The decision resonated as shocking for all sides. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose entire war strategy hinges on the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, unilaterally decided on May 19 to allow “immediate” food entry to the famine-stricken Strip.

Of course, Netanyahu still maneuvered. Instead of permitting at least 1,000 trucks of aid to enter the utterly destroyed and devastated Gaza per day, he initially allowed a mere nine trucks, a number that nominally increased in the following days.

Even Netanyahu's staunch supporters, who fiercely criticized the decision, found themselves confounded by it. The prior understanding among Netanyahu's coalition partners regarding their ultimate plan in Gaza had been unequivocally clear: the total occupation of the Strip and the forced displacement of its population.

The latter was articulated as a matter of explicit policy by Israel's Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to... third countries,” he declared on May 6.

For food to enter Gaza, however minuscule its quantity, directly violates the established understanding between the government and the military, under the leadership of Netanyahu's ally, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir.

These two significant additions to Netanyahu's war cabinet replaced Yoav Gallant and Herzi Halevi. With these new appointments, Netanyahu stood poised for his master plan.

When the war commenced on October 7, 2023, the Israeli leader promised that he would take control of the Gaza Strip. This position evolved, or rather was clarified, to signify permanent occupation, though without the Palestinians themselves.

To achieve such a lofty objective–lofty, given Israel's consistent failure to subdue the Palestinians over the course of nearly 600 days–Netanyahu and his men meticulously devised the "Gideon's Chariots" plan. The propaganda that accompanied this new strategy transcended all the hasbara that had accompanied previous plans, including the failed "Generals' Plan" of October 2024.

The rationale behind this psychological warfare is to imprint upon the Palestinians in Gaza the indelible impression that their fate has been sealed, and that the future of Gaza can only be determined by Israel itself.

The plan, however, a rehash of what is historically known as “Sharon's Fingers,” is fundamentally predicated on sectionalizing Gaza into several distinct zones, and leveraging food as a tool for displacement into these camps, and ultimately, outside of Gaza.

However, why would Netanyahu agree to allow food access outside his sinister scheme? The reason behind this relates profoundly to the explosion of global anger directed at Israel, particularly from its most staunch allies: Britain, France, Canada, Australia, among others.

Unlike Spain, Norway, Ireland and others that have sharply criticized the Israeli genocide, a few Western capitals have remained committed to Israel throughout the war. Their commitment manifested in supportive political discourse, blaming Palestinians and absolving Israel; unhindered military support; and resolute shielding of Israel from legal accountability and political fallout on the global stage.

Things began to change when US President Donald Trump slowly grasped that Netanyahu's war in Gaza was destined to become a permanent war and occupation, which would inevitably translate to the perpetual destabilization of the Middle East – hardly a pressing American priority at the moment.

Leaked reports in US mainstream media, coupled with the noticeable lack of communication between Trump and Netanyahu, among other indicators, strongly suggested that the rift between Washington and Tel Aviv was not a mere ploy but a genuine policy shift.

Though Washington had indicated that the "US has not abandoned Israel," the writing was clearly on the wall: Netanyahu's long-term strategy and the US' current strategy are hardly convergent.

Despite the formidable political power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, and its robust support on both sides of the Congressional aisle, Trump's position was strengthened by the fact that some pro-Israeli circles, also from both political parties, are fully aware that Netanyahu poses a danger not only to the US, but to Israel itself.

A series of decisive actions taken by Trump further accentuated this shift, which received surprisingly little protest from the pro-Israel element in US power circles: continued talks with Iran, the truce with Ansarallah in Yemen, talks with Hamas, etc.

Though refraining from openly criticizing Trump, Netanyahu intensified his killings of Palestinians, who fell in tragically large numbers. Many of the victims were already on the brink of starvation before they were mercilessly blown up by Israeli bombs.

On May 19, Britain, Canada, and France jointly issued a strong statement threatening Israel with sanctions. This unfamiliar language was swiftly followed by action just a day later when Britain suspended trade talks with Israel.

Netanyahu retaliated with furious language, unleashing his rage at Western capitals, which he accused of “offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities.”

The decision to allow some food into Gaza, though patently insufficient to stave off the deepening famine, was meant as a distraction, as the Israeli war machine relentlessly continued to harvest the lives of countless Palestinians on a daily basis.

While one welcomes the significant shifts in the West's position against Israel, it must remain abundantly clear that Netanyahu has no genuine interest in abandoning his plan of starving and ethnically cleansing Gaza.

Though any action now will not fully reverse the impact of the genocide, there are still two million lives that can yet be saved.

“Nah, he wouldn’t really do that.”

I’ve lived in the Upper Delaware Valley for five years, first in Pike County, Pennsylvania, and now in Sullivan County, New York. My county went 58% for Trump last November, and several of my pro-Trump neighbors made remarks like that in the lead-up to the election. Deep down, they know Trump is a liar and con artist, even if they find him entertaining and thrillingly transgressive.

They didn’t take his bombast and grandiose promises seriously. Like establishing high tariffs. Abolishing the Department of Education. Arresting diverse “enemies,” including a federal judge, a congressional representative, a mayor and a student journalist. Or slashing funding for Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) and the National Institutes of Health. Or demolishing federal government agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Board, Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, National Weather Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Drug Administration, Occupational Safety and Health Administration or Environmental Protection Agency. Who’s going to warn you if a wildfire, tornado or hurricane is headed our way? Who will bring emergency relief if you’re unlucky enough to be in its path?

It wasn’t only my upstate neighbors or people like them elsewhere—small business owners, farmers, service sector employees, teachers and retired workers—who declared, “Nah, he wouldn’t really do that.” Sophisticated Wall Street titans wanting tax cuts and deregulation muttered the same thing and then freaked out when Trump imposed tariffs that tanked the stock market. Republican members of Congress have stood idly by and let Trump run roughshod over the limits of executive power, insisting that he is “only joking” when floating ideas like running for a third term. This may be a way to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon once put it, but such jokes often have serious consequences.

“I don’t know.” That’s what Trump responded when NBC reporter Kristen Welker asked him whether he was obliged to uphold the U.S. Constitution. They were talking about due process for migrants, but Trump’s ignorance of and contempt for the Constitution go way beyond that. Accepting the Emir of Qatar’s gift of a $400 million jet plane, for example, violates Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution, which states that “no Person holding any Office … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” The Emir of Qatar, formerly a prince, is now a king, and is the personification of a foreign state.

Since his inauguration Trump has issued nearly 200 executive orders. Some are brutally cruel, like invoking an “invasion” to remove migrants with no criminal record to prisons in third countries, or dangerously shortsighted, like withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. Others are peevishly petty like promoting plastic drinking straws, discontinuing minting pennies or demanding higher water pressure in showerheads. As of May 23, 177 court rulings had at least temporarily paused some of these initiatives.

It’s not just that Trump is reveling in Qatar’s gift of the opulently appointed Boeing 747 (which will have to be torn to pieces if it is to be brought up to Air Force One’s security standards). It’s that Trump too aspires to be like the emir, a king with all the dictatorial powers that absolute monarchy implies. In December 2023, when Trump remarked to Sean Hannity that he would only be a dictator on “day one,” his aides dismissed the comment as a joke. Fast forward to February of this year, the White House posted a mock TIME magazine cover that showed Trump wearing a golden crown. In place of the magazine’s name was “TRUMP” and below the words, “Long live the king.”

Many of those people who used to say, “Nah, he wouldn’t really do that” will continue to insist, “C’mon, he’s just joking.” But is he?

“Make America Think Again” is what I hoped for in the days before the 2024 election. What I’d say to my neighbors today is: If you’re having trouble finding affordable housing, low-income immigrants doubling up in substandard apartments aren’t screwing you as much as those private equity firms that snapped up so many foreclosed properties following the 2008 crisis and jacked up rents and sales prices.

Like most rural counties, Sullivan County, in the western Catskills where I live, receives far more in federal funds than we pay in taxes. In our county, 37.2% of the population is on Medicaid, the third highest proportion of any county in New York State. Federal cuts to Medicaid affect not just Medicaid beneficiaries, who lose medical insurance, but also the solvency of local clinics and hospitals. When nurses and physician assistants are laid off, or health care facilities close because of falling reimbursements, the diners where employees bought their meals will also suffer.

Effects like these cascade through entire regional economies. Farmers are already complaining that the USDA’s cancellation of contracts they signed for reimbursement of infrastructure and conservation improvements on their properties has saddled them with massive debt, having spent money for planting or infrastructure and conservation improvements expecting reimbursement from the government. USDA also halted procurement programs that sourced fresh, local foods for school cafeterias. Together with the cuts to SNAP and dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), both programs that purchased huge amounts of food, farmers are reeling—and will be spending less at our region’s businesses. The kids in school will be eating less nutritious food. It’s hardly Making America Healthy Again.

At the same time that the administration is abandoning rural America, it is fighting tooth and nail to get Congress to pass enormous tax cuts for the rich, and promoting influence-buying scandals like the $TRUMP meme coin and its gala gazillionaires’ dinner. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys have eviscerated entire federal agencies with impunity. Do people remember that Trump and his cronies once yapped incessantly about “Drain the Swamp”?

Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago the American colonists revolted against George III, the “mad king” who governed them. This year, a new mad king plans to celebrate his birthday on Flag Day with an expensive, over-the-top military parade, paid for by you the taxpayer.

On June 14, citizens throughout the land will take to the streets in large cities and small towns to celebrate “No Kings Day.” We will remind the Trump administration that no one is above the rule of law and declare: no thrones, no crowns, no kings.

Click here to find a No Kings Day event near you.

The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is setting the stage for the upcoming United Nations’ International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. The three-day session, to be held in New York on June 17-20, 2025, will be chaired by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, and the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz. It is believed that at this confab France and a number of other countries will formally recognize the State of Palestine. In an angry response, Netanyahu announced that should France and others make this announcement Israel will retaliate with the formal annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In a sense, the threats are meaningless, not because Israel couldn’t take measures to sabotage a Palestinian state, but because this is precisely what it has been doing for several decades—and it’s accelerated its efforts in the past few years.

The daily news from Gaza is numbing. After 18 months of an immense toll in lives and property, Israel agreed to a ceasefire in March, only to break it and intensify their plans to ethnically cleanse and annex large swathes of this territory. Daily, there are reports of Israeli bombings, shelling, or shootings that kill scores of Palestinians at shelters or food distribution sites. In each instance, the Israelis, true to form, at first deny that it happened, then deny that they had anything to do with the killings—“it might have been Hamas” or, “if we did, it was because our soldiers were forced to shoot in the air” to control unruly crowds. When all else fails, they obfuscate by announcing that a military review panel is looking into the matter (coupled with the charge that anyone prejudging the matter before the Israeli military publicly issues its findings—which they never do—must be guilty of harboring an anti-Israel bias). The result is that there is no accountability and the killings continue.

The Netanyahu government’s plan for Gaza is taking shape. The logic behind the Israeli-US “humanitarian mission” in Gaza is now established and that is to facilitate their “ethnic cleansing” masterplan for the area. First, the Israelis are conducting “mopping up” operations in the north, evicting as many Palestinians as possible from 80% of Gaza and forcing them to congregate in congested areas along the southern border. Then, after denying Palestinians food aid for three months, they have set up these Israeli-run food distribution sites in the south with the clear message that “if you’re hungry and want food, this is the only place you’ll get it.” As throngs of desperate Palestinians mass at the sites, the Israelis use live ammunition as crowd control, killing dozens at each location. The entire enterprise is criminal and yet it continues.

