal protection under the law.
Under President Barack Obama, the lending program was nationalized, resulting in the Department of Education making and owning all new loans from July 2010 onward. While private companies like Sallie Mae did not like this change, they remained in the mix by both servicing healthy loans and collecting on defaulted student loans.
Disturbingly, because lending companies could now only make revenue through these two means—where rehabilitating defaults would be far more profitable for them than servicing loans—this only strengthened the perverted incentives these companies already had to frustrate, baffle, and bamboozle borrowers into default.
This change was clearly a boon for the Department of Education, which now stood to earn interest on the loans. Some of the profit was even used as an offset to pay for the Affordable Care Act. The federal government loved this new arrangement, as lending skyrocketed, leading to the accrual of interest.
It also became apparent that the Department of Education had no intention of fairly administering the lending program under Obama’s presidency. The various income-driven repayment (IDR) plans that were in place were run in ways that would lead to the disqualification of the overwhelming majority of borrowers. Between 2013 and 2014, the department found that an astonishing 57 percent of borrowers had “fallen out” of these programs for failing to verify their incomes—just one of many hurdles borrowers must overcome to receive the promised loan cancellation after 20–25 years of making payments.
The Department of Education also fought tooth and nail behind the scenes to keep bankruptcy rights away from student loans on Obama’s watch. They regularly submitted testimony to judges in bankruptcy cases and even micromanaged such cases directly or through contracted attorneys.
Despite the long-standing promise by Democrats to return bankruptcy rights to federal student loans (which they failed to do in 2008), the best we saw from President Obama was an order to “study” the feasibility of returning bankruptcy rights to the loans. There was no meaningful action on this front. During Obama’s two terms in office, nearly $1 trillion was added to the nation’s student debt tab, according to my analysis.
The Worsening of the Crisis
President Donald Trump’s first term in office was—with a couple of notable exceptions—a nightmare. He hired Betsy DeVos—who held stock in student loan collection companies—to be his secretary of education. DeVos ran the department in even worse faith than seen during Obama’s term. She was even threatened with possible prison time by a federal judge for violating “a court order to stop collecting loans from former students of a now-bankrupt for-profit college,” according to the online news publication Government Executive.
There were, however, a couple of surprising bright spots from Trump’s first term. First, he became the first president to cancel student loans broadly, and by executive order. He first did this in August 2019 when he canceled student loans for 25,000 disabled veterans. He did it for a second time for everyone when he first enacted the repayment pause at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This proved that the president can, indeed, cancel federal student loans by executive order. There were no lawsuits or controversies surrounding either of these actions.
Interestingly, it was these actions that compelled my group to start the petition in March 2020 to return bankruptcy rights to all student loans, igniting public conversation about canceling student loans by executive order. The petition quickly grew to hundreds of thousands of signatures and went viral in the mainstream media. Within six months, leading senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, began making a similar call.
Joe Biden, who won the election in 2020, meanwhile, promised to both “eliminate” the student debt of people who went to public colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and also committed to restoring standard bankruptcy rights to student loans.
Shortly after the 2020 election, Steven and Mary Swig, a billionaire San Francisco “power couple,” circulated a memo within Democratic circles declaring that the president could not cancel student loans by executive order.
Soon after, Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi andSusan Rice were parroting this memo, declaring that the president could not cancel the loans administratively. When the Supreme Court handed down its verdict, Chief Justice John Roberts actually quoted Pelosi in the majority opinion.
It seems like Biden himself wasn’t entirely behind this plan. He rejected a “$50,000 student loan forgiveness plan” shortly after the elections, according to ABC News, and the law that he attempted to use to justify the cancellation was “ill-fitting.”
The loans that were canceled during Biden’s term weren’t because of anything that Biden did or didn’t do. Instead, these were loans that were, by and large, supposed to have been canceled through existing rule or law, years or even decades ago. While Democrats often cited them as evidence of their concern for student loan borrowers, the fact remains that these cancellations were relatively small compared to the loan portfolio’s growth over four years.
On returning bankruptcy rights to student loans, the Biden administration did, indeed, stop “opposing” student loan borrowers in bankruptcy court, but the “new bankruptcy process” they put in its place effectively transferred the power to determine the case from the judges to the departments of Education and Justice. The process has proven to be an expensive joke on the borrowers, with only a few borrowers getting discharges. In fact, out of 450,000 student loan borrowers who have filed bankruptcy since the new process was implemented, only around 2,500 people (0.6 percent) have received partial relief.
Meanwhile, Dick Durbin, former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had a good bipartisan bill called the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act of 2021, which he introduced along with Republican Senator John Cornyn. It proposed making “federal student loans eligible for discharge in a bankruptcy proceeding ten years after the first loan payment comes due.” Leading Democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, however, refused to endorse the bill.
In 2025, Trump returned to the presidency, and the Republicans gained control of the White House, the House, and the Senate. He has promised to “eliminate” the Department of Education, and “return student loans to the states” (which is incredibly ambiguous). Trump has already gotten the go-ahead from the Supreme Court to dismantle the department.
In fact, the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill in July 2025 makes the situation worse for student borrowers. It reduces “the number of repayment plan options down to two from seven… [also] capping the amount individuals can borrow for higher education,” states CBS News. Critically, the bill eliminates the President’s ability to cancel loans by executive order and allows defaulted borrowers to rehabilitate their loans twice. This provision is tantamount to an economic death sentence for these borrowers, whose loans will default again around 80 percent of the time.
Both parties in Washington have joined hands in keeping this failed loan scam going. At this point, this is not just unwise, but also immoral. We are truly in uncharted territory here. Going forward, we can easily expect half of all student loan borrowers to wind up in default in the next few years. This is precisely what the founding fathers wanted to avoid when they called for uniform bankruptcy rights. The worsening of this situation is going to take a tremendous toll on millions of people.
We can take action to prevent this by compelling Congress and the president to restore the standard, constitutional bankruptcy rights that were removed in the first place. This will end the widespread abuse that we’ve seen, prevent the far greater financial and social harms that the lending industry is poised to inflict on the country (particularly in light of the passage of the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” law in 2025, and, over time, should lead to more rational pricing and more sensible lending.
What Other Countries Are Doing to Ensure Access to Higher Education
As the U.S. lags in understanding the value of investing in public education, other nations have recognized the importance of an educated workforce to ensure a thriving economy.
In Norway and Sweden, higher education is “tuition-free,” which guarantees equitable access to learning. To prepare students to meet industry demands, Germany offers a dual apprenticeship system, which “integrates classroom learning with paid, on-the-job training, producing well-prepared graduates for industry demands,” according to The 74 opinion piece by Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation. Denmark provides students with grants to support them financially.
“Switzerland has a vocational education system that allows students to split their time between school and work in fields like health care, information technology, and advanced manufacturing. Singapore’s SkillsFuture program gives adults financial credits they can use to pursue short courses and certificates at any stage of their careers. In Finland, adults can attend publicly funded retraining programs to gain new skills when industries shift or disappear,” adds the May 2025 opinion piece.
The U.S. student loan crisis is not simply the result of rising tuition costs, but of decades of deliberate policy choices that transformed higher education from a public good into a profit engine for lenders, politicians, and corporations. The stripping of bankruptcy protections, the monopolization of the lending system by an unholy alliance of the Department of Education and its private financial partners, and the bipartisan complicity of Congress have entrenched borrowers in a cycle of debt with no escape, leaving millions in financial ruin and undermining confidence in the very value of a degree. Meanwhile, other nations are investing in free or low-cost education, apprenticeships, and lifelong learning as a foundation for economic growth and social equity. Unless the United States confronts this broken system head-on—by restoring basic consumer protections, reducing costs, and reaffirming education as a public good—the crisis will continue to deepen, threatening not only individual livelihoods but the country’s long-term economic stability.
This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.
The drug problem won’t be solved by scapegoating Latin America, when the US has yet to address root causes at home. Screenshot: @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social
A big Cadillac limo with Jersey plates was parked down the block. Few locals in East Harlem even owned cars, let alone new ones. Curious, I asked the street kids what’s up. They casually explained that the mafioso come weekly to collect their drug money. Later I found a playground, which served as a veritable narcotics flea market each night. If a blanquito from the suburbs and some third graders could uncover the illicit trade, I wondered why the officials – who plastered the city with “keep New York drug free” signs – couldn’t do the same.
That was in the late 1960s, and I am still wondering why the US – the world’s largest consumer of narcotics, the biggest money launderer of illicit drug money, and the leading weaponry supplier to the cartels – hasn’t resolved these problems.
One thing is clear: the drug issue is projected onto Latin America. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly warned of “evil narco terrorists [trying] to poison our homeland.” Drug interdiction has been weaponized as an excuse to impose imperial domination, most notably against Venezuela.
Since Hugo Chávez was elected Venezuela’s president in 1998 and initiated the Bolivarian Revolution – a movement that catalyzed the Pink Tide in Latin America and galvanized a counter-hegemonic wave internationally – Washington has tried to crush it. In 2015, then-US President Barack Obama accused Venezuela of being an “extraordinary threat” to US national security when, in fact, the opposite was the case; the US threatened Venezuela.
Obama imposed unilateral coercive measures – euphemistically called “sanctions.” Each subsequent administration renewed and, to varying degrees, intensified the sanctions, which are illegal under international law, in a bipartisan effort. But the imperial objective of regime change was thwarted by the political leadership of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in concert with the country’s people and in firm alliance with their military.
Now that draconian sanctions have “failed” to achieve regime-change, President Trump dispatched an armada of warships, F-35 stealth aircraft, and thousands of troops to increase the pressure.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro responded: “What Washington wants is to control Venezuela’s wealth [including the world’s largest oil reserves]. That is the reason why the US deployed warships, aircraft, missiles and a nuclear submarine near Venezuelan coasts under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking.”
Maduro maintains his country is free of drug production and processing, citing reports from the United Nations, the European Union, and even the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The Venezuelan president could have also referenced the findings of Trump’s own security agencies absolving him from the charge of directing the Tren de Aragua drug cartel.
And, speaking of collusion with drug cartels, Maduro could have commented on the DEA itself, which was expelled from Venezuela in 2005 for espionage. Regardless, the DEA has continued to secretly build drug trafficking cases against Venezuela’s leaders in knowing violation of international law, according to an Associated Press report.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez highlights that the DEA “has known connections with the drug trafficking world.” For example, an investigation by the US Department of Justice, revealed that at least ten DEA agents in Colombia participated in repeated “sex parties” with prostitutes paid for by local drug cartels. In 2022 the DEA quietly removed its Mexico chief for maintaining improper contacts with cartels. This underscores a troubling pattern: DEA presence tends to coincide with major drug activity, but does not eliminate it.
