Elon Musk is leaving the White House — and leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. But of all the actions Musk and President Trump set in motion, nothing will hurt more people around the world than their dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

By making disease-stemming drugs, clean water, and food available to millions, USAID has probably saved more lives worldwide than any entity in history.

Since 2000, USAID’s programs have prevented the deaths of 58 million people from tuberculosis, 25 million from HIV/AIDS, and over 11 million from malaria. It’s given 70 million people access to safe drinking water and, working in concert with global vaccine initiatives, helped to nearly eradicate polio.

As the main funder of global health interventions, USAID served as a bulwark against diseases that don’t halt at national borders. Its programs identified emerging epidemics and minimized the spread of drug-resistant diseases that threaten Americans as well.

Although it’s commonly assumed to be much higher, foreign aid is just 1 percent of federal spending, so cutting it won’t begin to balance the budget. So instead Trump and Musk attacked USAID by slandering it, calling it a “criminal agency” (Musk) that’s “run by a bunch of radical lunatics” (Trump).

This, of course, was a lie. USAID was known for having rigorous oversight, with 275 investigators and auditors in its watchdog office.

Most USAID funding in low-income countries targets disease prevention, economic growth, and disaster relief. But DOGE and Trump made staggering false claims, like Trump’s that USAID was sending “$50 million to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”

As a result, USAID was the first casualty in the Trump administration’s struggle to make the federal government subservient not to the Constitution but to one man. And Musk — the world’s richest man, whose income last year exceeded USAID’s entire budget — and his fellow billionaire President Trump withdrew medicines and food from millions of the world’s most vulnerable people. Afterward, Musk gleefully announced that they’d fed “USAID into the wood chipper.”

I’ve followed USAID since seeing its economic and agricultural programs in the African Sahel in the 1980s, and I’ve spent 40 years heading nonprofits working to provide clean drinking water internationally.

No organization I’ve led has received USAID funding, but over the years I’ve known scores of USAID staff who were hard working and conscientious about spending U.S. tax dollars. Trump owes an apology to USAID’s employees, now indiscriminately fired or coerced into early retirement.

Every federal agency can stand being streamlined. But what happened to USAID wasn’t reform — it was destruction. “They didn’t know what they were doing or care to find out, but I came to realize that cruelty is their purpose,” one senator told me in April. “Cruelty is how they think they demonstrate power.”

It’s fair to say American voters didn’t ask for this. USAID went unmentioned during the 2024 presidential campaign — and bipartisan majorities continue to say they oppose gutting the agency.

American entities which partnered with USAID — including corporations, faith-based organizations, foundations, universities, and civic groups like Rotary International — will continue to raise their own private funds. But by themselves they can’t replace USAID’s leadership abroad.

Now that Trump and Musk have eviscerated the agency, millions will suffer. The Center for Global Development estimates that U.S. foreign assistance has been saving 3 million lives annually. The journal Nature calculates that the loss of U.S. global health funding alone could result in 25 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.

For Americans — including Trump voters — feeling queasy over what’s been carried out in their name, it’s not too late to convey to Congress your support for life-saving foreign assistance.

Regardless of how they voted, Americans should be proud of how their foreign aid has reduced worldwide poverty, sickness, hunger, and thirst — all for 1 percent of the federal budget. The future cost to the United States, if it abandons its leadership in global health and development, will prove incalculable.

Rulings issued by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) increasingly appear to be ideologically driven, often splitting along a clear conservative-liberal divide—whether 5–4 when there were five conservative justices, or 6–3 following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by the more conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump. The relatively recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling in June 2022, where the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade by a 6-3 split, underscores this point.

This pattern of partisan alignment contributes to a broader fear, especially in the wake of President Trump’s reelection, that America’s bulwarks of democracy are buckling. From attacks on civil rights, universities, and the press, to a Justice Department willing to arrest sitting judges, Trump’s actions seem designed to destabilize core institutions. At the same time, his roughshod approach to “justice” is almost cynically expected to end up in the courts—particularly at SCOTUS—where many assume the ruling will go his way. The common narrative in progressive circles warns that the Court, stacked with Trump appointees, will support him in any unconstitutional attempt to hold power. While we have no quibble about their assessment that President Trump is a bad hombre who will do his best to do his worst, we are not convinced that SCOTUS will ever do his bidding. And though three of its justices were appointed by Trump and others often align ideologically, SCOTUS has shown itself, at times, to resist political pressure. It may still serve as a vital check on executive overreach. Whether it can fulfill that role is a question worth answering not just with alarm, but with close attention to facts and patterns. But first, some context and examples.