The situation in the West Bank has gone from bad to worse. After months of raids that have taken the lives of 1,000 Palestinians and destroyed the homes of 40,000, the Israeli government has authorized the establishment of 22 new settlements, the confiscation of more Palestinian lands, and the construction of more Jewish-only roads. All of this will serve to further the cantonization of the West Bank, isolating Palestinian population centers from one another.

The design Israel is following was laid out in 1978 by Mattityahu Drobles of the World Zionist Organization. The Drobles Plan envisioned total conquest of the West Bank through the establishment of Israeli settlement blocs connected by highways and secured infrastructure that would divide the area making the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. This was Drobles’ declared intent. Back in the 1970s, Israel’s Labor governments rejected this idea, preferring to build settlements along the 1967 lines. When Likud came to power, they embraced Drobles in 1979 and began to implement it, but without ever formally acknowledging it. Now they have.

Palestinians in East Jerusalem fare no better. They still face threats of confiscation of homes and properties, the weaponization of archaeology through which Israel has seized sites they believe hold special importance to their history, while ignoring that same site’s pre-history or current importance to Palestinian Muslims or Christians. And while Christians and Muslims are violently assaulted or harassed as they seek to pray on their faiths’ holy days, Jewish worshippers are protected by the Israeli military as they violate what had been the previously accepted “status quo” at the Haram al Sharif. While in the past, these violations were carried out by a handful of Jewish religious extremists, now there are thousands, including government officials, who annually invade the Haram. And as if to signal their clear intentions, the Israelis have changed street signs which once pointed the way to the “Haram” to now read the “Temple.”

And so, the upcoming UN sessions have the makings of a supreme test of wills. It pits the Israeli government, backed by the United States, against the rest of the world. We know what Israel is doing and what they still can do. The question is whether other nations will find the resolve to directly confront Israel’s plans and take direct action to isolate and punish them for their actions. It will require more than recognition of Palestinian rights, verbal protests, or resolutions of disapproval of Israeli policies. Europe can’t just protest settlements and genocide in Gaza, while continuing to be the largest buyers of Israeli-made weapons. If they don’t apply sanctions (like Spain) or boycott settlement products (like Ireland), nothing will change.

In a real sense, what is at stake in next week’s UN sessions is even more than just recognition of a Palestinian state, it is the survival of the rule of law and human rights covenants and the integrity of the United Nations.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s (FFC) sailboat, named the Madleen, was intercepted in international waters by the Israeli military at 3:02 am CEST earlier today at 31.95236° N, 32.38880° E.

The ship was unlawfully boarded, its 12 unarmed civilian crew and participants abducted, and its life-saving cargo—including baby formula, food, and medical supplies—confiscated, as well as personal possessions taken.

To our knowledge, no one from the Madleen was injured during the interception.

Immediately after the interception, the crew and participants were moved from the Madleen and taken to an Israeli ship. That is only the second time that crew/participants have been taken off the flotilla ship. The first was in 2011 from the Dignite, which sailed from France.

Prior to the interception, drones flew around Madleen and a white powder substance was dropped on the decks. We do not know what the substance was.

After losing communication with Madleen, the FFC began posting pre-recorded video messages from those onboard. “If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupation forces, or forces that support Israel.” SOS messages from the volunteers have been sent to the world.

In the statement issued by the Gaza Freedom Flotilla coalition, Huwaida Arraf, human rights attorney and Freedom Flotilla organizer, said, “Israel has no legal authority to detain international volunteers aboard the Madleen. This seizure blatantly violates international law and defies the ICJ’s binding orders requiring unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza. These volunteers are not subject to Israeli jurisdiction and cannot be criminalized for delivering aid or challenging an illegal blockade—their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end immediately.”

The statement continued, “Israel is once again acting with total impunity. It has defied the International Court of Justice’s binding orders to allow unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza, disregarded the international laws protecting civilian navigation, and dismissed the demands of millions worldwide calling for an end to the siege and genocide.”

This latest act of Israeli aggression follows the unpunished Israeli drone attack on May 1, 2025 on the flotilla’s vessel, Conscience, which left four civilian volunteers injured and the ship disabled and burning in European waters. That unprovoked attack on the Conscience is a major violation of international law that has not been addressed by the international community.

Now, today, Israel has escalated its violence again by targeting another peaceful civilian vessel.

“The world’s governments remained silent when Conscience was bombed. Now Israel is testing that silence again,” said Tan Safi another Freedom Flotilla organizer. “Every hour without consequences emboldens Israel to escalate its attacks on civilians, aid workers, and the very foundations of international law.”

Flotilla lawyers will meet volunteers while they are in prison and advocate for their release.

Calls to the seven embassies in the respective countries of the volunteers will put pressure for immediate consular visits to the prisons to speak with their citizens. Please call the French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Turkish, Brazilian, and Dutch embassies in your country.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition demands:

• An end to the illegal and deadly siege of Gaza.
• The immediate release of all abducted volunteers;
• The immediate delivery of humanitarian aid directly to Palestinians that is independent of the control of the occupying power
• Full accountability for the military assaults on Madleen and Conscience.

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Tune into an essential episode of “The TMI Show with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan,” tackling the explosive unrest in Los Angeles that’s gripping the nation. Protests against aggressive immigration raids have spiraled into chaos, with burned cars, looted stores, and fireworks hurled at the LAPD. President Trump’s deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops, bypassing a governor for the first time since LBJ used them to desegregate Southern schools in 1965, has ignited a firestorm. Newsom is suing to reclaim control of the Guard, saying the LAPD had the situation under control before troops made things worse. Will Trump escalate even more and invoke the Insurrection Act to unleash active-duty Marines from Camp Pendleton, now on high alert? Or will Newsom’s legal challenge work?

The violence, sparked by random ICE raids targeting Latino communities, has seen flash-bang grenades and tear gas deployed against crowds blocking freeways and surrounding federal buildings. With tensions flaring in Paramount and Compton, will the chaos spread as the workweek begins, or can local leaders like Mayor Bass restore calm? The political stakes are massive—Trump’s calling protesters “insurrectionists,” while the governor and mayor urge peaceful resistance to deny Trump a pretext for more force. Internationally, the crackdown’s optics could strain diplomatic ties.

We have unmatched insight from three SoCal personalities: Manila, raised in East LA, Ted, a former Los Angeles Times cartoonist and KFI radio host, and guest Scott Stantis, The Chicago Tribune cartoonist from south of LA. They’ll unpack why this erupted, what’s next, and how it could reshape the nation’s political landscape.

The post TMI Show Ep 155: “Trump’s War Against Los Angeles” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

By Ralph Nader June 9, 2025 A good way to understand CIVIC SELF-RESPECT – the title of my timely new book – is to recall a slice of American history from the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies. Those were the years when Congress and a Republican President, Richard Nixon, produced many laws strongly…

In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest—or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.

The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend—where the average home price is nearly $800,000—are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.

“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told The New York Times.

Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.

This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.

Nearly one year later, homelessness—and its criminalization—has only worsened.

Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants.

As a result, there are now over 770,000 people without housing nationwide—a record high. Many more are just one emergency away from joining them.

The Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision opened the door for cities to harass people for the “crime” of not having a place to live. Fines and arrests, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.

Since Grants Pass, around 150 cities have passed or strengthened “anti-camping” laws that fine, ticket, or jail people for living outdoors—including over two dozen cities and counties in California alone. A Florida law mandates that counties and municipalities ban sleeping or camping on public property. Due to a related crackdown, almost half of arrests in Miami Beach last year were of unhoused people.

Emboldened by Grants Pass, localities have ramped up the forced clearing of encampments—a practice known as “sweeps.”

While officials justify them for safety and sanitation reasons, sweeps harm people by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. In many cases, basic survival items are confiscated by authorities. Alongside being deadly, research confirms that sweeps are also costly and unproductive.

Punitive fines, arrests, and sweeps don’t address the root of the problem: the lack of permanent, affordable, and adequate housing.

President Donald Trump is only doubling down on failed housing policies. He ordered over 30 encampments in D.C. to be cleared based on a March executive order. And his budget request for 2026 would slash federal rental assistance for over 10 million Americans by a devastating 43% (all to fund tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.)

For too long, our government policies have allowed a basic necessity for survival to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors. We must challenge this if we ever want to resolve homelessness.

Housing is a fundamental human right under international law that the U.S. must recognize. Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.

As housing experts have long noted, governments should invest in proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.

Despite the obstacles, communities continue to fight back—including in Grants Pass, where disability rights advocates are challenging the city’s public camping restrictions. Others are forming tenant and homeless unions in their cities, organizing rent strikes, and pushing for publicly funded housing (or “social housing”) that’s permanently affordable and protected from the private market.

The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right. Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions.

The United States has entered a phase that resembles the early stages of state failure. What once seemed impossible in a country with vast resources and robust democratic traditions now appears increasingly plausible.

The signs are evident. A government that has turned inward and become both self-protective and vindictive. An economy that is straining under a combination of political hubris and international estrangement. A population facing widening inequality and the fraying of social bonds. Historical examples of state collapse reveal that such trajectories, once set in motion, become difficult to reverse. For centrist Democrats who have long believed in the resilience of American institutions, it is essential to understand the historical precedents and the structural forces at play.

State failure is not typically marked by a single event. It is a process that begins with the corrosion of political legitimacy and ends in the disintegration of central authority. In the United States, this erosion of legitimacy can be seen in the deliberate politicization of the civil service and the Justice Department, the relentless attacks on the press and civil society, and the hollowing out of regulatory agencies through mass firings and loyalty tests. Historical parallels can be found in the final years of the Roman Republic, where the Senate’s inability to manage domestic discontent and external pressures created a vacuum for strongmen like Julius Caesar to exploit. In a more modern example, Weimar Germany’s democratic institutions were systematically undermined by the combined effects of economic crisis and political extremism, leading to the Nazi seizure of power.

The United States has survived grave challenges before, but its survival has always depended on a functioning state that could reconcile competing interests and adapt to new circumstances. Today, that state is being systematically dismantled.

Economically, the United States is facing a self-inflicted crisis. The decision to impose sweeping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike has triggered a trade war that has cut the country off from vital imports and provoked retaliatory measures. The stock market crash of 2025 is a direct consequence of these policies. Historically, protectionism in the face of global integration has often led to economic collapse. Argentina in the 1940s under Juan Perón embraced similar trade isolation and industrial autarky, leading to decades of stagnation. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, though a different context, was a catalyst for the downward spiral of the global economy in the Great Depression.

The military and security apparatus in the United States has also been turned inward. This is a hallmark of states on the brink of collapse. The administration’s decision to conduct loyalty tests for federal employees, to dismiss or sideline those deemed “insufficiently loyal,” and to demand public fealty to the president’s personal narrative mirrors the tactics employed by autocratic regimes throughout history. In the final years of the Soviet Union, a similar pattern emerged: The KGB was weaponized to target internal dissent as the economy faltered and the central government lost its grip on reality.

Domestically, the climate is one of deepening polarization and mounting distrust. The forced departure of civil servants, the targeting of universities and independent journalists, and the use of the Justice Department as an instrument of political retribution have weakened the structures that once mediated conflict and enabled compromise. In 1970s Chile, President Salvador Allende’s government was destabilized by economic sabotage and political violence. While the American situation is not identical, the deliberate undermining of democratic norms and the conflation of personal power with national interest are consistent with patterns seen in states that have tipped into authoritarian rule.