The US “is not interested in addressing the serious public health problem its citizens face due to high drug use,” Maduro reminds us. He points out that drug trafficking profits remain in the US banking system. In fact, illicit narcotics are a major US industry. Research by the US Army-funded RAND Corporation reveals that narcotics rank alongside pharmaceuticals and oil/gas as top US commodities.
The former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Pino Arlacchi commented: “I was in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil but I have never been to Venezuela; there was simply no need.” He added: “The Venezuelan government’s cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking was one of the best in South America; It can be compared only to Cuba’s impeccable record. This fact, in Trump’s delusional narrative of ‘Venezuela as a narco-state’, sounds like geopolitically motivated slander.” The UN 2025 World Drug Report, from the organization he led, tells a story opposite to that spread by the Trump administration.
According to Arlaachi, if any Latin American country should be targeted, it is US-allied Ecuador, now the world’s leading cocaine exporter using banana boats owned by the family of Trump’s buddy, right-wing President Daniel Naboa.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum notes that if any “alliance” exists with cartels, it lies “in the US gun shops,” highlighting how Yankee firearms fuel cartel violence. She urges Washington to look inward at its own drug demand and lax enforcement. If the US truly wanted to curb fentanyl, “they can combat the sale of narcotics on the streets of their main cities… and [stop] the money laundering” tied to the trade – steps “they don’t do.”
The resounding message from Latin America is that blaming them alone for the drug problem is misleading – the US’s own appetite for drugs and history of interventionism are key contributors. Solutions call for shared responsibilities and cooperative relationships.
US policy under Trump, which confounds terrorism with criminal activity, is a cover for projecting military domination. Claiming the prerogative to unilaterally intervene in the sovereign territories of neighboring states to fight cartels or murdering a boat’s crew in the Caribbean are not solutions. Latin American leaders are turning the spotlight back on Washington. They point to US gun policies, consumer demand, and ulterior motives behind Washington’s renewed “war on drugs,” such as the current regime-change offensive against Venezuela. The drug problem won’t be solved by scapegoating Latin America, when the US has yet to address root causes at home.
Corporations have colonial instincts; they see the land that has bred my bloodline as nothing but real estate. Image by Oberon Copeland.
It seems like just yesterday, I was on my school’s campus having meetings with administrators, voicing demands to cut ties with Israel. Whether that was cancelling their study abroad trip to Israel or divesting from zionist institutions, the movement to boycott Israel was alive and well years ago – before October 7th, 2023.
Because, as we all know, the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been going on for over seven decades, and calls to protest the harrowing actions of Israel have been ongoing for years. However, sometimes it felt like I was screaming into a very scary, very endless void when I would talk about Palestine. I grew up telling the kids at school that I was from Jordan, because every time I said Palestine, I was met with a confused face and a, “What is that?”
When I grew up and learned more about the resilient yet heartbreaking history of my land, every time I tried to talk to someone who wasn’t Muslim or Arab about it, I would be met with the same expressions. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has been happening all these years, and just now, are people willing to glance at the bloody history of Palestine – and the ways to free the land that has been shackled in chains for my whole life and beyond.
While the world was sleeping on Palestine, many organizers weren’t. The Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement has been a trailblazer in committing to civil disobedience against Israel. One of its targets, Airbnb, even submitted to it in 2018, five years before October 7th. Airbnb has long been listing vacation rentals on illegal settlements in the West Bank and has faced heat for it time and time again. So much so, that they removed all their listings in the West Bank in 2018, but reinstated them once threatened legally by the same settlers who rented these properties out.
Airbnb responded to the pressure and calls from the BDS movement because what they allow to happen is a major crime against humanity. Uplifting and supporting the theft of Palestinian land by illegal settlers on illegal settlements is a war crime under international law. Under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, it is clearly stated that the occupier should not deport the original civilian population of the land they occupy. Obviously, Israel has never cared much for international law, and neither has the world in holding it accountable for breaking it.
Because of that, Israel has used the act of illegally creating settlements and bringing in foreigners to settle in them as a part of its annexation plan of the West Bank for decades. Israel is blatant in its genocide in Gaza, it was flagrant with its colonization of 48’ territories, but the annexation of the West Bank has been a less scrutinized avenue for Israel to occupy all of Palestine. The stealing of Palestinian land to give over to the white colonizers is an age-old tactic to push the Indigenous population out.
What has exacerbated Israel’s process of illegal annexation has always been corporate profit throughout the decades. In the British colonial period, it was organizations like the Jewish National Fund that were buying and selling Palestinian land for the ultimate gain of zionist occupation that was to come in 1948. Now, we have modern-day companies like Airbnb that allow settlers to capitalize off of the stolen Palestinian land – land that is illegally occupied under the guise of international law.
That’s a pretty big charge to have under your belt as one of the leading home-sharing companies in the world. Along with engaging in a very illegal system, it allows the Israeli government to impose more restrictions and limit more resources on the Palestinian people to shift all that over to their growing settlements. It provides for the economy of tourism to fund the Palestinian occupation and also to serve as a tool of propaganda. Personally, I don’t know how anyone can go into the West Bank and think that anything about the conditions there is normal. But, the glamorized portrayal of these settlements with fancy homes is definitely a propaganda ploy that many fall into.
That’s why Airbnb is a legitimate BDS target, and it has been one for a long time. Calls for Airbnb to remove its listings in the West Bank have been made for almost a decade, especially here at CODEPINK. Although Airbnb may not be actively listening to the Palestinians when we say this is actively hurting us, they must surely listen to the lawsuits that are popping up against them. The Global Legal Action Network just recently announced a trans-Atlantic lawsuit against Airbnb for a multitude of reasons, one of them being their complicity in Israeli violence. You can read more here.
I think the intersections between Airbnb and the occupation of my homeland really point to a larger issue for me: companies have been and continue to be profiteers off of Palestinian genocide. I learned this in college with divestment work, and I learn it now, when companies like Airbnb are renting out properties that should belong to one of my Palestinian kin. Corporations have colonial instincts; they see the land that has bred my bloodline as nothing but real estate. Nothing but somewhere they can sell and make into aesthetic property rental.
Palestine is not a colonial or capitalistic venture for anyone or anything. I’d never allow my land to be exploited as a “beachside resort” or “country cottage”, and neither should anyone who proclaims themselves as Pro-Palestine. I urge you to look further into the actions we have against Airbnb and how to make it clear that people will not sit and watch the commodification of their land.
The Israeli air raid on Qatar delivers a sharp warning to other countries in the region: what is the value of a military alliance with the U.S. if the supposed protector decides which threats to block and which to permit? Image source: X screenshot.
Last week’s failed assassination attempt of the Palestinian negotiating team in Doha, Qatar, raises critical questions that extend far beyond the attack itself. The crux of the problem lies in three interconnected issues: the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in targeting individuals, the failure or deliberate negligence of the U.S.-led air defense system, and Qatar’s vulnerable position as a host to both a major U.S. base and the ceasefire negotiations.
The use of AI will be the topic of a future analysis. Meanwhile, the raid on Qatar did not happen in isolation. The skies over Doha are monitored by the American Air Base in Al Udeid, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. This base is not a marginal outpost; it is the forward headquarters for U.S. Central Command, USCENTCOM, overseeing U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East.
In theory, nothing enters Qatari airspace or nearby region without being detected by the advanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) system, which provides air cover for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE, along with Jordan. IAMD architecture is integrated into the U.S. command-and-control network and operated by USCENTCOM from the U.S. base in Qatar.
Israeli jets violated the same airspace that is ostensibly protected under the IAMD defense umbrella. The more than a dozen Israeli jets traveled more than 2000 KM without raising an alarm or triggering the IAMD air defense. CENTCOM’s decision not to activate, or failure to activate IAMD, a system largely paid for by the GCC, raises two critical questions where each scenario demands accountability: was it a deliberate choice that left Qatar exposed, or was it a catastrophic system failure.
The first possibility assumes the U.S. military was fully aware of the approaching Israeli aircraft and chose to stand down. This decision could not have been made by local commanders alone. Allowing a foreign military to penetrate protected skies where the largest U.S. base is located would have required authorization from the highest levels of the U.S. government. In this case, Washington effectively greenlit the operation, sacrificing its ally’s sovereignty and the lives of the Palestinian negotiators.
The second possibility is even more frightening: IAMD did not detect the foreign aircrafts at all. If true, this exposes a blatant vulnerability at the very center of America’s regional security architecture. How could the largest and most advanced military base in the Middle East fail to notice hostile jets entering its immediate airspace? Such a failure would undermine the very justification for the base’s existence and call into question the credibility of IAMD and U.S. security guarantees to defend regional participants.
For Qatar, the message is obvious. Despite hosting more than 10,000 U.S. troops and spending billions to maintain and support the base, its skies are not safe. Hosting an American base does not guarantee protection, worse, the Air Base may provide a false guard or act as a gatekeeper that serves other U.S. ally’s interests first and foremost, even at the expense of its host country.
If the skies above Doha are not defended by IAMD and Al Udeid Air Base, what is it really protecting, then? Israel?
To date, IAMD has been activated twice, and only to protect Israel, a country that is not a party of IAMD system: first, defending Israel against Iran’s retaliation in April 2024; and second, to thwart Iran’s barrage of missiles at Al Udeid Air Base following the joint Israeli/U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear sites.
The Israeli attack on Doha showed that the American security umbrella over Qatar is porous and intentionally compromised. Failing to own up to America’s failure to detect and stop the attack against a “major ally,” Trump offered empty promises that this “would never happen again.” This, of course, was his administration’s way of evading the real question: why would the U.S. base, built and financed by Qatar, sit silent while American-made Israeli jets bombarded a residential area next door?
On Thursday, September 11, 2025, the U.S. answer came clear in New York. The Trump administration stopped the UN Security Council (UNSC) from voting on a resolution condemning the Israeli attack on Doha. In its place, the UNSC issued a routine press statement merely admonishing the raid. Rather than demanding a binding resolution, Qatar and its media spun the useless statement as a major diplomatic victory.
Such a statement is a non-binding press note, and not a legally significant resolution. A resolution requires a formal vote and carries legal weight, whereas a press release is merely a statement read by the Council president. Dressing up a press note as a “resolution” appears to be a deliberate attempt to shield the Trump administration from embarrassment and to obscure its tacit support for Israel’s raid. In accepting a meager press statement, Qatar chose to protect Trump from having to cast a definitive vote, rather than forcing the U.S. to reveal its true stance on Israel’s actions.