Recall that SCOTUS dismissed Texas v. Pennsylvania in December 2020 because Texas lacked standing in how Pennsylvania (but also other states) conducts its elections. The unsigned order stated: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.” No Justice supported Texas’s request for relief, though Justices Alito and Thomas would have allowed the complaint to be filed. SCOTUS rejected or refused to hear all other major legal challenges by Trump or his allies to the 2020 elections. This is despite the 6-3 conservative majority in the Court.

Similarly, there are other examples too, and not just those related to elections, that don’t fit the narrative that the three new Justices nominated by Trump will upend all the civil rights, due process, or other liberties we enjoy. Take Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), a landmark civil rights case where, in a 6-3 ruling, the Court ruled the Civil Rights Act protects employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, and while dissenting justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh are also conservatives, Justice Kavanaugh wrote a separate dissent arguing it should be Congress and not the courts that should add gender and sexual orientation to Title VII. He stated,

“Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and law ... They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today's result. Under the Constitution's separation of powers, however, I believe that it was Congress's role, not this Court's, to amend Title VII.”

A different kind of example is the Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (2023). Here, the Court significantly limited EPA’s authority to protect certain wetlands under the Clean Water Act, which has serious environmental implications. Notably for our purposes, this conservative ruling was unanimous (9–0), though the justices differed in their reasoning.

So what should one make of these mixed examples? Is the Court under Chief Justice Roberts more conservative than its predecessors? Has it become more conservative since the appointment of the three justices by President Trump, and if so, in what type of cases? And what about ideological splits like 5-4 or 6-3, have they increased over time?

Data. Fortunately, the publicly available Supreme Court Database (SCD), hosted by Washington University in St. Louis, allows researchers to explore precisely these questions. The current version of the database includes all Supreme Court cases from World War II to July 1, 2024 (with an extended version covering decisions from four centuries ago) and classifies each ruling as liberal, conservative, or “unspecifiable”. For example, a decision is coded as liberal if it favors minorities in civil rights cases, supports the defendant in criminal cases, rules against the government in due process cases, or sides with labor over business in union-related disputes. Occasionally, this can give a counterintuitive classification; in Trump v United States (2024), the SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in favor of the individual and is thus coded as ‘liberal.’

Importantly, the SCD also records each justice’s vote, the breakdown of majority and minority opinions, and categorizes the main legal issue using a detailed taxonomy of 271 issue codes (e.g., habeas corpus, antitrust, abortion, torts, privacy) as well as 14 broader issue areas (e.g., Criminal Procedure, First Amendment, Civil Rights, Economic Activity, Due Process). Although there can be occasional misclassifications given the database’s scale and complexity, it is considered comprehensive and is widely used by legal scholars. The database includes 9,277 cases, with only 64 (0.69%) lacking an associated issue.

Robert’s Court. How do SCOTUS decisions under Chief Justice Roberts compare with those of his predecessors? Ignoring unspecifiable cases and coding liberal as 0 and conservative as 1, the average under Roberts is 0.532—meaning 53.2% of cases are conservative. This figure is similar to those from earlier courts: Vinson (49.7%), Berger (54.8%), and Rehnquist (55.2%), with none statistically different from Roberts’ 53.2%. (See Table 1 below.)

Only the Court of Warren, with an average of 32.8% (appointed by Eisenhower, who later called Warren “the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made”), stands out as markedly liberal, as seen in landmark decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, or Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) which guaranteed the right to a lawyer in criminal cases, or Miranda v. Arizona (1966) which required police to inform suspects of their rights (Miranda rights) or Loving v. Virginia (1967) which struck down laws banning interracial marriage. Overall, aside from Warren’s Court, the decisions do not appear radically more conservative.