Internationally, the administration’s decision to pursue annexationist policies—expressed in rhetorical claims to Canada and Greenland and actual negotiations over resource extraction in Ukraine—has isolated the United States from its historical allies and weakened its standing in the world. Such expansionist fantasies do not typically succeed in a world defined by interdependence. They more often result in international sanctions, economic isolation, and domestic overreach. This was the fate of Benito Mussolini’s Italy when it attempted to carve out an empire in North Africa, only to find itself diplomatically and economically encircled.

The cumulative effect of these policies is a government that no longer serves as an impartial arbiter of competing interests but as a factional tool of the leader and his inner circle. The normal functions of governance—delivering basic services, maintaining order, managing foreign policy—are subsumed under the political imperative of loyalty and control. This is the point at which states enter the final stage of failure. In 1990s Yugoslavia, the central government’s failure to mediate ethnic and regional disputes led directly to the violent fragmentation of the state. In the American context, this dynamic is playing out along lines of political affiliation, class, and race. The militarization of border policy, the collective punishment of protest movements, and the repeated targeting of minority communities reveal a state that is no longer willing or able to accommodate the diversity of its population.

The question of when collapse occurs is not easily answered. Historical examples show that once a state has entered the spiral of delegitimization, economic contraction, and political repression, collapse can follow within a few years. The Soviet Union’s dissolution took less than three years from the final economic crisis of 1988 to the official end in 1991. Yugoslavia’s collapse began with constitutional disputes in the late 1980s and culminated in violent disintegration by the early 1990s.

The timeline for collapse in the United States is likely to be similarly short if current trends continue. The economy, already battered by tariffs and retaliatory measures, will see further contraction as foreign investment dries up and domestic confidence evaporates. Political violence, already simmering, will become more organized as the state’s capacity to maintain a monopoly on violence wanes.

For those who have long believed that the American system is immune to these forces, it is time to reconsider that assumption. The United States has survived grave challenges before, but its survival has always depended on a functioning state that could reconcile competing interests and adapt to new circumstances. Today, that state is being systematically dismantled. The institutions that once checked presidential power are being turned into instruments of that power. The economy, once buoyed by global integration, is being sacrificed to nationalist fantasies. The courts and the press, once the guardians of democratic accountability, are being brought to heel or driven into irrelevance.

There is still room to change course. Historically, states have a narrow window to reverse the downward spiral once it begins. In some cases, a determined opposition or a political realignment can restore legitimacy and rebuild the social contract. In others, collapse proceeds until the state is no longer recognizable and must be rebuilt from the rubble. The examples of Spain in the 1930s, where collapse was narrowly averted but civil war followed, and of Greece in the 1940s, where foreign intervention postponed state failure, show that external shocks and internal realignments can interrupt the cycle of collapse, though at a high human cost.

What lies ahead for the United States is not yet written in stone. But the pattern is clear and the examples from history are stark. State failure is not a single moment but a cascade of failures that begins with the corruption of political institutions and ends with the disintegration of social order. The evidence is already present in the hollowing out of the federal government, the weaponization of law enforcement, the trade isolation, and the embrace of expansionist policies that have no place in the modern world. If these trends are not reversed, the United States will become another entry in the long history of states that lost their way and collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions.

Emmanuel Macron was the victim of a physical assault by his wife Brigitte on international TV. She slapped and shoved the French president’s face on a plane in Hanoi, prompting countless jokes but little discussion of male victims of domestic violence and gender. Sad, since men are abused by their wives and girlfriends at similar rates to the other way around. Is Macron a battered husband? Maybe, even if Elysee Palace brushed off the violence as playful fun between a loving couple. But even if he were to look for support, there are very few resources for straight male victims. Society overlooks such cases or worse, makes fun of them. A French gym even used an AI image of a bruised Macron to promote self-defense classes for men, for example. Family courts grant custody to accused abusers 70% of the time, and male survivors get little sympathy. If a woman can beat up the president on France on TV without consequence, there is little hope.

The post Le Slap appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

What is our moral responsibility as citizens of the United States when the President of the United States moves to deploy thousands of American soldiers against us?

President Donald Trump signed a memo late yesterday ordering 2,000 members of the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles County after federal immigration agents in riot gear squared off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day.

Trump’s action is extreme although technically legal. California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not call in the Guard. Title 10 of the United States Code allows a president to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” In a presidential memo, Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

What better Ground Zero for him to try out his police state than Los Angeles—a city teaming with immigrants, with Hollywood celebrities who demonize him, and wealthy moguls who despise him?

Why is he doing it, and why now?

Because Trump can’t stand to be humiliated—as he has been in the last two weeks. By Senate Republicans’ refusal to quickly enact his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. By Chinese President Xi Jinping’s refusal to back down on trade (and restrict shipments of China’s rare earths, which American industry depends on). By Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine. By the federal courts pushing back against his immigration policy. And, now, by insults and smears from the richest person in the world, who has a larger social media following than does Trump.

So what does Trump do when he’s humiliated? He deflects public attention. Like any bully, he tries to find another way to display his power—especially over people who are powerless, such as immigrants. Especially over people whom he doesn’t consider “his” people, such as Californians.

He has despised California since the 2016 election when the state overwhelmingly voted against him.

And what better Ground Zero for him to try out his police state than Los Angeles—a city teaming with immigrants, with Hollywood celebrities who demonize him, and wealthy moguls who despise him?

He is calling out the National Guard to provoke violence. As Gov. Newsom said, “that move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.”

Trump wants to escalate tensions. He wants a replay of the violence that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder—riots, mayhem, and destruction that allow him to escalate his police state further—imposing curfews, closing down parts of Los Angeles, perhaps seeking to subdue the entire state. And beyond.

Please do not give him this. Don’t fall into his trap.

We cannot be silent in the face of Trump’s dictatorial move. Silence is acquiescence. We must be brave in resisting him. But we must not succumb to violence.

What is needed is peaceful civil disobedience. Americans locking arms to protect those who need protection. Americans sitting in the way of armored cars. Americans singing and chanting in the face of the Americans whom Trump is drafting into his handmade civil war.

Americans who do not attempt to strike back, but who do what many of us did during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements—peacefully but unambiguously reject tyranny. To be brave and nonviolent in the face of tyranny, to be strong and restrained, to resist with our hearts filled with anger but not succumb to that anger—is difficult. But Martin Luther King Jr. taught us its importance, and John Lewis taught us how.

A humiliated Trump is the most dangerous Trump. He has manufactured this entire crisis. But he will overreach. He already has. And this overreach will ultimately be his undoing.

As long as we keep our heads.

May we look back on this hellish time and feel proud of what we did.

Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.

On World Ocean Day, and the eve of the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France opening Monday, the Arctic Ocean ecological crisis needs to be top of the list for attention by governments.

Given the well-documented, catastrophic decline of the Arctic Ocean sea ice ecosystem in recent decades due to climate change, coupled with the increasing threats and impacts from industry and military activity in the region, it is imperative that governments establish an International Arctic Ocean Sanctuary to preserve this extraordinary ecoregion as a global commons for peaceful, non-commercial, scientific purposes.

Covering approximately 5.4 million square miles, the Arctic Ocean is one of the most extraordinary and vibrant regions of the global ocean, and plays an important role regulating Earth’s climate.

Combined with the effects of climate change, industrialization and militarization would further accelerate the ecological and social collapse of the struggling Arctic Ocean region.

The Arctic marine ecosystem is globally unique, productive, and remains relatively unexplored. The ocean biome supports more than 7,000 identified species, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth—polar bears, walrus, several kinds of ice seals, narwhals, beluga whales, bowhead whales, some of the largest populations of seabirds in the world, and many unique fish and invertebrate populations. It hosts cold seeps, hydrothermal vents, stunning benthic habitats, a rich pelagic ecosystem that remains surprisingly active during winter darkness, and supports the subsistence cultures of coastal Indigenous Peoples.

However, this unique polar marine ecosystem is now one of the most endangered regions of Earth’s biosphere, suffering effects of climate change more severely than anywhere else. Arctic sea ice has declined by more than half in the last 50 years, losing about 1 million square miles in both summer and winter, has thinned from an average of four meters to about one meter, and could disappear entirely in summer by 2035. Multiyear sea ice has all but vanished. This remarkable decline has been caused by global carbon emissions from human activity, mainly fossil fuel use.

The loss of Arctic sea ice over the last half-century constitutes one of the largest declines in ecological habitat on Earth, rivaling the loss of tropical rainforests. The resultant Arctic Ocean ecological crisis is now severe, and predicted to get much worse in coming decades.

In addition to devastating impacts of climate change in the Arctic Ocean, commercial interests are clamoring to exploit ice-free offshore areas for oil and gas, methane hydrates, minerals, commercial fishing, shipping, and tourism. And Arctic coastal nations have made Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) seabed claims (pursuant to U.N. Law of the Sea, Article 76) beyond their 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), a dangerous territorial expansion into international waters with an eye toward resource extraction.

As Arctic nations and others (China, India, etc.) advance their own parochial interests across the region, there is a growing competitive race to exploit Arctic offshore resources and to project military power across the region to secure these competing national interests. As such, the risk of military confrontation across the Arctic Ocean is escalating. Combined with the effects of climate change, industrialization and militarization would further accelerate the ecological and social collapse of the struggling Arctic Ocean region, and would clearly compromise the ability of the bioregion and its people to survive the 21st-century climate crisis.

In fact, the resource and political tensions in the Arctic Ocean today are remarkably similar to the Antarctic after World War II, that were resolved then by the leadership of U.S. (Republican) President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposing and negotiating the historic 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The international Treaty, now with 58 nation-state members, permanently protects the extraordinary 5.5 million square-mile Antarctic continent as a global commons for peaceful, scientific purposes, free from nuclear testing, military operations, economic exploitation, and territorial claims. The Antarctic Treaty remains the single greatest conservation achievement in history.

The same opportunity now presents itself with the Arctic Ocean. In addition to accelerating efforts to reduce global carbon emissions to reverse global warming, governments must urgently adopt strong, permanent protections for the entire Arctic Ocean to give this region and its people the best chance possible to survive the 21st-century climate crisis. Given the pace of decline, this may be our last best chance to do so.

While Arctic nations have begun protecting some areas off their coasts, still less than 5% of Arctic Ocean waters are in permanently protected status. This is clearly insufficient.

The proposed circumpolar Arctic Ocean Sanctuary must fully protect not only international waters beyond coastal state 200-mile EEZs across the 1.1 million square mile Central Arctic Ocean (as is currently proposed), but also the highly productive waters within the EEZs of Arctic coastal nations—Canada, Norway, Denmark and Greenland, Russia, and the U.S., where most ecological activity, human impact, and threat occurs. The sanctuary should permanently prohibit oil and gas leasing, mineral leasing, commercial fishing, military activities, improve shipping safety, reduce pollutants, and enhance scientific research.

To be sure, it is a big ask of the five Arctic coastal nations to contribute some of their claimed territory into a globally protected area, but this was the right thing to do in 1959 in the Antarctic, and it is the right thing to do now for the Arctic.

While the current federal administrations in the Russia and U.S. habitually oppose any and all environmental conservation proposals, perhaps presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump might see this as a historic legacy in the midst of the environmental havoc they have caused, a chance to be remembered as Eisenhower is today for his leadership in negotiating the Antarctic Treaty. And just to note, former President Joe Biden ignored this request entirely, enacted no comprehensive permanent protections in the U.S. Arctic Ocean off Alaska, and made no effort to begin discussions on the International Arctic Ocean Sanctuary.