Beyond the immediate geopolitics, the Israeli air raid on Qatar delivers a sharp warning to other countries in the region: what is the value of a military alliance with the U.S. if the supposed protector decides which threats to block and which to permit? The reality is clear, Washington has chosen to prioritize the interests of its subsidized ally, Israel, with more than $17.9 billion in the last two years alone, over the very host nation that bankrolls the American military base with $10 billion.
Who knows which nation Washington will elevate next, and at whose expense? This is the risk of such alliances where host countries left naked the moment America decides another ally’s interests outweigh their own.
Will the emergency Arab-Islamic summit in Doha this week rise to meet this new reality? Or will it descend into Act II of the UNSC farce with a new toothless declaration, and hand Trump yet another free pass to double-cross his allies?
“Israel’s strike on Hamas’s political leadership in Qatar’s capital, aimed at forcing an end to the Gaza war, looks like a rare Israeli tactical mistake.”
– David Ignatius, “Doha attack narrows Israel’s options in Gaza war,” Washington Post, September 10, 2025,
With this singular sentence, the Post’s David Ignatius has demonstrated once again that he is unaware or prefers to ignore the numerous strategic and tactical mistakes that Israel has committed over the past eight decades since gaining independence. Israel has pursued numerous confrontations in this period, and its decision-making has produced a significant number of strategic and tactical mistakes.
The Suez War in 1956. Israel never should have been a secret partner in the Franco-British colonial war to depose Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal. Israel’s participation convinced many Arab leaders that Israel was nothing more than an extension of European colonial power in the Middle East. Heavy political pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union led to the humiliating withdrawal of the British-French-Israeli forces from Egypt. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had to resign, and the crisis made it more difficult for the international community to deal with the Soviet invasion of Hungary at the same time.
The Six-Day War in 1967. The Six-Day War was marked by two strategic lies that compromised Israeli credibility in the international community and should have compromised Israel’s standing with its only serious ally, the United States. As a junior analyst at the CIA at the time, I helped draft the report that described Israel’s attack on Egypt, which Israelis described as a preemptive attack. It was nothing of the sort. We had access to sensitive communications intercepts that documented Israeli plans for the attack, and there was no evidence whatsoever of an Egyptian battle plan. In fact, half of Egyptian fighting forces were engaged in Yemen’s civil war, and there was no sign of Egyptian readiness in terms of air or armored power. The lack of readiness allowed the Israeli air force to destroy Egyptian fighter aircraft that were parked wingtip to wingtip on Egyptian air bases.
In addition to lying about the start of the war, the Israelis were even more deceitful three days later when they attributed their malicious attack on the USS Liberty to a random accident. If so, it was a well-planned accident. The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed. It brandished a huge U.S. flag in the midday sun, and didn’t resemble a ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s weak enemies. The USS Liberty was providing excellent intelligence information on Israeli battle plans, which is why Israel wanted it out of the way.
Yet the Israelis claimed they were attacking an Egyptian ship. Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, then machine-gunned the life rafts that survivors dropped in hope of abandoning the ship, Thirty-four American sailors died, but the National Security Agency’s official U.S. investigation of the disaster remains classified to this day.
The Lebanese Invasion in 1982. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon led to a siege of the capital city of Beirut, which had not been discussed with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and which violated Israeli pledges to Arab states that it would not attack their capital cities. The Israelis made this pledge because of the vulnerability of their own capital, Jerusalem. The raid was designed to force the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, which it did, but the PLO was replaced by a far more dangerous and lethal insurgency, Hezbollah, which brought Iran’s Revolutionary Guard into the picture. Sharon believed his military forces would be in Lebanon for several weeks or months. In actual fact, they were there for the next two decades…and Israeli military forces are back in southern Lebanon today.
The Gaza War. There are too many Israeli strategic and tactical blunders to discuss in this short essay. An intelligence failure allowed the Hamas attack in the first place, and Israel’s creation of an outdoor prison in Gaza twenty years ago certainly explains Hamas’s pursuit of revenge. The war itself is genocidal in nature, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been appropriately labeled a war criminal by numerous international and human rights organizations. The strike in Doha to kill Hamas’s lead negotiator certainly tells you all you need to know regarding Israel’s strategic and tactical blunders. (The intelligence failure that enabled the initial success of the Gaza invasion in 2023 was similar to the strategic intelligence failure that led to the initial success of the Egyptian-Syrian attack against Israel in 1973, when the Israelis had strategic warning from a well-placed Egyptian operative.)
Clearly, there was nothing “rare” regarding the Israeli blunder in Qatar. It was part and parcel of a far larger picture of Israel reliance on military forces to achieve objectives that require diplomacy and negotiation. Israeli hubris regarding its own capabilities and the lack of regard for Arab capabilities and coordination are key factors in its intelligence failures. The genocidal campaign in Gaza has made Israel a pariah state, and U.S. complicity has turned the international community against the United States as well.
The Palestinian armed resistance has defended Gaza for almost two years now, successfully preventing Israel from expelling two million people from their homeland. But, outgunned as they are by Israel’s technology and its unlimited supply of war matériel from the United States, the resistance fighters now need the world’s help—and soon—to drive out the Israeli occupation forces and end the genocide. There’s a realistic mechanism to make that happen under United Nations auspices, so a growing global movement is now demanding that the UN get off its butt and come to Gaza’s rescue.
Palestine’s Armed Resistance Hasn’t Let Israel “Finish the Job”
At this stage of the Gaza genocide, the Israelis’ ostensible goals are (a) to free the captives who remain in Gaza, all of whom are soldiers (that is, prisoners of war) and (b) to “destroy Hamas.” But its leaders have repeatedly made clear their true intentions: to nix all ceasefire proposals as they proceed to completely empty the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population through some combination of mass killing and expulsion.
To “destroy Hamas,” as they put it, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) would have to fight the organization’s armed wing—the Al Qassam Brigades—and its allied resistance groups in person, on their turf. Instead, out of cowardice, the Israelis have largely avoided direct engagement, instead turning all their firepower on Gaza’s civilian population and its infrastructure for sustaining life and health.
When Israeli troops have dared to enter Gaza and tried to occupy the camps and cities (instead of just bombing them into rubble), the resistance forces have inflicted heavy casualties on them and destroyed or disabled large numbers of their tanks, armored personnel carriers, and bulldozers. As recently as September 15, the Israeli military’s chief of staff admitted to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a cabinet meeting that “even after the operation to capture Gaza City, Hamas will not be defeated militarily and administratively.”
In all ceasefire negotiations, Israel has demanded that the resistance forces, whom they have failed to defeat militarily, must nevertheless surrender and be disarmed. All the while, in other venues, Zionist leaders are declaring their intention to continue bombing, shooting, and starving Palestinian civilians as part of a campaign to drive them south, herd them into concentration camps near the border with Egypt, and from there, forcibly remove them to various countries in Africa and Asia—in Zionist leaders’ terms, to “finish the job.”
That phase of the genocide would be much further advanced today had there been no armed Palestinian resistance doggedly thwarting IOF troops’ attempts to capture and hold large areas of Gaza. If the resistance forces were now to give up that struggle, IOF efforts to slaughter, starve, imprison, and expel Gaza’s civilian population could and would shift into overdrive. As the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah has starkly put it, Western governments can demand that the resistance give up their weapons “till the cows come home,” but “they’re not going to, because they know that would ensure the ‘Final Solution’” for the people of Gaza. (at 2 hr 38 min)
UN General Assembly to the Rescue?
While Palestine’s national liberation forces have succeeded in foiling the IOF’s attempts to steal and depopulate Gaza, the fighters don’t have the resources required to drive out a large, genocidal army, lavishly supplied with US weaponry, or to keep Israelis off their land and out of their airspace, let alone break the 18-year-long siege of the territory. But if enough nations, ones that are not complicit in the genocide, join forces, they could stop it.
When a genocide is in progress, nations have a duty under international law to try to stop it. So far, Yemen’s de facto government, Ansar Allah, with its missile attacks on Israeli ships, military installations, and airports, is the only one taking its duty to intervene in this genocide seriously. Although the Yemeni people are paying a heavy price for their humanitarian intervention, their solidarity with Palestine has grown even stronger.
One such ally, of course, is not enough to end the genocide. The Palestinian people need a large international armed force to converge on Gaza by air, sea, and land, to join the resistance fighters in protecting the civilian population and putting an end to the genocide. And, as luck would have it, there’s a little-known, decades-old mechanism for doing just that: UN General Assembly Resolution 377 (V), adopted in 1950 under the title “Uniting for Peace.”
Uniting for Peace authorizes the General Assembly to request that its member nations intervene in cases of military aggression when the Security Council fails to act (which the council always does when it comes to Israel, thanks to the US veto). By a two-thirds majority, the General Assembly (in which each member nation has one vote and there are no vetoes) can pass a resolution enabling the formation and deployment of a multinational military force to come to Gaza’s rescue.
And that might just happen. Spurred by a clamor from global civil society, the UN may consider an armed-intervention resolution this month, during the 80th Session of the General Assembly in New York City.
A Uniting for Peace resolution can kick off a joint effort among nations to take any of a range of actions, such as imposing sweeping sanctions and military embargoes against Israel or even expelling it from the UN. Most importantly, the 1950 resolution authorized the General Assembly to make “appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
Experts urge that stopping the genocide requires adopting a resolution that mandates the deployment, at Palestine’s request, of a multinational protection force to Gaza. These troops would be empowered to “protect civilians, open entry points via land and sea, [and] facilitate humanitarian aid,” along with forcing Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza’s territory, coastal waters, and airspace, while preserving evidence of its war crimes, crimes against humanity, apartheid, and genocide.
Once such a resolution is passed, the UN Secretary-General is required to invite member nations to contribute troops, equipment, and supplies to the military force, which must then be quickly assembled and deployed.
Image: Priti Gulati Cox. See more such bookmarks at her resistance embroidery initiative, which supports The Sameer Project in Gaza.
Prevailing Against US-Israel Obstruction
Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in October of 2023 while warning that genocide was coming to Gaza, is one of the most prominent advocates for a UN resolution to deploy an armed protection force. In a Middle East Eye article last month, he stressed that the genocide being wrought by Israel “requires intervention, the State of Palestine has invited intervention, and Palestinian civil society has appealed for intervention.” A multinational military force, he wrote, is necessary to help the Palestinian people out of this immediate crisis. But in the longer run, he added, “genocide (and apartheid) will only end through resistance against the Israeli regime, the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, the solidarity of the rest of the world, and the isolation, weakening, defeat, and dismantling of the Israeli regime.”
Mokhiber is optimistic that the resolution can get ‘Yes’ votes from the required two-thirds of General Assembly members. However, he warns,
The U.S. and the Israeli regime will use every available carrot and stick to try to
prevent the securing of the necessary two-thirds majority, seeking to water down the text, and bribing and threatening states to vote no, to abstain, or to be absent for the vote. The current lawless government in Washington may even threaten sanctions on behalf of the Israeli regime, as it has already done vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court and the UN’s Special Rapporteur. And they are likely to try to obstruct the protection force itself, once mandated.
Mokhiber doesn’t say so explicitly, but it seems to me that any US-Israeli attempt to “obstruct the protection force” could include a range of actions that might well lead to direct armed conflict with the protection force.
Alfred de Zayas, a former UN Independent Expert on International Order, explained in a recent CounterPunch article why “Israel has no authority, no sovereignty, and no rights in Gaza or in the West Bank,” while UN-approved troops would be in Gaza legally at the request of Palestine. But the occupiers have broken every other international law they’ve encountered, so it would be no surprise if they were to attack the UN’s protection force, which, I presume, would be authorized to fight back in defense of themselves and the civilian population.
I haven’t seen anything in the various calls for a Uniting for Peace resolution regarding specific actions the protection force would be allowed to take. Mokhiber has said that the troops would be dispatched to protect Palestinians, not attack Israelis. It seems to me, though, that if they’re to carry out their protective mission, UN troops must be authorized to enforce a no-fly zone over Gaza and shoot down Israeli aircraft that violate it.
I’m way out on a limb at this point, but if a no-fly zone is not permissible, I think it should be. As the Palestinian resistance has shown, the IOF are effective fighters only when they’re in the cockpit of a fighter-bomber or sitting safely back at their home base controlling a drone. They’re not good at fighting on terra firma. With a no-fly zone in place, therefore, the multinational force could be highly effective in protecting Gaza’s civilian population, pushing out the Israelis, and helping bring a surge of humanitarian aid, other supplies, and infrastructure into the territory.
I’ve felt a little more optimistic that IOF troops can be purged from Gaza without setting off full-blown armed conflict since hearing Craig Mokhiber discuss prospects for a protection force on The Electronic Intifada’s livestream of September 11. He cautioned that with the General Assembly session starting soon in New York and the many possibilities being discussed, the creation and deployment of a protection force is far from guaranteed. But, he imagined, “if a force made up [hypothetically] of Spanish, Irish, Slovenian, South African, Namibian, Kenyan, Malaysian, and Indonesian contingents sailing under a UN flag” approaches Gaza, it is “not obvious that Israel would be in a position to attack such a force.” And if Israeli forces do attack the UN troops, he added, even more nations might be inspired to join the intervention.
Whatever the chances that an armed protection force can be successfully assembled and deployed, Mokhiber concluded, civil society around the world must demand as loudly as possible that the UN establish and deploy an armed protection force for Gaza.
“If we ask for it and they don’t do it,” he said, “it’s their sin. If we don’t ask for it, it’s our sin.”
Trump’s designation of the U.S. as “No. 1” and Russia as “No. 2,” as well as his observation that “it’s good” when those “two big powers get along,” has multiple, conceivably terrifying implications. Image by Jørgen Håland.
“We’re No. 1 and they’re No. 2 in the world.”
That was President Trump’s blunt assessment of global power politics when it came to the United States and Russia following his inconclusive “summit” meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15th. Of all his comments about the meeting, that numerical assessment — made during a post-summit interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News — was perhaps the most revealing, if also in some strange sense the hardest to decipher.
Supposedly, the intent of the Anchorage meeting was to arrange an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine and devise a path to lasting peace there — none of which, of course, occurred. Instead, Trump appeared to focus on repairing U.S.-Russia relations, which had been in a deep freeze since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“I think the meeting was a 10,” Trump exclaimed triumphantly after being asked by Hannity to rate the outcome of his talks with Putin. “In the sense we got along great, and it’s good when two big powers get along, especially when they’re nuclear powers.” Then came the observation that we’re No. 1 and they’re No. 2.
What Could Trump Have Meant by That?
Ostensibly, the comment suggests that Trump was anointing Russia as the second most powerful nation in the world after the United States. But while few would contest America’s status as the number-one world power, most analysts would certainly rank China as the world’s second most powerful nation, given its mammoth economy, expanding technological base, and growing military capacity. So, was this just a dig at China — a crude way of denigrating its rise to superpower status? Maybe, but it’s likely that there was more to it than that.
As with so much Trump says in public, his comment appeared to be both a spontaneous outburst — prompted by his chummy conversation with Putin — and a reflection of his long-held understanding of global power politics. Speaking as if international relations were a competitive sport like baseball or football, where team rankings matter, he celebrated America and Russia’s status as the top two competitors.
But there’s more that can be extracted from Trump’s comment, including hints as to his preconceptions about the core constituents of national power and his strategy for perpetuating America’s status as “No. 1.”
Calculating Global Power Rankings
First of all, what parameters might go into a calculation of such global power rankings? While there is considerable debate about this, analysts usually cite some combination of economic, military, geographic, and demographic factors when making their assessments.
In his interview with Hannity, Trump referred to the status of the two countries as nuclear powers, so that’s a good place to start. According to the most recent (2024) tally from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the U.S. and Russia possess the world’s largest inventories of nuclear warheads, far surpassing those of the other nuclear-armed powers. And in this one key area, Russia is, in fact, number 1 in total numbers, with an estimated stockpile of 5,580 nuclear warheads compared to 5,044 in the U.S. arsenal. (These figures include warheads in storage as well as those deployed with battle-ready forces.) China, with the third largest arsenal, is said to possess 500 warheads, while France, in fourth place, has about 290. (Bear in mind that you don’t need anything faintly like 5,000 nuclear weapons to completely incinerate planet Earth and kill most of its human inhabitants.)
Where else can the U.S. and Russia be said to occupy either the No. 1 or No. 2 positions in global power rankings? Certainly not in population size or, in Russia’s case, economic muscle — both considered major components of national power.
Population size matters because having more people translates into more workers, soldiers, and entrepreneurs to drive economic and geopolitical expansion. According to the most recent data from Worldometer, a respected independent source on global trends, the U.S. (with 348 million people) is the world’s third most populous nation, with India (1.5 billion people) in first place and China (1.4 billion) in second. Russia (with 144 million people) ranks ninth, following Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, and Bangladesh. Significantly, Russia’s population is projected to shrink between now and 2050 — a consequence of low fertility rates, declining life expectancy, and losses to conflict, among other factors — sending it into 13th place, behind Ethiopia, Congo, Egypt, and Mexico.
The United States can certainly claim No. 1 status in gross domestic product (GDP), a leading indicator of national economic capacity. According to recent calculations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. towers above all other countries in that category with an estimated 2025 GDP of $30.5 trillion. China occupies second place with a GDP of $19.2 trillion; Germany, Japan, India, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, and Brazil follow, with Russia trailing as No. 11 on the list, claiming a GDP of $2.1 trillion.
Russia’s relatively low ranking compared to so many major powers has significant implications for its ability to wield other instruments of national power. Although seeking to match China and the U.S. in combined nuclear and conventional military power, Russia’s annual military spending is just 15% of what the U.S. spends and about half of China’s. This means that Russia can’t afford to buy as many high-tech ships, planes, and missiles as the U.S. or China. And given that much of Russia’s military spending is now being devoted to the war in Ukraine, it’s falling ever further behind those two countries when it comes to developing and possessing the most advanced conventional weaponry.
Russia also lacks the massive sums needed to support advanced research in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge technologies that will undoubtedly power future economic and military growth. According to Spherical Insights, a market research and consulting firm, the U.S. is by far the world’s leading investor in AI, committing $471 billion to new computing capacity in 2025 alone. China comes in second, with an estimated 2025 investment of $119 billion, followed by the UK, Canada, Israel, Germany, and India. Russia doesn’t even appear among the top 10 investors in AI, which will undoubtedly significantly limit its ability to compete in the evolving world economy. Worse yet for Russia, many skilled AI technicians have reportedly fled the country rather than risk being sent to fight in Ukraine.
The Oil and Gas Dimension
From such vital data, it’s hard to imagine how President Trump could ever classify Russia as the number two power on the planet. There is, however, one critical area where, all too sadly, this ranking might indeed apply: the production and export of oil and natural gas.
According to the 2025 edition of the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, the U.S. leads the world in those categories, while Russia is No. 2 in natural gas production and exports but No. 3 in oil production and exports, just slightly behind Saudi Arabia. However, if oil and natural gas exports were to be tabulated in identical units of measurement (such as barrels of oil or the equivalent) and combined, Russia would indeed move ahead of Saudi Arabia to become the world’s second leading exporter of hydrocarbons, making this one key area in which President Trump would be all too accurate in saying, “We’re No. 1 and Russia is No. 2.”
Is this what Trump was indeed thinking about? After all, there’s no doubt that he’s intent on waging a global campaign to encourage the continued consumption of oil and natural gas, while discouraging investments in any of the noncarbon sources of energy — especially wind and solar — so necessary to slow the pace of global warming. For example, as part of the U.S.-European Union (EU) trade and tariff deal agreed to by Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on July 27th, EU countries are now obliged to buy $750 billion worth of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG), oil, and nuclear energy products over the next three years — a move that will surely undermine the EU’s plans to lessen fossil-fuel consumption in accordance with its commitment to substantially reduce carbon emissions by 2030.
A fossil-fuel alliance with Russia and No. 3 oil exporter Saudi Arabia to extend the Fossil Fuel Era and slow the adoption of green energy could indeed be the ultimate objective of Trump’s diplomacy, in which case touting a successful meeting between “No. 1” and “No. 2” makes a lot of (grim) sense. In fact, senior Russian officials have spoken with their White House counterparts about U.S.-Russian energy cooperation, a subject that reportedly was also discussed during the Anchorage summit. According to an August 26th Reuters report, a number of proposed oil and gas joint ventures were first brought up in an August 6th meeting in Moscow between Vladimir Putin and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, and those proposals were indeed revisited during the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
A U.S.-Russian or U.S.-Russian-Saudi alliance to perpetuate fossil-fuel dominance on planet Earth, while suppressing the adoption of renewables, would have profound and ultimately catastrophic consequences for the fate of humanity. It would almost certainly guarantee that the world community will prove incapable of limiting global warming to (an already disastrous) 2 degrees Celsius rise above the pre-industrial level, the maximum temperature increase scientists believe the planetary ecosystem can accommodate without generating even more massively destructive and life-threatening storms, floods, fires, and droughts.