Global society has a historic choice to make with the imperiled Arctic Ocean. Should we continue our competitive industrial and military expansion into one of the last wild areas of the world, further degrading a region already unraveling due to human-caused climate change? Or should we protect and sustain this magnificent place for all time, giving it and its inhabitants, human and non-human, the best chance possible to recover from climate change this century?

How we answer this question will tell us a lot about ourselves and our future.

In early 2018, I remember sitting at my kitchen table, trying to make sense of how the 2017 Trump tax law was supposed to help families like mine.

I’d read headlines promising “middle class tax relief.” But when tax season rolled around, there was little relief to be found—especially for me, a Black woman navigating caretaking for elderly parents and a demanding career. My refund was smaller, my deductions had vanished, and the math simply didn’t add up.

It was clear then, as it is now: the Trump tax cuts weren’t designed with people like me in mind.

Let’s be clear: The 2017 Trump tax cuts failed Black women—and millions of others—the first time around. They widened inequality, rewarded the wealthy, and ignored the economic realities of everyday families.

Now as more GOP tax cuts for the rich move through Congress, history is poised to repeat itself. The bill would disproportionately benefit the well-off—and harm the financial well-being of millions of working Americans, including Black women like me.

Instead, lawmakers should embrace the “Black Women Best” framework and take a different path. Coined by Janelle Jones, the principle is that when Black women are thriving, then the economy is truly working for everyone.

For example, when the 2017 tax cuts were passed, most of the benefits went to wealthy, white households. Had lawmakers considered the financial realities of Black women, who are typically underpaid, they could have made a package better designed for all those who need the most help—not just Black women, but everyone struggling to make ends meet.

Refundable tax credits like the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are one of the most direct ways the government supports working families. When structured fairly, they give families a much-needed financial boost.

The 2017 tax law increased the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 per child. But many families receive far less because it restricted the refundable part of the credit for those with modest earnings. That left out many of the lowest-income families—including 45% of Black children (double the share of their white peers)—whose parents didn’t earn enough to qualify.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which temporarily restructured the CTC to make it larger and fully refundable. For the first time, all the families at the bottom received the full credit. The results were stunning: Child poverty hit record lows.

But that progress was short-lived. The expanded credit has not been renewed, and child poverty shot right back up.

This time around, the House temporarily boosted the CTC to $2,500. But limits on the refundable portion would be continued, meaning 17 million of the lowest-income children in America will still be left out.

Using the “Black Women Best” framework would make those expanded benefits permanent—not just because it’s the right thing to do for Black families, but because it lifts up the entire economy.

But instead, in this way and others, the bill favors the already wealthy.

Another significant example is the bill’s deduction for income people receive from “pass-through” businesses. Rather than pay a corporate income tax, these business owners pay taxes on their profits through their personal taxes. The 2017 tax law created a 20% deduction for this kind of income—and now lawmakers want to permanently increase it to 23%.

Increasing this deduction means Congress is giving handouts to those already holding the keys to wealth. A Treasury report showed a jarring 90% of the people who received this benefit were white. Only 5% of the benefits went to Hispanic taxpayers—and just 2% to Black taxpayers.

Let’s be clear: The 2017 Trump tax cuts failed Black women—and millions of others—the first time around. They widened inequality, rewarded the wealthy, and ignored the economic realities of everyday families. Repeating those mistakes in 2025 would be more than negligent—it would be a deliberate choice to uphold a broken system.

But there’s another way. When Black women thrive, everyone wins. It’s time for our tax code to reflect that truth.

Despite all the military threats facing the United States, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to go to war with the gay community. During the first week of Pride Month, he ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, which honors the late gay rights leader and Navy veteran.

“Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” said a Pentagon spokesman.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to oppose Hegseth’s order.

It is notable that Hegseth, an outspoken Christian nationalist, targeted Milk, who was not only gay but also Jewish. Hegseth is aligned with a wing of the evangelical church that believes in establishing a theocratic Christian government in which Jews would be, at best, second-class citizens, and LGBTQ individuals would lose nearly all of the rights they have won in recent decades. Earlier this month, Hegseth promoted staffer Kingsley Wilson as the Pentagon’s chief press secretary, despite her history of disseminating antisemitic conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi rhetoric on social media.

Milk, a gay rights activist, was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (its city council) in 1977, making him, at that time, the most high-profile LBGTQ figure in the country. He was assassinated the following year.

In 2016, then-U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, observed that “Even after death, his voice still spoke, his struggles continued and his cause taken up by countless others.” Milk, he said, “offered hope for millions of Americans who were being ostracized and prosecuted just for who they loved.”

When the ship was finally built and christened in 2021, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro spoke at the event, “not just to amend the wrongs of the past, but to give inspiration to all of our LGBTQ community leaders who served in the Navy, in uniform today and in the civilian workforce as well, too, and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future.”

To Hegseth, Milk is an obvious target in the Trump administration’s homophobic crusade. It is part of a broader effort to reverse decades of progress toward equality and human rights. Trump and his MAGA followers want to eliminate recognition of people and movements who fought discrimination against women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans, including those who served in the military.

In March, the Pentagon removed from its website a story about Jackie Robinson’s military service, explaining that “DEI is dead at the Defense Department.” Toward that goal, the Pentagon also removed a page about Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of the marines pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, as well as articles about Native American code talkers. The DOD also deleted an article about a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox. A DOD webpage about a Black Medal of Honor recipient, Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, was also briefly taken down but later restored. A DOD page about an all-Japanese-American unit that fought in WWII was also removed and then restored.

The backlash against scrubbing mention of Robinson, the trailblazing baseball hero and activist, was so widespread that the Pentagon restored the story a day later, but Hegseth has pursued his crusade nevertheless.

According to a memo from Navy Secretary John Phelan, the names of other civil rights pioneers are also on the list to potentially be removed from Navy vessels, including Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman, suffrage and anti-slavery activist Lucy Stone, NAACP leader Medgar Evers (who was assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan member), and farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez, who was also a Navy veteran.

Soon after taking office, Hegseth fired prominent Black and female officers, including Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman selected as the Navy’s top officer, suggesting that they may have been promoted to those positions due to their race or gender rather than merit.

Hegseth has also pushed to eliminate courses at West Point and the Naval Academy that deal with gender, racial, and LGBTQ issues and remove books from their libraries that focus on these subject. He ordered the military academies to end consideration of gender, race, or ethnicity as part of their admissions standards. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our armed forces,” said Hegseth.

Hegseth seems unaware that Harvey Milk was also a warrior. He demonstrated courage, leadership, and resilience in challenging the status quo. In his day, as an activist and public official, Milk did battle with conservative and religious right forces.

Milk is hardly an obscure figure. He was the subject of an acclaimed 1982 biography by Randy Shilts calledThe Mayor of Castro Street. The Times of Harvey Milk won the 1984 Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2009, the film Milk garnered eight Academy Award nominations (including best picture). Sean Penn, who played Milk, won the Oscar for Best Actor, while Dustin Black earned the award for Best Original screenplay. That year, the California legislature established Milk’s birthday, May 22, as Harvey Milk Day throughout the state and President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the gay rights movement. Obama explained, “He fought discrimination with visionary courage and conviction.”

Milk is to the gay rights movement what Jackie Robinson was to baseball, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights, what Betty Friedan was to the women’s movement, and what Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were to the farmworkers movement.

When Milk was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977, most gay women and men were still in the closet. Many states had laws against hiring gay people as schoolteachers and other occupations. This was just a few years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It was before the AIDS epidemic, before Rock Hudson became the first movie star to acknowledge that he was gay. It was before Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” a policy that allowed gay and lesbian people to serve in the military. It was before Ellen DeGeneres, star of the TV comedy series “Ellen,” publicly came out as a lesbian during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show and became the first openly gay character on a major TV show. It was before colleges offered courses in gay literature, history, and politics. It was before the Supreme Court ruled, in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, that state laws criminalizing gay or lesbian sex were unconstitutional, and ruled again in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that states could not prohibit same-sex couples from legally marrying.

Milk was not the first openly gay person to win public office. Voters in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan had already elected gay and lesbian candidates. But Milk’s victory, winning a powerful high-profile position in the nation’s gay capital, made him instantly a national figure.

Today, at least 1,336 openly LGBTQ persons are serving in public office, according to the LBGTQ Victory Institute, including three governors, 13 members of Congress, and 68 mayors.

Milk grew up in a middle-class Jewish family on Long Island outside New York City. In high school he played football and developed a passion for opera. He graduated from college in 1951 with a degree in math. Although he knew he was homosexual while he was still a teenager, he kept it secret. A college friend recalled, “He was never thought of as a possible queer — that’s what you called them then — he was a man’s man.”

After college Milk joined the navy for four years, serving as a diving officer aboard a submarine rescue ship during the Korean War. He was discharged in 1955 with the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.

For the next fifteen years, Milk drifted, taking a series of jobs for which he had little enthusiasm. He taught high school, then worked as a statistician for an insurance company and as an analyst for a Wall Street brokerage firm. During that period he had a number of relationships with men.

In 1972, Milk and his partner Scott Smith joined the exodus of hippies and gays migrating to San Francisco. The city had long been a haven for nonconformists and bohemians. The 1950s beatnik scene, with its overlapping circles of radicals and folk music devotees, morphed into the hippie culture of the 1960s, centered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. After World War II, San Francisco had also become a mecca for gay men. By the 1960s, it had more gay people per capita than any other American city and a thriving gay scene of bars, businesses, and bathhouses. The Castro District became the city’s gay ghetto, but the official culture still reflected mainstream antipathy toward gays. For example, landlords could legally evict tenants whom they discovered to be homosexual.

As their numbers grew, gays became a political force in the city. Two organizations — the Society for Individual Rights and the Daughters of Bilitis — began challenging the police department’s arbitrary and sometimes brutal persecution of gay bars and entrapment of gays having sex in public parks. In 1971, 2,800 gay men were arrested for having sex in public restrooms and parks. That year Richard Hongisto, a straight ex-cop who had fought the police department’s bias against gays and minorities, ran successfully for county sheriff with the support of the gay community. Other liberal politicians began to court gay and lesbian support. Key gay leaders, including the publisher of the gay newspaper the Advocate, started the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club in 1971 to mobilize gay voters.

Milk lived as an openly gay man. He and Smith had opened Castro Camera. The store’s back room became a gathering place for Milk’s widening circle of friends. He frequently complained about taxes on small businesses, underfunded schools (which he learned about when a teacher asked to borrow a projector because her school’s equipment did not work), and ongoing discrimination against gays by employers, landlords, and cops. In 1973 Milk decided to run for supervisor. “I finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or shut up,” he recalled.

Milk, who still looked like an aging hippie, ran a spirited but low-budget and chaotic campaign, drawing on patrons of gay bars angry about police harassment. His fiery speeches and flare attracted media attention, and he garnered 16,900 votes — winning the Castro District and other liberal neighborhoods, finishing tenth out of thirty-two candidates. It was not enough to win the citywide campaign, but it made Milk a visible presence.

Milk and other gay business owners founded the Castro Village Association, which chose Milk as its president. He also organized the Castro Street Fair to attract more customers to the area. By then, Milk had started referring to himself as the “mayor of Castro Street.”

Milk ran a better campaign for supervisor in 1975. He cut his hair and wore suits. His community organizing paid off. He had more money and more volunteers. Thanks to his activism, he earned the support of key unions. This time he came in seventh, one spot away from winning a supervisor’s seat.