Indeed, such an alliance would likely ensure that warming climbs well above 2 degrees Celsius, resulting, sooner or later, in the inundation of coastal cities globally (as the Antarctic ice sheets melt) and the collapse of the food and water systems upon which billions of people depend. Can human civilization survive such catastrophes? At this point, it’s hard to know.
A U.S.-Russian-Saudi fossil-fuel alliance would also imperil Europe’s commitment to climate-change mitigation, as well as to an independent Ukraine. Conceivably, Europe could choose to join a green-energy alliance with China, the world’s leading producer of solar panels and electric cars and the country that’s installing renewables faster than any other (even if it’s also consuming record amounts of coal). That, of course, would risk the disintegration of NATO, helped along by President Trump’s crippling U.S. tariffs and other punitive measures.
A Perilous Future?
Another way of interpreting Trump’s comments to Sean Hannity is by way of George Orwell’s brilliant 1949 dystopian novel about the (then) future, 1984. Although largely focused on the perils of a future authoritarian system in which a godlike ruler called “Big Brother” exercises absolute control over the population of Oceania (an amalgam of North America and Western Europe), Orwell’s prescient novel also took aim at pervasive militarism. He portrayed a world in which Oceania, where the novel takes place, is forever battling with two other superstates, Eurasia (then corresponding to the Soviet Union and its satellite states) and Eastasia (China and its neighbors). The citizens of Oceania, he wrote, were constantly being exhorted to prepare for war with the enemy of the moment — which, without explanation, could change from one day to the next between Eurasia and Eastasia.
In the geopolitics of 1984, a former enemy suddenly becomes a valuable ally when a new enemy is identified. Eurasia is Oceania’s chief adversary at one point in the novel but is then welcomed as a loyal friend when Eastasia — formerly an ally — is identified as the new enemy. Today, it’s easy enough to imagine something like that shaping Trump’s thinking. Whereas former President Joe Biden lumped Russia and China together as adversaries, complicating U.S. strategic planning, Trump clearly views Russia as a potential ally, thereby diminishing the global clout of China — the real “No. 2” in today’s international power hierarchy.
Russian leaders have clearly sought to foster just such a possibility, regularly touting the advantages of a U.S.-Russian entente in conversations with American officials. Mind you, they have by no means abandoned their reliance on China for economic and diplomatic aid in their drive to conquer Ukraine, a stance underscored by Putin’s lavish praise of the Russo-Chinese alliance during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on September 2nd. That, however, doesn’t mean that Trump and his aides see little chance of pulling Moscow into Washington’s orbit at Beijing’s expense. Indeed, this would appear to be the principal aim of Trump’s meeting with Putin in Anchorage and U.S. diplomacy towards Russia in general.
How all this will play out remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that Trump’s designation of the U.S. as “No. 1” and Russia as “No. 2,” as well as his observation that “it’s good” when those “two big powers get along,” has multiple, conceivably terrifying implications. At the very least, it portends a grim future for Ukraine, as the U.S. embraces Moscow’s war aims and deters Europe from playing a key role in Kyiv’s defense. The planet as a whole could face an even more perilous future if the U.S. joins Russia and Saudi Arabia in ensuring that global fossil-fuel dependence will last far into the future. Further observation and analysis will be needed to determine which of these outcomes is most likely to materialize, but as of this moment, the prospects aren’t very promising.
Los Chinchillas (detail), Plate 50 from Los Caprichos, Francisco Goya, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
– TS Eliot, The Hollow Men
+ Back in 2003, during peak post-9/11/Iraq War patriotic fever, when, as Dylan said of the McCarthy Era, “as long as you don’t say nothing, you can say anything at all,” Bill and Kathy Christison and I gave a talk in Taos, New Mexico, about the Iraq War, the neocons and the Israel Lobby. It was a bitterly cold night with brutal winds blowing down out of the Sangre de Cristos. As we left the venue, Bill noticed we were being tailed by a black truck, which followed us down State Road 68 towards Santa Fe, sometimes flashing its brights in the rearview mirror. Just outside Española, the truck pulled even with us and someone fired two shots at us from the passenger side window. Kathy and I flinched and ducked at the flashes. We heard a sharp metallic “ting.”
Bill and Kathy had both retired from the CIA in the late 70s and became two of the Agency’s fiercest critics. Bill, who had started as an analyst in the 1950s, had risen to near the top of the Agency. In the course of his career, he worked on the Soviet desk and nuclear proliferation. He became the principal adviser to the CIA director for Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa
And ended his career as director of the agency’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. Few people knew more about how the world worked, who benefited and who paid the price.Bill and Kathy met Cockburn shortly after 9/11 and quickly began writing erudite and incisive pieces for CounterPunch, excoriating US foreign policy. In an early essay, Bill laid out what he considered the root cause for many of the terrorist attacks on the US: “the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Bill and Kathy had contributed a chapter to our book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I’d spent the previous week driving across the Southwest, giving talks about the book and speaking at anti-war rallies, starting in San Antonio, then El Paso, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque, before meeting up with Bill and Kathy for events in Santa Fe, where they’d moved after leaving DC, and Taos.
The truck continued to shadow us for several miles and fired at least two more shots. But Bill engaged in some fancy evasive driving techniques, which he’d once put to use in wartime Saigon, and we made it safely back to Santa Fe. (Had I been driving, I’d’ve probably steered us right into the Rio Grande Canyon.) The Christisons’ car didn’t escape unscathed, however. At least one of the shots creased the roof of their Toyota, just above where Bill’s head had been. I’ve given a lot of incendiary speeches over the years and I really prefer it if people do not respond to them, no matter how crazy they might sound, with gunfire…
+ The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets. But let’s recall that when two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch…..When an anti-vaxxer fired 173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month, Trump stayed quiet, which was probably welcome, given what he might have said.
The 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…
+ Senator Markwayne Mullin: “He was a Christian, and Christians are under attack right now from this far crazy left views that say they don’t feel safe. Well, they’re the ones going in and shooting up our schools and shooting up our churches and shooting people that they don’t agree with, like President Trump and now Charlie Kirk.”
+ Elon Musk: “The Left is the party of murder.”
+ Now this from Trump’s backroom Kissinger, Laura Loomer: It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization. If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
+ Of course, Loomer had directed some pretty harsh words at Kirk herself…
+ Christopher Rufo: “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
+ Donald Trump: “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
+ Some recent acts of political violence committed by MAGA/Trump supporters…
August 2025: Firing of 180 shots into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and the killing of David Rose, a black police officer.
June 2025: Killing Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their Minnesota home.
June 2025: Shooting and critical wounding of Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their Minnesota home.
April 2025:Attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro.
Late 2022 and early 2023: A series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico.
October 2022: Attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and assault on her husband, Paul.
January 2021: Storming of the Capitol, assaults on Capitol Hill and DC police, threat to lynch Mike Pence.
July 2020: Attack on the home of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas that resulted in the murder of her son Daniel and the shooting and critical wounding of her husband, Mark.
July 2020: Attempted kidnapping of Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
August 2019: Mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 23 people and injured 22.
October 2018: The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.
September 2018: Shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and wounded six.
January 2017: Mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Center, Quebec City, that killed six and injured 19.
August 2017: Killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville during the counter-protest to the Unite the Right rally.
+ Elizabeth Warren on calls for the Democrats to “tone down” their rhetoric: “Oh, please. Why don’t you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he’s posted and every ugly word.”
+ Obama: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.” Perfectly fine and appropriate sentiments, if only he’d speak this forcefully about the genocide in Gaza…
+ Many of those condemning the rise of “political violence” have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.
+ The late, great Paul Krassner: “When John Hinckley shot Reagan, Hinckley later came out against gun violence, Reagan came out in support of it!”
+ Kirk was shot while he was answering, well, flippantly responding to, a question about mass shootings in the US:
Q. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?”
Kirk: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
+ Utah has some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation. You can open carry without a permit. There were almost certainly a lot of people packing weapons at Kirk’s speech. None of them prevented the shooting. None of them were able to append, disarm or shoot the assassin after the killing.
A recent Utah law forced state universities to allow anyone with a concealed weapons permit to openly carry a gun on campus. The Utah Valley University, where conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was killed with a suspected high-powered rifle yesterday, already allowed open carry — in part because a student there made a fuss about it in 2010, helping to inspire legislation that opened the door for the university to allow it. In other matters, in 2023, the Department of Education fined the college for not adequately filing security reports, for which the university eventually paid $200,000.
+ Will Trump send the National Guard to occupy Orem?
+ The Trump administration has issued a warning to immigrants that if they say anything negative about Charlie Kirk, their visas will be revoked. Naturally, Kirk’s murder would be used as justification for more deportations…
+ Charlie Kirk (2023): “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a completely alternate universe.”
+ Would Kirk have considered the three kids shot at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, on the same day “unfortunate” martyrs for the 2nd Amendment?
+ One of the two people detained, interrogated, and later released as suspects in the murder of Charlie Kirk was Zachariah Qureshi, an Arab-American conservative who works for the Heritage Foundation. Since Qureshi is a fervent supporter of Turning Point USA, his arrest and subsequent were almost certainly a case of racial profiling.
+ How long can a “statement” be when “engraved” on a bullet casing?
+ This trend of inscribing messages on and/or of signing ammunition is one of the more macabre pathologies of post-9/11 America. How many politicians have signed US-made, Israeli-launched bombs that have killed Palestinian children? Nikki Haley signed her Israeli bomb: “Finish them.”
+ Greg Grandin: “There’s a weird, dangerous transubstantiation going on in which the failed shooting of Trump is manifest in the killing of Kirk, allowing Trump simultaneously to escape martyrdom and claim, in the name of his figurative son, martyrdom.”
+ Soon after the following interview aired, Matthew Dowd, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, was fired as a commentator at MSNBC…
Katy Tur, MSNBC: “What about the environment in which a shooting like this happened?”
Matthew Dowd: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially one of the most divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sorts of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”
+ Tur asked a reasonable question. Doud gave a reasonable answer, even if it offended many on the right. But reason no longer matters. We’ve been beyond reason for some time, now.
+ What kind of “awful words” did Kirk say? How about this: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” Or this: “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence or is she there because of affirmative action?” Or this: “If you’re a WNBA pot-smoking black lesbian, do you get treated better than a US Marine?” Or this: “If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” Or this: “The American Democrat Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”
+++
+ In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court gave Trump the green light to engage in racial profiling. In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett “Kegger” Kavanaugh expressly endorsed ICE and Border Patrol targeting any Hispanics they observe in Los Angeles speaking Spanish and then demanding their papers. Kavanaugh writes that if anyone is concerned about ICE/DHS using excessive force, they should be able to sue. But he has previously voted in Egbert v Hernandez to bar people from suing the federal government over similar violations of the 4th Amendment…
+ In Sotomayor’s dissent, she argues that today’s decision will make Hispanics “second-class” citizens, forced to “carry enough documentation to prove they deserve to walk freely”…
+ Steven Mazie, Supreme Court reporter for The Economist:
SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant’s file is blatantly unconstitutional.
ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting people to detain and deport is cool, cool cool.
+ Cato’s David J. Bier: “When ICE violates people’s rights and stops them without reason, the inevitable result will be unnecessary conflict that threatens everyone, even ICE agents themselves.”
+ ICE is the modern-day slave patrol. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling functions as a reification of its infamous decisions legalizing the Fugitive Slave Act–Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Ableman v. Booth (1859)–allowing Trump’s marauders to pursue people into sanctuary states and cities based only on their race, and assault, detain and deport them unless they prove they are “free”…
+ Fox News: “A lot of protesters are being bused in. Is DHS looking at the financing of these so-called organic protests?”
Thomas Homan: “Absolutely. These protesters are being paid. They will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. They will be.”
+ Is it a crime to be compensated to protest? How many people have the CIA paid to protest in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran…?
+ Weren’t the Brooks Brothers rioters who disrupted the vote counting in Miami-Dade during the 2000 elections paid? Many were GOP operatives and congressional staffers who later got compensated with jobs in the Bush Administration.
+ If Trump deployed the National Guard to a city near you…
+ Jesse Watters: “I don’t care about disappearing. I’m not even offended. So what, yeah, they’re disappearing from the country — exactly. That’s what we were elected to do. Make these people disappear. If they don’t have the paperwork, they don’t belong here. I’m sick and tired of having to deal with all these specific individuals. That’s what we mean by mass deportation. They are all going out. They are not going out fast enough. They should be going out way faster.”
+ According to the government of South Korea, more than 300 of the workers arrested and put in chains during the military-commando style ICE raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia were South Korean citizens, all of whom had valid work visas. They were mainly engineers sent to Georgia to set up the plant, which is still under construction. Hyundai-LG has halted all operations in the US as a result. One lawmaker in Seoul urged the government to look into U.S. nationals teaching English on a tourist visa in South Korea. Well done, Stephen Miller.
+ Donna Hughes-Brown is an Irish citizen who has been a lawful resident of the US for 37 years. She’s married to James Brown, a U.S Navy veteran, who voted for Trump. Now she’s in ICE custody in Kentucky, separated from her husband, four children and five grandchildren, despite regularly renewing her Green Card on schedule..
Why? ICE says she’s being deported for reasons of “moral turpitude.” And what depraved crime did Donna commit? Twenty years ago, she wrote a check for $25 that bounced. She quickly repaid the money and got probation from the court.
Her husband James, now regrets his vote for Trump. “Trump advertised that he was getting criminal illegal immigrants and deporting them—which I agree with,” James Brown said. “But they’re not telling the truth about what’s actually happening to a lot of legal immigrants.”
+ HR 3486, the Stop Illegal Entry Act, would subject those who cross the border “illegally” to harsher punishment than convicted rapists.
+ Tom Homan is threatening mayors and governors: “ I don’t care who the mayor is. If mayors and governors don’t want to help, then get out of the way… They better not step over the line. They better not impede our efforts or there’s gonna be consequences. We’re coming!”
+++
+ More from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Jane Fonda of the Far Right:
They believe in a “war economy”…They’ll say “Marjorie, you have thousands of jobs in your district that rely on these government contracts.’ Well, you want to know something, I’m not very interested in funding an economy that’s based on killing people, especially innocent people and children.”
+ How does one begin to speak about a President who depicts himself “presiding” over the napalming of America’s third largest city? His cult knows he’s a draft-evading coward that sent poor whites, blacks and Hispanics to kill, be maimed and die in his place so that he could blow his $400 mm inheritance on failed business scams, and who’d need three people to help him up if ever managed to squat like Robert Duvall, right?
+ Pete Hegseth on changing the Department of Defense to the War Department: “Maximum lethality — not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re gonna raise up warriors. Not just defenders.”
+ “Tepid Legality” sounds like a good name for a thrash metal band.
+ Tim Barker: “AOC will only vote to fund the defensive aspects of the War Department.”
+ Trump: “We could’ve won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct, or wokey.” I’d hate to see the un-woke versions of My Lai and Abu Ghraib…
+ George Washington’s Revolutionary Army was more integrated (woke) than any US armed force until the Korean War. (See Eric Foner’s excellent new collection of essays, Our Fragile Freedom.)
+ Rep. Thomas Massie: “If it is called the Department of War, can we finally acknowledge it commits Acts of War, which require Congressional Declarations according to our Constitution?”
+ JD Vance to Lara Trump: “It would not have shocked me if I had learned your father-in-law was in the Marine Corps—of course, he didn’t serve in the Marines, but he has a Marine Corps style of leadership.” If it hadn’t been for the bone spurs…
+++
+ Trump: “There’s no inflation.”
+ The consumer price index rose in August at a 2.9 percent annual rate, up from July. Weekly jobless claims rose to the highest level since 2021.
+ Fox’s Jesse Watters: “Prices are still high. Can’t Trump just bring in some corporate executives and just say guys, there’s going to be a socialist revolution in this country if you don’t do something, please do something?”
+ The 400 richest people in the U.S. are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. Their wealth grew by $1.2 trillion in the past year.
+ Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: “AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”
UBS has assessed the probability of recession at 93%.
+ The Wall Street Journal has crowned Larry Ellison as the richest person in the world, toppling Elon Musk. Ellison’s wealth increased by $200 billion this year, largely owing to the AI surge inOracle’s stock..
+ According to Bloomberg, new cars are now so expensive that more and more buyers need seven-year loan.
+ Percent of Gen Z parents who believe that a college degree guarantees long-term job security: 16%.
+ Bank of America survey: 53% of men and 54% women ages 18 to 28 are spending $0 a month on dating.
+ Financial Times: Americans face biggest increase in health insurance costs in 15 years.
+ Jason Calacanis: “Before 2030 you’re going to see Amazon, which has massively invested in [AI], replace all factory workers and all drivers … It will be 100% robotic, which means all of those workers are going away. Every Amazon worker. UPS, gone. FedEx, gone,.”
+ Mexico has lifted 8.3 MILLION people out of poverty since 2022
+ Home prices are falling in half of the US. But not in NYC, where Manhattan apartment rents hit a record for the fifth time in the past six months. New leases were signed at a median of $4,700 in July, up $75 from June, according to data from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman.Rents surged 9.3% from a year earlier, the second-biggest annual jump in the firms’ data going back to 2008.
+ The NY Fed reports that worker confidence in finding a new job has hit a new low.
+ Realtor Climate Risk Report: “More than one in four U.S. homes—amounting to $12.7 trillion in real estate—faces at least one type of severe or extreme climate risk, like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires.”
+ Last year, Burgum’s home state of North Dakota produced 35% of its energy from wind power.
+ Apparently, they’ve forgotten all about how to store energy and the batteries containing the rare earth minerals they’re arm-twisting countries across to acquire?
+ Even as Trump is doing everything he can to shut it down, congestion pricing in NYC has succeeded in reducing vehicle traffic into Manhattan by 12%, meaning almost 18 million fewer vehicles trips since it went into effect.
+ Meet the Press’s Kristen Welker: “Goldman Sachs says 86% of the tariff revenue collected so far has been paid by American businesses and consumers. Do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on American consumers?”
Scott Bessent: “No, I don’t”.
+ More bullshit from Kevin Hassett, in furtherance of the Trump admin’s relentless smearing of Portland and Chicago: “80% of the claims for unemployment over the last few months have come from blue states. So there are places like Portland and Chicago where people are fleeing the cities.”
+ The rise of the BRICS Nations
Share of Global GDP in 1995 – 2025
BRICS
1995: 17%
2003: 20%
2025:34%
United States
1995: 22%
2003:20%
2025:15%
European Union
1995: 20%
2003:20%
2025:13%
+ At this week’s BRICS teleconference, Lula asked the member states to denounce US military pressure against Venezuela at the UN General Assembly. “The presence of a major power’s armed forces in the Caribbean Sea creates tension that is at odds with the region’s peaceful nature.”
Does anyone else feel like we’re trapped in a Paul Verhoeven movie?
Q: Any lessons from your time in Washington, DC?
Elon Musk: “The government is basically unfixable…If AI and robots don’t solve our national debt, we’re toast.”
+ The top house buyer’s markets across the US, according to Zillow:
1. Miami, Florida
2. North Port, Florida
3. New Orleans, Louisiana
4. Urban Honolulu, Hawaii
5. Deltona, Florida
6. Jacksonville, Florida
7. Austin, Texas
8. Jackson, Mississippi
9. Palm Bay, Florida
10. Tampa, Florida
+ Rand Paul on JD Vance and the US Navy droning that dinghy, assassinating 11 people: “What really ticked me off and got me going was for somebody [Vance] to glorify the idea of killing people without any due process and saying he just didn’t give a shit … That, to me, was a disdain for human life and a disdain for our process.”
+ You’ll probably feel like you’ve “just had some kind of mushroom” after reading Radley Balko’s round-up of the last month in Trumplandia…
+++
+ Paula White, Trump’s spiritual advisor: “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”
+ Trump: “Things that take place in the home, they call a crime. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this is a crime.” I recommend revisiting Ivana’s account of the “little fight” Trump had with her after she insulted his hair implants, an episode vividly re-enacted in Ali Abbasi’s film, The Apprentice.
With his remarks about “little fights with the wife” made at, of all places, the Museum of the Bible, Trump lent considerable credence to Ivana’s accusation, recounted in Harry Hurt’s book, The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald Trump…
+ Coincidentally, the lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s estate have given Congress a copy of the “birthday book” featuring Donald Trump’s crude letter and drawing that Trump said didn’t exist…
+ Molly Knight: “What a humiliating way for Don Jr. to find out that his dad sends birthday cards.”