Milk remained involved in grassroots gay activism, which was facing a backlash by the religious right across the country. The growing antigay climate had real consequences. Random attacks on gays in the Castro increased. Upset by the lack of police protection, groups of gays began patrolling the neighborhood themselves. On June 21, 1977 conservative thugs attacked Robert Hillsborough, a gay man, yelling “Faggot!” while stabbing him fifteen times, killing him. A few weeks later, 250,000 people attended the Gay Freedom Day Parade, fueled by anger as well as by gay pride.

Milk’s leadership in these mobilizations, plus his previous campaigns, gave him an advantage when he ran again for supervisor in 1977.

Equally important, voters had just approved a city charter change to elect supervisors by geographic districts instead of citywide. The new District 5, centered in the Castro area, was Milk’s home base. That November, Milk was finally elected to the Board of Supervisors, beating sixteen other candidates, half of them gay. This time he had an effective campaign manager, a large cadre of volunteers, and the endorsement of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Milk’s victory made national news. He became a close ally of Mayor George Moscone, a progressive who had been elected two years earlier. Together, they challenged the power of the big corporations and real estate developers that were gentrifying the city and changing its skyline. They supported rent control, unions, small businesses, neighborhood organizations, and a tax on suburban commuters. Milk made sure that he responded to constituency concerns, such as fixing potholes and installing stop signs at dangerous intersections.

In fact, soon after taking office, he sponsored two bills. The first outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. Milk was responding to his core constituency, San Francisco’s gay community, which had endured years of bigotry from employers, landlords, and other institutions. The second bill dealt with an issue that, according to polls, voters considered the number-one problem in the city: dog feces. Milk’s ordinance, called the “pooper scooper” law, required dog owners to scoop up their pets’ excrement. After it passed, Milk invited the press to a local park, where, with cameras rolling, he intentionally stepped in the smelly substance. The stunt attracted national media attention as well as extensive local press coverage, as Milk had anticipated. He later explained why he pulled off the photo op: “All over the country, they’re reading about me, and the story doesn’t center on me being gay. It’s just about a gay person who is doing his job.”

Milk was a big personality, but he was also a serious and brilliant politician. After his election, he was the most visible gay public figure in America. At a time when homophobia was still deeply entrenched in American culture, Milk encouraged gays and lesbians to come out of the closet. He received thousands of letters from gays around the country, thanking him for being a role model. “I thank God,” wrote a sixty-eight-year-old lesbian, “I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.”

Milk knew that to win elections and pass legislation, he had to build bridges with other constituencies and with his straight colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. He cultivated support from tenants’ groups, the elderly, small businesses, environmentalists, and labor unions.

Milk forged an unlikely alliance with the Teamsters union, which represented truck drivers. The Teamsters wanted to pressure beer distributors to sign a contract with the union to improve pay and working conditions for its members. They were particularly angry at Coors, which of all the beer companies was the most hostile toward unions. A Teamsters organizer approached Milk for help in reaching out to gay bars, a big portion of Coors’s customer base. Within days, Milk had canvassed the gay bars in and around the heavily gay Castro District, encouraging them to stopping selling Coors beer. With help from Arab and Chinese grocers, the gay boycott of Coors was successful. Milk had earned a political ally among the Teamsters. At Milk’s urging, the union also began to recruit more gay truck drivers.

Much of Milk’s eleven months in office — before he and Moscone were assassinated — was spent organizing opposition to a statewide referendum sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to ban gays from teaching in public schools. Milk went up and down California speaking out against the initiative. He debated Briggs on television. He crashed Briggs’s events, generating media stories. When Briggs claimed that gay teachers abused their students, Milk countered with statistics documenting that most pedophiles were straight, not gay.

Opposition to the Briggs initiative mobilized gays and their liberal allies. They knocked on doors, wrote letters to the editor, and paid for TV and radio ads. More than a quarter of a million people attended that summer’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco. (Similar events in other cities attracted record numbers). Milk rode in an open car and later gave an inspiring speech that, according to the San Francisco Examiner, “ignited the crowd.” He said:

On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country. We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays! I’m tired of the silence. So I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives. Come out to your friends.

On November 7, 1978, Briggs’s initiative lost by more than a million votes, with 58 percent of voters — and 75 percent in San Francisco — opposing it. It was a stunning victory for the gay community, and Milk was its most visible leader.

Twenty days later, Milk and Moscone were dead. On November 27, former supervisor Dan White, carrying a gun, climbed into city hall through a basement window and shot both public officials. White had represented one of the city’s more conservative neighborhoods and was the only supervisor to oppose Milk’s antidiscrimination ordinance. Frustrated by his marginalization on the board, he abruptly resigned on November 10, only ten months after being sworn in. He quickly changed his mind and asked Moscone to reappoint him to his old position. Moscone refused to do so, in part because of Milk’s lobbying against White.

White was charged with first-degree murder, making him eligible for the death penalty. A conviction seemed a slam dunk. But White’s lawyer claimed that he was not responsible for his actions because of his mental state, which the lawyer termed “diminished capacity.” On May 21, 1979, a jury acquitted White of the first-degree murder charge but found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. The verdict triggered riots outside city hall as gays and their allies unleashed their fury.

Milk had anticipated his murder. He had received many hate letters and death threats. He recorded his thoughts on tape, indicating who he wanted to succeed him if he were killed, saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” He added, “I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”

Milk’s charisma and political savvy helped unleash the power of gay voters and advance the issue of gay rights, including the growing number of gay and lesbian elected officials and widening acceptance of same-sex marriage.

The Trump administration’s, and Hegseth’s, recent efforts to paper over and rewrite history suggests they don’t want the current and future generations to know about that movement, its accomplishments, and the persistent battle for LGBTQ equality.

Responding on his Facebook page to news of the effort to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, gay playwright Harvey Fierstein described the move as a “crime against the gay community” and wrote that Trump is a “vile, petty, stupid, destructive, jealous, illiterate, hateful, ego-maniacal and dangerous shmuck.”

California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is also gay, told the Los Angeles Times that Hegseth’s move against Milk is part of a “systematic campaign to eliminate LGBTQ people from public life.”

“They want us to go away, to go back in the closet, not to be part of public life,” added Wiener. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

Universities face vitriolic attacks today from the Trump regime. Several could even go under. When you keep in mind that he also targets other institutions of civil society—such as law firms, labor unions, the media, assorted churches, and the like—it becomes woefully clear what is going on.

The Trump regime seeks to force all independent sources of news, truth, and judgment to their knees, doing so to rapidly impose a fascist oligopoly that limits and demeans every orientation and viewpoint except his own. His is a recipe most autocratic regimes introduce early in the day. As M. Gessen has reminded us in a superb piece in the New York Times, the silencing of diverse centers of judgment and opinion marks the early stages of an authoritarian movement. I quote from her experience in Russia during the middle stages of the Putin takeover:

"I was shaken when Russian invaded Georgia in 2008. My world change when three young women were sentenced to jail for a protest in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was posoned in 2020, arrested in 2021, and almost killed in prison in 2024. And when Russian invaded Ukraine in 2022." (NYT, June 1, 2025, p B4).

The Gessen message is that it is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life. If Trump has not yet made the same moves as Putin, his Big Lies, pardons of hundreds of convicted insurrectionists, attacks on independent centers of civil society, and extra-legal exportation of people to concentration camps in other countries are well on the way. We are shocked at each new round and then tend to forget how shocking such events were.

It is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life.

So, the first thing universities and colleges must do today is to join hands with other institutions of civil society which are—or are about to—face the same sort of massive pressures, pressures often backed by militia threats to the livelihoods and safety of people in those same institutions. That is exactly why Trump, very early, pardoned the militias who joined him in drives to deny and violently overturn the results of the 2020 election. He may well need them in the future. "Stand back and stand by." It is also why Inspector Generals were immediately removed from key institutions in the government and why Elon Musk was given free rein to wreak havoc on government institutions focused on health for the poor, medical studies, and new scientific research.

The 'Viewpoint Diversity' Fraud

It must be emphasized from the start, too, how fraudulent new movements are within several universities—led, I fear, by the one in which I have worked—to "pluralize" intellectual perspectives within their schools. It is now called "Viewpoint Diversity." Those are attempts to move universities toward the right of the current distribution of power and opinion while the right itself holds bankrupt views about future dangers and possibilities. The fraudulence of this movement is easy to expose: If you campaign to move university faculty to the right in the name of institutional pluralism, why not—with the same vociferousness—call for greater economic and ideological diversity among university trustees, university presidents, corporate boardrooms, right wing think tanks, silicon valley entrepreneurs, the Claremont Institute, and Fox News reporting? For surely, these institutions on the right could use more diversity. The reason is that the so carefully selected calls for diversity within universities alone are designed to draw university culture—as one of the precarious holdouts against an autocratic regime—more securely into the orbit of that regime. Greater faculty "diversity," neoliberal university administrations, and external pressure will do the job.

Neoliberal university presidents and trustees may not love aspects of the Trump agenda, but too many show by their deeds that they prefer it to a university in which faculty control the curriculum, bloated administrative staffs are reduced, students express political opinions freely, and peaceful protests are treated as welcome aspects of university life that can educate wider publics about things many had failed heretofore to grasp. There have been valuable university challenges to public opinion to reconsider the Vietnam War, to resist the Iraq War, to ignite civil rights, to challenge Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to come to terms with an emerging period of climate wreckage that corporate/state institutions now try to ignore, downplay, or cover up.

The University As New Beacon

So, what should universities and colleges be doing today, then? Well, first, we must relieve our decades long great dependence on the state by curtailing military research. Faculties, students, and parents must also band together to demand a pluralization of boards of trustees, as we pull back the autocratic powers too many university and college presidents have assumed in recent years. More than that, faculties, students, and ecologists must demand that more teaching and research resources be devoted to studying the dangers radical climate wreckage poses to life in so many regimes today. (I note that this has never been one of the "signature" initiatives pursued by the president of my university, though he loves AI research).

As it becomes clear how current hurricane and tornado surges, wildfires, faster glacier melts, ocean rises, and a slowing ocean conveyor are harbingers of worst to come unless radical transformations are undertaken, university humanists, earth scientists, and social scientists must find new ways to work together. While some schools lead the way in this regard, many others are populated by faculties and students who would also give climate wreckage their highest teaching and research priority if only their trustees, provosts, and presidents would stop discouraging and marginalizing these activities. Too many of the latter are too close for comfort to Trump in this regard

The Risks and the Stakes

These are all big and risky moves. They will incite further Trump attacks as they focus on an accelerating condition he calls "climate crap." And yet, much more is needed, too. Universities must make themselves into living eco-egalitarian beacons today, doing so to encourage other institutions of civil society to follow suit. Most faculty know that today university presidents, deans, and college coaches too often pull down extravagant salaries and benefits. Those perks often draw their lifestyles and thinking closer to big neoliberal donors who increasingly see themselves inhabiting a different world from people in everyday life. This encourages college presidents to mimic the lifestyles of the donor class and to downplay the educational needs of the poor, racial minorities, and future high school teachers. The current structure of the university is exquisitely designed to foment working-class resentments among those who know their kids need to go to college but can't afford the exorbitant bill to do so.

Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being.

So, let's work to usher into being student/faculty/parent/movements to demand that the highest paid members of a university make, say, no more than eight times as much as the lowest paid members—the food staff, the janitors, the support staff, the groundskeepers, etc. Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being. One immediate effect will be to lower the cost of admission for working-class students.

These egalitarian practices must be joined to a variety of ecological practices, practices which enact in college organization what ecologists know are urgently needed in the wider society too. The university will now become a center in which fossil fuels are a thing of the past, replaced by solar and wind power. Its new buildings—hopefully now emphasizing the classroom buildings that are sorely needed—will also be constructed to conform to the most advanced ecological designs. Such redesigns can draw upon faculty and students from multiple fields to participate in their perfection.

A Utopian Agenda and Expose

Of course, it will be announced immediately that these are all utopian proposals. They are sooo unrealistic. They are indeed. In being utopian they not only expose how right-wing, anti-egalitarian, and anti-ecological the Trump regime is today. They also show how too many university presidents and trustees have lost their way as well, adopting modes of realism woefully inadequate to the risks faced today by universities and the larger society. University leaders often assume they can float above the inequalities and climate wreckage of today, and they too often support a university matrix that is desperately unattuned to the most urgent needs of the larger society in which they are nested. In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.

In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.

Under a new, or revivified, university regime, presidents, provosts and deans--albeit a much smaller cohort than the number which currently bloats these schools—will propose agendas to the faculty rather than imposing them from above and waiting for laggards to buy into their problematic neoliberal image of the world. They will enact democratic processes rather than putting the squeeze on faculty, students, and parents from every side.

When it comes to Harvard against Trump and Musk, the faculty must always side with Harvard. When it comes to the current authoritarianism of too many university presidents, provosts, deans, and trustees, more faculty members must call upon a new generation of students, faculty and parents to repair the damage collaborating university regimes have wrought both in their internal organization and in the public face they present to society. We must speak more vociferously to a wider public about the real situation the United States faces, as its autocratic leaders attack democracy, affirm racism, accelerate inequality, flirt with economic disaster, ignore climate wreckage, and refuse to acknowledge how their own climate policies help to promote the escalating migrations from south to north they so cruelly use to foment fascist energies at home. The odds, of course, are against those who seek to make the university a new center of egalitarian creativity and ecological awareness. But since the most likely alternative to that is disaster, those are the odds we must face and strive to overcome.

Recently, I’ve been turning off my iPhone — all the way off! — for 10 to 30 minutes at a time. I leave it somewhere in the house, while I try to live IRL (“in real life”), washing dishes, hanging up laundry, or even going for a walk, phoneless.

In this hyper-connected world of ours, doing so, even for such a short time, often feels like an enormous act of self-deprivation — no podcasts, no long-distance communication with those I’m closest to, no social media, no para-social relationships, no steps of mine being counted, or micro-health-tracking going on. So much, in other words, missing in action. I’m not a digital native. In fact, I am what they call a late adopter. I didn’t get a cell phone until the fall of 2003. So I remember when it was normal to go about your business without a powerful computer attached to your person. Even with that perspective — recalling the not-so-long-agos of answering machines and public phones with grubby buttons and Internet cafes — I feel unsettled when I’m untethered from my digital leash and experiencing what might pass for freedom, even for a few minutes.

But as unsettling as it is, I also want to start new patterns. Lawyer friends tell me that activists often turn their phones off for the first (and maybe only) time as they commit acts of political property destruction. It’s almost a rite of passage for the newly politicized, and it’s as incriminating as the massive data trails that other activists might leave.

Did you hear about the Tesla saboteur? Home from college in Boston for spring break, the 19-year-old wanted to express his rage at billionaire Elon Musk’s government takeover. He went to a Kansas City Tesla dealership in the middle of the night and used a homemade Molotov cocktail to set a Cybertruck on fire. The fire spread, destroying charging stations and setting a second truck aflame, causing more than $200,000 in damage. He was caught in the act — at least in data terms. The cameras at Tesla (and inside Tesla vehicles themselves) pinpointed the time of the property destruction, while images of someone who looked like him were caught on multiple cameras in the vicinity.

As for new patterns, turning off my cellphone for a period of time every day means a small window of datalessness that offers a twenty-first-century version of rebellion. It dams up the stream of free data that flows from my device with every tap-tap and swipe. By doing so, I create a tiny space for surprise, for rebellion, for precious secrecy.

I don’t have any plans to sabotage a Tesla showroom, nor am I in a current conspiracy with anyone trying to stop a shipment of U.S. weapons to the Israeli Defense Forces for its genocidal campaign against Gaza. I’m not trying to organize a workers’ strike at my kids’ school or local grocery store. To my shame, I’m not actively planning any of these actions. For those who don’t want to make rookie activist data mistakes, the Internet (and here’s a nod toward the irony) is full of crash courses on security culture and avoiding self-incrimination or entrapment through careless reliance on tech.

As I power down that ubiquitous device, I remind myself of my own power, too. Yes, I still know how to get places without a map app. I know the answers to the random trivia that comes into my mind any day. (Who sang that song? Who was president in 1954?) Or I can live with the not-knowing. Amazingly enough, I’ve discovered that I still know how to live in my own mind alone, without being distracted or entertained by a podcast. I’ve realized that just because I have the urge to reach out to so-and-so, it doesn’t actually mean that it has to happen that very second. It’s bracing and helpful to remember I can live without this device.

Dehumanizing Technology?

I’m well aware of the research on how bad the online world can be for anyone, especially young people. And believe it or not, my kids — 11 and 12 — still don’t have cellphones and don’t live online. They don’t play video games on and off all day long or have access to their own devices at home. But that doesn’t mean that they’re living some Montessori or Waldorf fantasy of Luddite delight. I kind of wish they were. But that life is for a much higher income bracket than mine. It’s worth noting that many in the tech world take great pains to shield their children from this technology. Every other kid on my daughter’s bus undoubtedly has a phone and I’m sure she’s craning to look over someone’s shoulder whenever she can. My son’s friends all have phones — no surprise in this world of ours — and play video games regularly. He’s a little left out of the chatter about this or that gaming platform, but I’m not giving in just so he can fit into a culture that I don’t think is all that healthy to begin with.

As a parent, I think a lot about the kind of world I’m preparing my kids for. And I guess there’s an argument to be made for preparing them for a world lived largely online, since that’s where we are these days. But I’m going to try and hold the line and reject that very world as much as humanly possible. (Humanly indeed!)

I want my kids running, swimming, noticing the world around them, creating art, hearing bird songs and cries of warning, reading good books (or even not-so-great ones) — almost anything but playing video games and diving into the deep end of a cyber-cesspool of bullying, eating disorders, and a fixation on looks.

I read about the connections between video games and war fighting today and in the future. And it’s strange (at least to me) to imagine war as a video game and the degradation that goes with it. After all, dehumanization is the name of the grisly game these days for the Israeli Defense Forces. Soldiers are taught that the Palestinian people — even children — are less than fully human. Technology may not make them feel that way, but it certainly does make it easier to execute orders involving collective punishment, total surveillance, technological harassment, and ethnic cleansing.

Spending Time with Jennifer Lopez

On Wednesdays, my kids walk to the library, where they can log onto public computers and watch unboxing videos or tutorials on contouring (whatever that may be!). And then they have to walk home in time for dinner. It’s a little over a mile round trip, and I figure it’s a good trade-off. I tell them that they can have a smartphone when they can pay for it themselves, but in my dreams what I’d really like would be a communications device that, in order to use, they had to power with a bicycle or a hand crank. I would want it to feel like work. Because it’s not a value-neutral object and the network it relies on is not value-neutral either. At every juncture, this technology that we take for granted has a high labor, material, and environmental cost.

My daughter Madeline is 11. I notice her putting ever more attention into her appearance, primping and carefully considering her outfits. Still, she smiles when she looks in the mirror, delighting in her strong sense of style and dancing to the beat of her own drummer. Her once-a-week plunge into YouTube hasn’t dissipated her sense of self the way daily (hourly?) immersion would. She plays softball, runs at recess, and has a healthy appetite. She isn’t isolated from the world, and she and I talk about body image, aging, and the way old-fashioned media, social media, and AI create impossible standards for women.

Recently, we watched an ad featuring the multi-hyphenate Jennifer Lopez who, at the age of 55, is acting, singing, dancing, and representing high-end brands like a full-time mogul model. “Gosh, Mom. I can’t believe she is older than you,” Madeline said with the unalloyed frankness of the young. She didn’t have to mention my wrinkles and rolls and masses of white hair. It was all implied in her incredulous tone.

“Well, my Love, it’s not my job to look a certain way,” I replied.

Jennifer Lopez is, of course, a knockout. I have loved her since Out of Sight and Jenny From the Block. As a public figure and a professional beauty, she’s in a position to maintain her looks, no matter what the cost. She undoubtedly spares no expense when it comes to trainers, treatments, makeup, and clothes to keep that look (or at least something close to it), and then computers and lighting do the rest.

Believe me, it’s good to have these conversations with my kid, to have her understand the effort and cost that go into looking like Jennifer Lopez, or any other celebrity. As I pointed out to Madeline, I don’t have a deal with a face-cream company or a clothing line or a perfume outfit or some kind of alcohol company that requires me to devote myself to my persona. And in her own fashion, she heard me.

As I reflect now, I realize that, without such conversations, she might think she’s supposed to look that way, too, and that there’s something wrong with her if she doesn’t. That degraded sense of self is easy pickings for our consumerist culture which sends unrelenting messages that this or that product will fill the hole.

Making the Future Different?

All my yellow thumbs up, all my mindless clicks and swipes, the time traps I fall into — full disclosure: it’s videos of thrifters on the hunt for deals and the posts of the hauls they buy to resell that grab me every time! That’s my weak spot. But every minute online is captured in a huge data profile of ME that I can’t contest or contrive or unravel. But I can turn away. Turn off the iPhone. Turn away from the screen. Disconnect the stream of data. This pervasive technology and its promises of ease and a frictionless existence are a downright lie. After all, the same technological framework powers DoorDash and the weaponized drones that are now raining terror down on children just like mine in Gaza.

I live far enough away from Gaza (in so many senses) that I could mindlessly embrace DoorDash while rejecting killer drones. But now that I’ve made the connection, I can’t un-make it. So I am going to say as big a NO as possible to both.

As the world gets more networked and more automated, the basic knowledge of how to survive in it gets lost, commodified, or controlled. How to find and purify water, how to grow and prepare food — lost! The “cloud” won’t bring rain to end drought conditions. The Internet is not going to feed us in a supply chain collapse. These are the things that keep me up at night, so without freaking out too much, my kids and I work on life skills together. Eye contact, stamina for walking, tolerance of discomfort, strategic decision-making, map-reading, determining threat levels, and assessing someone’s trustworthiness. These are all skills that will help my kids in a distinctly precarious future.

A few years ago, an artist named Simon Weckert borrowed a few dozen iPhones from friends, put them in a red wagon and took a walk through the streets of Berlin. With just an hour or so of lag time, Google Maps showed all the streets and roads he had walked on bottlenecked in traffic jams. Video of his mobile art piece shows him strolling down the center of empty roads. It’s absorbing to watch that video, a split screen of him in a yellow jacket with the jaunty gait of a wagon puller and those red-lined Google Maps. Weckert’s performance demonstrates how our sense of reality is mediated by, filtered through, and dependent on a technology we simply don’t fully grasp or understand.

What we see isn’t what is real. In these dystopian Trumpy days, deep in our bones, we know that. Trump rants about White genocide and radical-left judicial monsters and tweets out AI-constructed images of himself as the Pope, a Jedi master, a golden statue in a renovated Gaza resort. What we see isn’t what’s real. And yes, I am in awe of it. I am afraid of it. I know it cannot feed me. I know it is trying to cleave my attention from the question of how we survive this violent present and make a different and far better future.

Peter Maurin, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day, was fond of saying that we make the future different by making the present different.

So, I am turning my iPhone off. It makes my present different. Will it make the future any different?

It won’t hurt to try!