Prem Thakker: “We’re releasing the Files. There are no Files. This video shows it’s a hoax. Ok, we edited it. Democrats made the Files. They’re real. Trump’s in them because he was an informant. Ok he wasnt I just mean he wanted to take Epstein down. That note to Epstein isn’t Trump. Ok, it is but…”
+ Jeffrey Sachs: “We all need to accept that the President probably raped kids and that’s not going to cost him his job.”
+ Rep. Jared Moskowitz on Mike Johnson’s now retracted assertion that Trump was a confidential informant against Epstein for the FBI: “If he was lying then, is he lying now?I don’t think in the history of this country we’ve had a Speaker of the House say the president was an FBI informant. We need to hear from the FBI.”
+ Bill Pulte is the Trump official in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has accused Adam Schiff, Letitia James and Fed member Lisa Cook of mortgage fraud for listing two houses as principal residences. But a Reuters investigation shows Pulte’s father & stepmother, Mark and Julie Pulte, claimed primary residences on homes in Michigan & Florida, in order to get real-estate tax breaks on each house. Meanwhile, Pro Publica reported that at least three Trump cabinet members, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and EPA director Lee Zeldin, have claimed multiple homes as their primary residences on mortgages: “Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation.”
+ Maybe PULTE V. BESSENT will be one of the cage fights on the White House lawn…Speaking of “political violence,” according to Politico
At a private dinner with Trump allies last week, Treasury Secretary. Scott Bessent threatened to punch housing finance official Bill Pulte “in the fucking face.” Bessent had heard from several people that Pulte was badmouthing him to Trump. “Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fck you. I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face… I’m going to fucking beat your ass,” Bessent told a “stunned” Pulte.
+ Britain’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, wrote this to his pal Jeffrey Epstein, after he’d been sentenced to jail for soliciting sex with a minor: “I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened. I still can’t understand it. It just could not happen in Britain.” Mandelson was sacked on Wednesday.
Rep. Martin Frost: “You’re here because you’re lap dogs to the president of the United States…”
Rep. Clay Higgins: “Words taken down, Mr. Chairman. My colleague just called me a lap dog of the president of the United States. I move for his words to be taken down.”
Caroline Downey, the National Review, on Iryna Zarutska’s murderer: “He should have been locked away for life because he was threatening the public. He was a menace to society.”
CNN: “He should have been locked away for life, for what now?”
Downey: “Schizophrenia.”
+++
+ Sen. Elissa Slotkin, the former CIA officer whom the Dems are promoting as potential presidential material because of her “intelligence,” thinks the Manhattan Project was set up to get an atomic weapon before the…checks notes…Soviets did. (In fact, the Manhattan Project enabled the Soviets to acquire a nuclear weapon shortly after the Americans did, thanks to Klaus Fuchs and others.)
+ Former NYPD Commissioner Tom Donlon has referred Mayor Eric Adams, Chief of Department John Chell and Deputy Mayor Kaz Daughtry to US Attorney General Pam Bondi for criminal prosecution for “forged official documents, manipulated promotions, obstruction of justice, and retaliation.”
+ We’ll gladly keep Yosemite, the Giant Sequoias, the Redwoods, Kings Canyon, Mt Shasta, Napa Valley, Big Sur, Joshua Tree, the Sierra, the Getty, the Watts Towers, the LACMA, the Norton-Simon, the Dodgers, 49ers, Giants, Warriors, Lakers, Rams, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cal-Poly, Capitol Records, the Whiskey Go-Go and Snoop Dogg out here and you can keep, well, whatever it is you got there in Iowa. Deal?
+ Gross farm income
California: $68.1 billion
Iowa: 41.2 billion
+++
I’ve had my disagreements with Medea Benjamin over the years, but it’s amazing how they could pull this off…
+ Jacob Silverman: “You’re asking how those protesters got so close to the president? Code Pink is the most elite deep cover group of operators this country has ever produced. They will pop up in your living room.”
+ Trump was loudly jeered and booed during his appearance at the men’s finals of the US Open, where he and his entourage sat grotesquely beneath the sign: “Arthur Ashe Court.” What went unmentioned in most of the coverage was the fact that Trump and his gang were there as a “guest of Rolex,” a company that is facing 39% tariffs on its watches that Trump imposed a few weeks ago.
+ Arundhati Roy and I are about the same age and probably started inhaling these death sticks around the same time after reading many of the same books (especially the French ones) and watching the same films (also the French ones)–maybe French cultural exports need a warning label? …Anyway, I love the cover of her memoir and the memoir itself, which is terrific, at times terrifying, and ultimately quite inspiring…
+ I asked AI to translate this into English, idiomatic American English even, but it gave up…Trump: “So they have hostages, It could be a little bit less than 20, you know, they tend to die. Even though they’re young people, they’re dying. Young people don’t die. Young people stay alive…We have about 38 bodies. Bodies. Meaning bodies.”
+ James Joyce wasn’t just a revolutionary in the way he used language to tell stories. He was a revolutionary period: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church.”
“Fascism was not simply a conspiracy—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge, a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation.”
Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer, dir., Paramount Pictures, 1964. Screenshot.
Stephen Miller is trolling me
Like most other writers for Counterpunch, I’ve written my share of columns about the current president. I’m slightly embarrassed about that fact; attention for a narcissist is like heroin for a junkie, and nobody wants to feed an addiction. But Trump is as liable to read Counterpunch as he is The New England Journal of Medicine, so on that score, my conscience is clear.
I’m less certain about his entourage. Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and very own Goebbels, is just perverse enough to read Counterpunch to buttress his claims that his boss’s opponents are “communist lunatics.”And that possibility, however remote, gives me pause. Since I started writing for Counterpunch in 2018, almost every awful thing I predicted Trump would do, he did. Almost every cruelty he enacted, I anticipated. Has Miller been trolling me? Have I been feeding him and Trump ideas?I therefore offer the following with trepidation.
A secret hidden in plain sight
Trump has sought to undermine every stabilizing institution of American political or civil society: Congress, the courts, federal agencies, universities, law and medicine. Were his goals not so corrupt and self-aggrandizing, we might call him a revolutionary.Instead, he is simply a greedy bastard who has for reasons unfathomable, hoodwinked a significant minority of Americans into believing he will make them rich or redress their grievances. They are discovering the con, though far too slowly for it to matter. But just in case there’s a major erosion of popular support, or congressional opposition arises, Trump has a back-up plan – so well broadcast it might be called a “front-up” plan:a presidential proclamation of national emergency and declaration of martial law.
National Guard troops and ICE agents, the latter a veritable Gestapo, are already pre-positioned in Los Angles and Washington. They may be sent soon to Chicago, New York, Boston and Baltimore, though public opposition is growing and there is a chance Trump will hold-off for now. What will be the pretext for a declaration of martial law, followed by postponement of midterm elections? What will martial law look like? Can it be stopped? Here’s a brief primer on martial law and its prospects in the U.S.A.
Definition
Martial law is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. The nearest reference is Article I, Section 8, Clause 15: “The Congress shall have power . . . to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrection and repel Invasions.” There’s also Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.” In each case, the coercive power of a militia is proposed as remedy to invasion, insurrection, or violence serious enough to threaten the central government or federated states. Only in extremis, in other words, may national armies be deployed within the nation, and then usually by congress. That prohibition was later codified in the marvelously named (shades of Wyatt Erp) Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbids the use of the federal military to enforce laws within the U.S.
Constitutional caution about the use of martial law is reflected in the subsequent body of Supreme Court decisions. In Ex parte Milligan (1866), the court forbade use of military courts while civilian ones were still functioning.In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase wrote that martial law could only be asserted “in time of invasion or insurrection within the limits of the United States…when the public danger requires its exercise.” A decade later, in U.S. v Dielkelman (1876), the Court again declared: “Martial law is the law of military necessity in the actual presence of war.”
Since that time, there have been further limitations upon the power of the executive to suspend habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful arrest) and declare martial law, plus one significant expansion, the notorious Korematsu v. United States (1944) which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Though the case was wrongly decided – an injustice that will forever stain the nation — the underlying rationale of the decision was the same as with previous cited cases: Suspension of due process and imposition of martial law is only permissible when danger from war, invasion or insurrection is extreme.
If the internment of Japanese American is tragedy, the current dispatch of National Guard troops to halt a “migrant invasion” is farce. Far from representing a threat, immigrants have brought the U.S. prosperity. They take the hardest, lowest paying jobs that American citizens don’t want, pay federal and state taxes without receiving benefits in return, and stabilize population numbers at a time of very low birth-rates.Immigrants exert little if any downward pressure on wages and contribute significantly to GDP growth. Nevertheless, President Trump has declared illegal immigration a national emergency and commanded the armed forces and national guard to prevent crossings at the Mexican border and apprehend “illegals” everywhere else.
As always with Trump, motives are murky. It’s not clear if the declaration of emergency was pretextual for the expansion of ICE and increased deportations, or if it was an excuse for the nationwide deployment of non-civilian police forces and the eventual imposition of martial law. The result is the same either way: fascist authoritarianism.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22….”
In a recent column in Counterpunch, John Feffer wrote persuasively about what he called “slow-motion authoritarianism,” the idea that some elected leaders “gradually undermine democratic institutions and accumulate more executive power”, until they become full-blown autocrats, like Putin in Russia and Urban in Hungary. That may be the situation with Trump, Feffer argues, but I want to offer a cavil: authoritarianism can also happen, to quote Hemingway on bankruptcy, “gradually and then suddenly.”
Right now, the U.S. is speeding toward martial law.The fuel is Trump’s narcissism and hunger for power, and congressional Republicans’ will to gratify both. Congress even provided enabling legislation in the form of the One Big Beautiful Bill and Recission Act. The first lowered taxes on the rich, paying for them with reductions in Medicaid and Food Stamps. The second cut 80% of funding for USAID, which mostly supports poor, hungry, and sick people abroad. The politics of both bills is transparent: further accrual of power and the crushing of potential political opposition. Hunger provokes activism and resistance; starvation prevents it.
That martial law will be proclaimed sometime in the next year seems pre-ordained. ICE agents, assisted by state National Guard troops in Los Angeles, Washington, and other Democrat-led cities and states, will round up and arrest undocumented immigrants, dark-skinned and Spanish-speaking legal residents and citizens, and anyone who tries to hinder them. (Suspects may also include anyone holding a submarine sandwich.) If protests grow large or unruly, more troops will be sent, including U.S. Army forces, in direct contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act. In that situation, a national emergency will be proclaimed by executive order, and martial law declared in affected cities, and perhaps nationwide. In other words, absent resistance, city after city will be slowly, gradually governed by military force, as Feffer described. If urban populations offer significant resistance to ICE raids and federal policing, more military forces will quickly be called in, and martial law declared. That’s the national catch-22: Don’t resist and martial law will happen slowly; resist and it will occur quickly.