Within 48 hours, the Israeli military will have killed hundreds more Palestinians in Gaza who are being starved to death, many killed this week as they were enticed by food into killing zones.

Within 48 hours, more Palestinian children will die from U.S. bombs dropped from Israeli drones and jets.

Within 48 hours, nations of the world will have again and again refused to take any concrete measures to force the government of Israel to stop the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Gaza Flotilla Sailboat Madleen

Yet, also within 48 hours, a small sailboat named Madleen will arrive near Gaza. (Watch on the https://t.me/FFC_official_channel, follow on Flotilla Instagram, and watch progress on a map here or here.)

Within 48 hours, 12 brave souls in the Madleen—Flotilla Steering Committee members Thiago Avila, Brazil and Yasemin Acar, Germany; Rima Hassan, French-Palestinian member of European Parliament; Dr. Baptiste Andre, France; Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Omar Faiad, France; Pascal Maurieras, France; Reva Viard, France; Yanis Mhamdi, France; Suayb Ordu, Turkiye; Sergio Toribio, Spain; Greta Thunberg, Swedish climate activist; and Marco van Rennes, The Netherlands—will carry the solidarity of citizens of the world to those in Gaza and the West Bank for the ending of the genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Within 48 hours, the 12 volunteers on the Madleen will most probably be stopped in international waters, arrested, taken against their wills to a place they do not want to go, imprisoned, and then deported… from Israel.

Only we the citizens can force our governments to isolate, boycott, and sanction the genocidal Israeli government to make them stop.

Within 48 hours, the 12 will be interrogated, possibly beaten and tasered, but probably treated much better than Palestinians in the prison who are stripped, humiliated, and starved.

Within 60 hours, the diplomatic missions of the 12, consular officers of the embassies of France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Turkiye, Sweden, and the Netherlands will arrive at the prison to talk with the citizens of their country.

Within 60 hours, brave lawyers accredited in Israel who associated with the Freedom Flotilla will arrive to advise the 12.

Within 60 hours, Israelis horrified at the genocidal actions of their government will protest in the cities of Israel.

Within 72-96 hours, an Israeli court will declare that the 12 on the Madleen entered Israel illegally and were a threat to the national security of Israel and will deport the 12.

Within 100-120 hours, the 12 will arrive at their home countries, hopefully to a warm, warm welcome to those who oppose the genocide of Gaza.

Within 120-140 hours, the Global March to Gaza will bring 3,000 persons from 35 countries by air to Egypt to demand food trucks be allowed into Gaza.

Within 120-140 hours, the Overland Convoy to Break the Siege on Gaza—Sumud will bring 7,000 persons by land to Egypt to demand an end to the genocide.

Within 700 days, within 900 days the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza will end?

Or will it?

Only we the citizens can force our governments to isolate, boycott, and sanction the genocidal Israeli government to make them stop killing the last Palestinians and destroying the last of the remains of the Palestinian presence in Gaza.

Keep pushing, protesting, sailing.

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla will sail until the Israeli blockade and genocide of Gaza ends and Palestine is Free.

LIVE 12 noon Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Join us for “DeProgram,” delving into the most pressing issues with unflinching clarity. On the “DeProgram show with political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou,”  we dissect the deportation firestorm surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador and the subject to a Supreme Court order, now back in the U.S.—but he’s facing new human smuggling charges after a legal battle in which the White House blew off the courts. Are the charges fair? What about his having been denied due process for months? Next, we unpack the chaotic clash in Los Angeles between ICE agents and protesters, sparked by aggressive enforcement and Trump’s latest travel ban. Trump won with a promise to do just this, but is a sense of chaos and mayhem undermining law and order?

Tesla’s stock is shown resilience amid the Trump-Musk feud, following a volatile period due to the public spat. The feud, centered on a spending bill dispute, saw Trump call Musk “crazy” and Musk propose an “America Party,” but there’s possible de-escalation after a White House call.

We also tackle the Proud Boys’ lawsuit challenging January 6th prosecutions, alleging political targeting in a case that could reshape legal accountability for the Capitol riot after the plaintiffs were already prosecuted.

Shifting to global crises, we explore the collapse of Gaza’s joint US-Israeli aid distribution system amid escalating violence, leaving millions in despair and humanitarian efforts in chaos.

Finally, we delve into groundbreaking medical news: could mRNA technology, the basis for COVID vaccines, unlock a cure for HIV? This potential breakthrough could transform global health. 

The post DeProgram: “Deportation Riot in LA, Trump/Musk, Jan. 6ers Sue, Israeli Aid Scheme Stopped, mRNA HIV Cure?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Basically, everyone knows that “making America great again” means making America racist again—making racism the cultural norm again, unlocking the cage of political correctness and freeing, you know, regular Americans to strut again in a sense of superiority.

This cultural norm was “stolen” by the civil rights movement. Prior to the changes the movement wrought—I’m old enough to remember those days—polite ladies at church could say, “Oh my, that’s very white of you.” And lynchings were not only normal but quasi-legal, or so it seemed, far more likely to result in postcards than convictions.

To worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself.

Permission to dehumanize comes from the top down. This is what the Trump era continues to teach us, as well as how politically convenient it is. Dehumanizing a particular group of people—turning them into “the enemy” of the moment—is such a useful governing tool. And creating the enemy isn’t limited to waging war.

America, America! Half democracy, half slave-owning autocracy: God bless our founding racism, let’s make America as great as it used to be. Here’s how this is done, as Axios reports:

In a tense meeting last week, top Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day... according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

Why it matters: The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term—and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations.

No wonder Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tagents seem like such brutal racists. It’s their job. Perhaps most of them believe in the moral necessity of their work—getting “illegals” out of the country, even if, oh gosh, they’re here legally. But even if they don’t. this is the work they have to do.

It’s not too difficult to scrape past the superficial terms “legal” and “citizenship” to spot the collective dehumanization of brown people. Americans capable of understanding life only in us-vs.-them—me-vs.-you—terms are getting what they long for.

This was exemplified in a recent CNN story about a surge in arrests of fake ICE agents—ordinary American guys harassing, assaulting, and/or pretending to arrest brown people. In one incident, a South Carolina white guy stopped his car on a rural road, blocking the car of brown men behind him. One of the victims recorded the incident on his cellphone.

“You all got caught!” the fake agent blathered. “Where are you from, Mexico? You from Mexico? You’re going back to Mexico!”

He then grabbed the keys from the ignition and started jiggling them in the driver’s face as he mocked his accent. One of the passengers made a call on his cellphone, causing the fake agent to admonish him: “Now don’t be speaking that pig-Latin in my fucking country!” He then slapped the phone out of his hand.

Ah, the enemy! What the incident makes public is not simply the sense of fear the Trumpers are instilling in ordinary Americans, but the fact that they’re returning those ordinary Americans to a sense of... uh, self-worth. We’re better than they are.

But of course this creates fear among everyone in the group declared to be non-American: “the enemy.” As Maribel Hernández Rivera of the American Civil Liberties Union noted to CNN after watching the video:

What we’re seeing here is we have leadership at the top that dehumanizes people who are immigrants and now this is the outcome of that dehumanizing. You end up having a violation of people’s rights, people see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.

Yes, this is part of who we are. Us-vs.-them hatred, fear, and contempt is basic humanity, simplified to its lowest common denominator. It’s so easy to seize a sense of hatred and contempt for an “other”—for someone who seems different. But to worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself. You’re living as half of who you are, locked solely in your certainties—in what you know or think you know—and denying yourself the chance to learn and grow. What someone prone to racism really fears isn’t “the other”—he may well worship having a clearly defined enemy—but, rather, life’s complexity: the unknown.

Removing books from libraries is one example of this—you know, books that make people “uncomfortable,” because they push them beyond their certainties (racist or otherwise). So is the Trump-ICE invasion of universities: arresting and deporting students who make, let us say, politically incorrect statements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As author Christine Greer asked, “What is the point of a university if we have homogeneity of thought and silence?”

Interestingly, we’re also witnessing a seemingly opposite sort of educational confrontation, as Trump education secretary Linda McMahon recently defended a New York state high school’s right to maintain an Indigenous American name for its sports teams: “the Chiefs.” The state had imposed a ban on stereotypical mascot names. As a spokesperson for the National Congress of American Indians said, “These depictions are not tributes—they are rooted in racism, cultural appropriation, and intentional ignorance.”

No matter! America has a right to maintain its stereotypes, that is to say, keep them in public view, front and center. Toss in a few hoots while you’re at it.

I believe this much: We’ll continue to evolve beyond this smirking certainty, regardless how difficult it will be to do so and regardless how long it takes.

This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk’s X platform, a “deepfake” video of President Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions), the attacks against LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, seem to be on steroids. After all, since taking office a second time, Trump has issued executive orders that ban transgender women in sports and transgender troops in the military, while limiting federal recognition to two genders. And his executive actions are only the spear tip of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat transgender people, who make up just over 1% of the U.S. population.

Believe it or not, so far this year, 701 anti-trans bills have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. More than $215 million was spent on anti-trans television advertisements during the 2024 election season alone. Now, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” barely passed by the House and at present in the Senate—which would gut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other lifesaving safety-net programs—takes explicit aim at gender-affirming care for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) patients. If the Senate passes it, the result will be devastating for trans people, who are already twice as likely as the general population to be unemployed and unhoused and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty. It should be no surprise, then, that almost half of transgender adults in this country have already relocated or are considering relocating to more trans-affirming places.

While executive orders, budget cuts, and other attacks threaten all trans and nonbinary people, the most vulnerable are, of course, at greatest risk, including the poor, people of color, the young, the disabled, and the incarcerated. In a recent report, the American Civil Liberties Union offers a horrific insight into this reality:

Some of the most immediate impacts will likely be felt by the more than 2,000 transgender people currently held in federal custody. [One] order specifically calls on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ignore the guidelines of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and enforce a blanket policy forcing transgender women into men’s prisons and detention centers against their will. This puts them at a severely heightened risk of sexual assault and abuse by other incarcerated persons and prison staff. The order also mandates that BOP withdraw critical health care from trans people in federal prison.

The overwhelming majority of anti-trans bills target trans and nonbinary children, youth, and young adults by taking away their sense of safety and belonging in healthcare locations, libraries, schools, sports, and so much more, while only accelerating anti-trans bullying and hate. In fact, according to a study from the Trevor Project, “When states pass anti-transgender laws… suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth ages 13 to 17 increased from 7% to 72%.”

It’s important to note that none of this is happening simply because Donald Trump himself is a bigot or because the Republican Party is just deeply cruel. It’s happening because there is a highly connected, well-funded, and strategically positioned Christian nationalist movement pushing forward anti-trans policy and its accompanying social violence.

But in the struggle against religious extremism and political oppression, trans people know what losing strategies look like. Preemptive compliance from the institutions we have often relied upon—including healthcare providers, colleges, and philanthropic foundations—has been a losing strategy. Submission to divide-and-conquer rule, theological idolatry, and biblical distortion, as well as silence from supporters and allies, also loses the day.

Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, however, trans people also know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now. Trans people, who have always had to live with their backs against the wall, are now being joined by those from all walks of life. Indeed, as Trump and the Christian nationalist movement attack everything from decent healthcare to decent housing, more and more people are poised to enter a struggle for survival. In the fight for dignity and democracy, trans people have much to teach everybody.

A History of Resistance

Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people have long resisted unjust laws, as well as mistreatment and oppression from those in power. The Compton Cafeteria riot in August 1966 sparked transgender activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, years before the Stonewall Uprising. Police violence was common in San Francisco then, and the staff at Compton Cafeteria called the police on poor trans women and drag queens who were harassed, subjected to genitalia checks, and subsequently arrested for crossdressing, which was illegal at the time. Tired of the constant oppression, violence, and harassment, trans women resisted arrest, sparking resistance throughout the Tenderloin district. This led to a picket-line presence at the café, as the establishment continued to ban drag queens and trans women.

Evidence of this early trans resistance was nearly erased from historical memory. Thanks to the work of transgender historian Susan Stryker and other activists and organizers, however, the important legacy of such organizing was confirmed to have indeed occurred.

It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone.

Three years later, across the country in New York City, the Stonewall Uprising was led primarily by poor people, particularly poor, gender-expansive folks of color, who faced continual police harassment, violence, and discrimination. The Stonewall Inn, a dingy bar reputedly owned by organized crime and frequented by those in the poor gay and trans community in New York’s West Village, was raided by the police in June 1969. The liberation movement that followed saw heroic activism, organizing, and community care by poor, unhoused trans women who resisted constant erasure and violence from the government (and even from within the gay rights movement). Some of those leaders, including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Maxine Feldman, Bobbie Lea Bennett, and Miss Major Griffin Gracy, were as much a part of the movement to end poverty as they were of the gay rights movement.

Both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were poor, unhoused trans women and sex workers, as well as organizers advocating for deep social transformation. In 1970, they founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) House where they worked to meet the material and community needs of poor trans youth. They held monthly political education meetings, offering support for queer folks who were arrested and couldn’t pay bail. They provided both jail and street support in tough times, while working to organize poor trans folks into a larger movement for transformational change.

The story of S.T.A.R. House is replete with lessons for anyone committed to resisting political violence, systemic immiseration, and authoritarian-style rule. In their melding of community-care and political activism, Johnson and Rivera successfully modeled ways to organize and build power in the shadow of extreme state repression. They insisted that everyone in their community had a right to live with dignity and that even the most marginalized among them should have a role in all movements for collective liberation. Through their work, they developed and protected a new generation of queer grassroots leaders, at a time when no one else was willing to do so. Theirs was a political ethic rooted in a deep understanding of the classic movement slogan: “When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises.”

Today, 2025 Pride organizers are doubling down on that radical history of protest and resistance. In fact, NYC Pride has made “protest” its theme of the year. As Kazz Alexander, its co-chair, explained:

The challenges we face today, particularly in this political climate, require us to stand together in solidarity. We must support one another, because when the most marginalized among us are granted their rights, all of us benefit. Pride is not merely a celebration of identity—it is a powerful statement of resistance, affirming that justice and equity will ultimately prevail for those who live and love on the margins.
Unholy Attacks on Children, the Poor, and the Vulnerable

It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone. In the Trump years, the slew of homophobic and transphobic attacks has been inseparable from the rise of Christian nationalism and religious extremism. In many ways, the contemporary legislative, executive, and judicial attacks on trans and nonbinary people closely parallel a decades-long strategy of the Christian right to politicize abortion access, an issue previously not considered political by a majority of Americans, including a majority of Christians.

An eerie argument about “defending innocent children” is being deployed by Christian nationalists in their war on gender-affirming care, despite overwhelming medical evidence that such care saves young people’s lives. In fact, denying such care is part of a growing Christian nationalist mission to remake this country as an extremist Christian dominion, starting with our children.

For example, Oklahoma Senate Bill 129, introduced in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 26, was named the “Millstone Act.” That title reflected an unsettling, even violent interpretation of Matthew 18:6 in the Bible, falsely asserting that gender-affirming care harms children and insinuating that anyone providing it should have “a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

In January, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty released its annual report, “The State of Religious Liberty in the United States.” It identified five areas of critical concern: immigration, antisemitism, in vitro fertilization mandates, parental choice in education, and scaling back “gender ideology” laws. It directly took up the rhetoric and politics of the soon-to-be-in-office Trump administration on trans rights and more.

Indeed, there is nothing innate or organic about the rise of anti-trans and anti-queer hate in the United States. As the research of Translash Media has made clear, organizations like the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family, and the Council for National Policy have been instrumental in funding, developing, and workshopping anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment, policies, and theology. Fundamentalist Protestant organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council have also been crucial to the launching of the anti-trans movement within the last decade, including the drafting of the first anti-trans legislation at a Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization conference in 2019.

Such Christian nationalist-fueled attacks aren’t just about hurting the queer community. They are also a key way of wielding supposedly “traditional” values and identities to discipline dissent and nonconformity in Christian ranks as well, while sowing distrust of “the other” in this all-American world of ours. All of this, of course, played out in the 2024 elections, when trans rights were weaponized into a hot-button and divisive issue by the Trump campaign (with only the most half-hearted pushback from the Biden-Harris crew), despite the trans community being such a microscopic minority of the population.

What the Bible Really Says About Gender Justice

Christian nationalists like to weaponize the Bible as a primary way of justifying their attacks on trans and nonbinary people. And yet, like all Christian nationalist theology, theirs is heretical when it comes to actual Christian scriptures and the subject of Jesus’ teachings.

After all, the creation story in Genesis is fully inclusive of God’s greatness—from the creation of light and darkness to the nonbinary sunrises and sunsets in between. It should be a reminder that all of us are created in God’s image. While the anti-trans crew has sought to use the biblical phrase “male and female God created them” from Genesis 1:27 in defense of exclusionary violence, some of the oldest interpretations of that text hold that God created the first human beings to contain both “maleness” and “femaleness” inside one body. Indeed, the Bible repeatedly names third-gender people as important.

If Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.

In Isaiah 56:3-5, for instance, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people who exist outside of the gender binary, in essence promising LGBTQ+ people, “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The Book of Esther, for instance, identifies no fewer than 10 gender non-conforming people, some of whom are identified as playing a role in assisting Esther’s defense of her people against imperial violence. The Jewish Talmud reflects a similar affirmation of gender diversity, legally recognizing no fewer than seven genders.

This inclusivity carries through to the New Testament and the stories about Jesus as well. In Matthew 19:12, Jesus teaches that there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth. Acts 8:26-39 explicitly lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender nonconforming people of African descent in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. In our time, that eunuch would have been far more welcome at the Stonewall Inn than at the Family Research Council’s annual summit.

There are numerous other biblical examples of gender diversity and of Jesus’ celebration of and identification with gender nonconforming people. The point is that if Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.

This is a “Kairos moment” for faith communities that affirm the dignity and rights of LGBTQ+ people—especially trans and nonbinary people. Christian nationalism’s spiritual and political attacks on LGBTQ+ people are also an attack on our deep belief in God’s inclusive love. Isn’t it time, especially in the age of Donald Trump, to leverage our public witness, our pastoral presence, our theological voice, and the power of our institutions in defense of the surviving and thriving of all people?

For too long, religion has been used to attack LGBTQ+ people. Today, Christian nationalists are amassing power by claiming a monopoly on morality. But beneath theological distortions and manipulations exists an untarnished gospel that teaches love, inclusion, diversity, and justice. We must be brave enough to proclaim this gospel for all to hear.

She shows up just after 9:00 am, like she has most mornings since the letter arrived. The lobby is already full—mothers with strollers, older men gripping folders, a teenager in a hoodie with his eyes on the floor. She clutches the same folder she’s been carrying for weeks: pay stubs, proof of residency, a note from her landlord warning the rent will rise again. Her name will be called eventually. And when it is, a caseworker will skim her paperwork, ask a few quick questions, and decide whether she qualifies—for what, she’s not even sure anymore. Rent relief? Help with the electric bill? A food pantry referral? Maybe nothing.

This is what public help looks like in America: a maze, a line, a thousand little gates. Each with a lock that shifts depending on your zip code, your paperwork, or whether the system deems you deserving. Our safety net isn’t built to catch—it’s built to sort. And that structure—the means-tested, piecemeal logic of American social policy—hasn’t just failed to prevent collapse. It has laid the groundwork for authoritarianism.

President Donald Trump came to power on the promise to fight for the forgotten working class—for people like those in that lobby. Millions believed him. Not because they were fooled, but because the institutions that should have offered stability—unions, schools, housing, healthcare—were already gone. What remained were brittle bureaucracies that asked everything, offered little, and always arrived too late.

We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.

Trump didn’t fill that vacuum with solutions. He filled it with vengeance. Not policy that delivered—but posture that blamed. While Republicans translated grievance into governing power, Democrats lost their map.

After 2024, the party was hollowed out. Young men walked away. Working-class voters of every background followed. The party that once stood for labor and civil rights began to feel like the party of college towns and tax credits. People didn’t switch sides—they stopped believing anyone was on theirs.

In that vacuum, the Abundance Agenda gained traction. Promoted by liberal technocrats, it focuses on clearing bureaucratic thickets: zoning reform, streamlined permitting, housing acceleration. Build more. Build faster. Let growth lift all boats.

But abundance doesn’t ask who’s in the boat—and who keeps getting thrown overboard. It solves for scarcity without addressing exclusion. It tackles supply, not distribution. It removes friction but doesn’t restore trust. Growth is not solidarity. Innovation is not inclusion. And no one will rally behind a politics that treats them as consumers before recognizing them as neighbors or workers.

Now, in his second term, Trump no longer pretends. He is using the federal government not to build—but to punish. Agencies are purged. Civil rights protections erased. Grants come with loyalty tests. Through executive orders and loyalist appointments, he is dismantling the federal infrastructure of inclusion, plank by plank.

This isn’t small government. It’s selective government—enforcement without support, punishment without provision. It survives because public systems remain fractured and cruel. When your right to basic services depends on proving your worth, solidarity dies. People stop defending each other’s needs. They’re too busy proving their own.

The single mother in the lobby doesn’t call this authoritarianism. She doesn’t have to. She feels it in the form that changes overnight. In the disconnected phone numbers. In the line she waits in each morning—only to be told again: You don’t qualify.

Abundance won’t help her.

Zoning reform won’t keep her housed.

Solar panels won’t make her feel seen.

She doesn’t need a productivity agenda. She needs a government that shows up.

Because this is how democracy unravels—not in a cataclysm, but in the quiet, daily normalization of abandonment.

Trump must be stopped. But we won’t defeat authoritarianism with messaging. Not with moral clarity. Not with speeches. Democrats will not win by being right. They will win by delivering.

Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment. We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.

Ask that woman in the lobby what failed, and she won’t name a policy theory. She’ll say: the office stopped calling. The money vanished. The form changed. Beneath that is something deeper: a belief that survival must be earned. That belonging must be begged for. And once that belief takes hold, it doesn’t just break programs. It breaks democracy.

Because when help is conditional, it becomes contestable. When people compete for scraps, they stop believing in the public. They stop believing in each other. When democracy fails, it’s not because people stop believing in freedom.

It’s because freedom stops being useful.

A ballot won’t quiet a hungry child. A speech won’t refill a prescription.

If democracy is to survive, it must show up in people’s lives.

And to show up, it must trust them first.

That woman is still waiting. Not for charity—for recognition. For someone to say: You matter. You belong. You should not have to beg to be seen. Universalism answers that hope. Not with pity, but with presence. Not with exceptions, but with guarantees. It does not ask what she did wrong. It simply says: You are part of this country. You are not alone.

Because if this republic is to endure, it won’t be because people begged for help.

It will be because we chose to build a government that finally refused to look away.

We chose to show up—not with hesitation, not with disclaimers, but with resolve.

Because in a nation this rich, no one should have to stand in line just to be seen.

No one should have to plead for the dignity that should already be theirs.