There’s another circumstance in which martial law may be pronounced, and it too presents itself as a catch 22. If congressional Democrats filibuster the stopgap budget bill to fund the federal government, Trump may declare a national emergency and instruct the treasury pay the nation’s bills anyway. The exercise of spending prerogatives, outside of congressional mandate, would constitute a coup, a de facto “state of emergency,” facilitated by the imposition of martial law.If on the other hand, Democrats join Republicans in passing the budget – one containing recissions and impoundments — they will be complicit in their own disempowerment. They will have created de facto, a government ruled by executive decree. Any public protest will quickly be answered by troops and a declaration of national emergency or state of martial law. Administration officials are no doubt gaming out various scenarios to maximize the chance to postpone or cancel the 2026 midterm elections. If they do, 2028 will also be up for grabs.
And there’s one more situation in which martial law might be declared: political violence targeted against the right. The murder of conservative influencer and Trump-whisperer Charlie Kirk inspired a 4-minute verbal presidential fusillade against the “radical left.” Even in advance of the apprehension of any suspect in the killing, Trump vowed retribution against “each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and… the organizations that fund it and support it.” It is easy to imagine this shooting, or similar events (regardless of the predominance of far right political violence in the U.S.) triggering what may be called a “Reichstag moment.”That’s when an arson fire at the German parliament in February 1933 was used by the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler as a pretext for an attack upon the political left and a presidential decree suspending civil liberties, in effect a declaration of martial law.
Can martial law be resisted?
The short answer is yes. Despite extraordinary improvements in electronic eavesdropping, video surveillance, facial recognition software, and online tracking, a genuine mass movement to arrest the descent into fascism can succeed. There simply aren’t enough hounds to catch the vast number of foxes who will seek to challenge or undermine a nascent, fascist polity. No state, not even a police state, can govern without a population willing to do the millions of jobs required to keep it operating. No nation, not even one locked down under martial law, can coerce millions of its citizens to manufacture, trade, buy, repair, heal, teach, travel, or entertain if they don’t want to. A nation of consumers under martial law will slow their buying; a land of tourists will see travel grind to a halt. A country of investors and entrepreneurs will see profit levels plumet. In those circumstances, the government must fall.
The only prophylaxis against fascism therefore, is an engaged and motivated mass. But for that to exist, there needs to be smart leaders as well as energized followers. To call the current Democratic Party leadership sclerotic is to say the least. But there are Democrats, including 84 y.o. Bernie Sanders and 35 y.o. A.O.C., who will help the new leaders that will inevitably emerge from the hundreds of thousands of people who are currently engaged in grassroots activism in support of environmental justice, union organizing, prison reform or abolition, gender rights, animal protection, and community health. All of those endeavors have been threatened or undermined by the Trump regime. A declaration of martial law will coalesce that opposition and loose a whirlwind. I hope Stephen Miller is reading this.
Trump’s obsession with violence is more than a grotesque fixation on power and cruelty; it is a commentary on politics as pathology, a grim theater in which authoritarianism reveals its inner logic. What he offers is not governance but the intoxication of destruction, the fetishization of cruelty, and the performance of violence as ritual. On the individual level, it is the grotesque display of a delusional mind that can only feel alive through the embrace of terror, that finds its emotional register only in the language of threat and annihilation. This is obvious in his AI-generated meme on Truth Social where he targets Chicago by threatening that he will go to “WAR” with the city. The image posted on September 6th “depicted him as Robert Duvall’s character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.”
In the doctored image, Trump not only cast himself as a cinematic icon of militarized madness but paired it with a menacing caption. The post invoked his plan to unleash the National Guard on Chicago, echoing his earlier militarization of Washington, D.C., and underscored his desire to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The caption’s most telling moment, however, was a grotesque parody of Duvall’s infamous line from the film. Transforming “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” into “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump collapsed cinematic war fantasy into his ongoing campaign of immigration terror, turning the language of mass suffering into a punchline of authoritarian bravado.
What emerges from this spectacle is more than a provocation; it is a declaration that cruelty is both pleasure and policy, a gleeful admission that state violence has become theatre, and that politics itself has degenerated into necropolitics: a regime in which sovereignty is measured by the power to decide who suffers, who is dispossessed, and who is left to die. This grotesque performance exposes the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture, where cruelty is transfigured into pleasure, violence becomes the grammar of belonging, and politics is reduced to a performance of derangement. In Trump’s hands, deportation is stripped of its bureaucratic disguise and reimagined as an ecstatic ritual of exclusion — a celebration of malignant aggression that reveals the fascist subject in its most naked form, finding joy only in the infliction of suffering.
Let us be clear: Trump’s glee in the cruelty of deportation is nothing less than an unabashed celebration of white supremacy. His words are not incidental; they crown a long record of racist commitments. This is the man who has praised the Confederacy, vilified DEI initiatives, and weaponized ICE with Gestapo-like tactics overwhelmingly aimed at people of color–practices that echo the racial terror of the Klan. His assaults do not stop with bodies; they extend to culture itself. By targeting the ideas, books, and voices of critical Black figures, he advances a cultural purge that carries chilling resonances with Hitler’s campaign to erase Jewish, Marxist, and liberal intellectuals. In both instances, the logic is the same: to erase difference, to terrorize the vulnerable, and to secure power through the destruction of memory and the annihilation of dignity.
Trump’s racist obsession with mass deportations is inseparable from his militarized vision of politics. In his social media post, he invoked war against Chicago, threatened the deployment of the U. S. military toLos Angeles and Washington D. C., and celebrated state violence as the solution to social problems. This is more than racist demagoguery. It reveals how authoritarian cultural politics operates as a spectacle of education—normalizing war, glorifying white Christian nationalism, and erasing democratic memory.
Trump’s war is aimed not only at immigrants, people of color, and all who refuse his vision of white supremacy, but also at history itself. Controlling memory—whether by intimidating the press, defunding public broadcasting, or rewriting historical narratives—undermines the public’s capacity to recognize and resist fascism. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley warn, Trump’s manipulation of memory is a deliberate fascist strategy: it disarms the public by making white supremacy appear natural and inevitable. Shea Howell underscores the stakes: in destroying the sources of our collective past that celebrate justice and equality, Trump rewrites history to elevate white Christian American men and render everyone else disposable. She writes:
Over the last six months they have been systematically destroying the sources of our collective past that celebrate the best of our cultural aspirations.Attacking universities, defunding public broadcasting, intimidating news sources, renaming battle ships, and making up statistics are all essential to rewriting history in ways that emphasize the importance of one group of people, white Christian American men, and the insignificance of everyone else.
To grasp the deeper cultural and psychological appeal of Trump’s celebration of violence, it is necessary to situate his rhetoric within a longer history of critical reflections on the fascist personality and subject. The history of fascism produced a number of commentaries on the fascist personality and subject, notably by Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, and Freud. Reich wrote in 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascismin which heintegrated Marxism and psychoanalysis. He insisted that fascism grows out of an “irrational character structure” in which repressed drives are transfigured into obedience, hatred, and a perverse pleasure in cruelty. Reich’s insights were later deepened by Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality, who noted that the fascist demagogue eroticizes violence, offering his followers the delusional notion that cruelty is a source of collective pleasure. Freud had already warned in Civilization and Its Discontents that aggression is woven into the very fabric of human drives, a force that seeks expression in humiliation, exploitation, and annihilation when left unchecked by culture and conscience. Trump’s photo and commentary make clear how his embrace of violence fuses cruelty with pleasure. Erich Fromm later sharpened this analysis with his concept of “malignant aggression.” Fromm suggests that such aggression was not defensive but ecstatic, a passion for annihilation experienced as intoxicating. Trump’s post embodies precisely this malignant aggression, turning state violence into a spectacle of pornographic pleasure and belonging, a ritualized performance in which militarized cruelty itself becomes the ground of agency.
What emerges here is not the sober, if sometimes cruel, language of governance under gangster capitalism, but the delirious performance of spectacularized sadism, where violence becomes the end itself and the exclusive mode of state rule. Trump’s boast is more than a grotesque slip of the tongue; it is the utterance of a deranged mind for whom cruelty is the only register of feeling, and terror the only idiom of power. This is politics transfigured into pathology, a criminogenic mode of rule that normalizes lawlessness, and a necropolitical order that elevates the management of death and suffering into the very principle of sovereignty. Here, governance is reduced to the staging of annihilation, and the state is recast as an apparatus of terror whose legitimacy lies in its capacity to inflict pain, humiliation, and disposability.
Trump’s post reflects not only the brutality of the times but also the evolution of a distinctly American political madness. In his early public persona, he embodied the caricature of the greedy capitalist — a clownish, inflated version of Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, burnished through his performative role in The Apprentice. As president, his demeanor took on the cold, manipulative cruelty of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, obsessed with control and the spectacle of his own authority. Now, in his descent, he mirrors Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Christian Bale’s deranged investment banker whose polished exterior masks a voracious appetite for violence and annihilation. Trump has morphed into something even darker: an unhinged Darth Vader of American politics, propelled by obsession, revenge, and cruelty, terrifying in his capacity to transform governance into a theater of sadism.
The historical trajectory of genocidal violence from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its account of the Congo holocaust to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with its vision of Vietnam as madness, to the rise of American fascism under Trump, makes clear a grim continuity. Across these histories, violence is not simply a tool of domination but a ritual of supremacy and subjugation, a performance that turns cruelty into destiny and annihilation into governance. At the center of this continuity lies culture itself. Too often it functions as a form of pedagogical terrorism, normalizing cruelty, shaping desires, and producing the formative conditions for demagogues to thrive. What unites these moments is the transformation of violence into both pleasure and policy, where terror is rendered ordinary and suffering becomes the currency of power. Trump’s boast about “loving the smell of deportations” situates him squarely within this lineage. It is the contemporary face of a necropolitical culture that manufactures the fascist subject, treating human beings as disposable and turning mass suffering into a spectacle of national strength.
The U.S. actions aim to curb India’s oil trade surplus, which constitutes the largest source of its export revenue, thereby posing a strategic challenge to India’s economic ascent. By undermining India’s largest export sector, the U.S. seeks to slow its trajectory toward becoming the world’s second-largest economy.