Trump I’s Nominations. Has SCOTUS become more conservative since the nominations of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett? To check this, we focused on cases decided after Roberts became Chief Justice on October 29, 2005. We partitioned these into two groups: cases decided before April 10, 2017 (the swearing-in date of Justice Gorsuch) and those decided after October 26, 2020 (the swearing-in date of Justice Barrett). We discarded cases between these two dates and those before Roberts took the bench. After removing cases where the issue was not specified or the decision wasn’t coded as liberal/conservative, our sample consisted of 1,128 cases—894 from before any of Trump’s nominations and 234 from afterward.

The good news is that his nominees have not overwhelmingly swung the Court towards conservatism. About 52.68% of decisions were conservative before the nominations, with a further 4.5% increase after—but this change is not statistically significant.

By Issue areas. Although there is no overall change, it still ‘feels’ as if something is amiss—perhaps because we value certain types of cases more highly. Since assigning weights to cases is complex, we next examine changes by issue area as defined in the data. We summarize below the baseline percentage of conservative decisions by issue and the percentage change after the three justices were sworn in.

Most changes are small and not statistically significant. However, two issue areas stand out. For “Due Process,” conservative decisions rose from 18.2% to 70% (an increase of 51.8% and statistically significant). For “Unions,” conservative decisions drop from 60% to 27.3% (a decrease of 32.7%, also statistically significant but not as strongly). These areas—among several others—often involve relatively few observations, which may affect statistical significance.

Liberal/Conservative Splits. We also examined the margin by which majorities prevail—whether decisions occur as 5-4 or 6-3 splits. First, as the proportion of votes in the majority, which range from 50% to 100%, has crept upward over time, consensus has slightly increased. This change is small yet statistically significant. The figure below shows the mean values for majority vote by year as well as the mean of (logit) fitted values.

Second, we assessed whether the share of cases decided by a 5-4 or 6-3 split has changed from before to after Trump’s nominations. This is tricky though, as a 5-4 or 6-3 split does not necessarily mean that the conservative Justices strongarmed their way, as splits can be with a liberal decision too. For example, in June 2012, SCOTUS ruled in a 5-4 split that the individual mandate under Obamacare was constitutional, where Chief Justice Roberts argued the mandate was essentially a tax, a power granted to Congress. Similarly, in Moyle v. United States (2024), three conservative justices — Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — joined with the liberal justices in a 6-3 decision upholding a lower court injunction preventing Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban in emergencies. But also recall that the 6-3 split in favor of President Trump in the criminal case of Trump v United States is coded as a liberal decision.

As Table 3 shows, about a quarter of cases during this period resulted in 5-4 or 6-3 splits, and such split decisions increased from 23.4% to 29.8%. But when we disaggregate the split cases by liberal or conservative decisions, there is a 12.5% statistically significant increase in split cases when the decision is conservative but not when it is liberal (we also tested this in a probability model for split decisions while controlling individual justice fixed effects with very similar results).

Final thoughts. One important caveat is that the data does not reveal which cases SCOTUS chooses to hear. Nonetheless, the impact of the three Trump nominations on the cases heard has been negligible regarding overall conservative rulings. This is not to say that the new Justices are not conservative or not likely to vote conservatively; rather, it indicates that the Court's overall posture has not radically shifted compared to recent periods. We may take some comfort in that, though we must remain vigilant.

Democracy and justice cannot be taken for granted. Ultimately, while conservative decisions today are more likely to be split along ideological lines, it remains an open question whether this is due to conservative justices imposing their views, liberal justices being more stubborn, or due to the nature of the cases heard by the Supreme Court.

Sometimes a little procrastination can be a good thing. A recent case in point was this year’s California Democratic Party’s convention decision to postpone consideration of a resolution calling for a mandatory retirement age for state and local officials. By not acting on the measure the party has, at least for the moment, spared itself a diversion from the real question of just what message it wants to convey – regardless of the age of the messenger.

The resolution was offered by Eric Kingsbury, a member of a heavily tech-funded slate that succeeded in moving the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee dramatically to the right in the last election. Kingsbury was quick to state that this was “decidedly not about Nancy Pelosi. If every elected leader in this country were like Nancy Pelosi [the 85-year old San Francisco Representative who is a fellow Committee member] we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” And yet SF Democratic Committee Chair Nancy Tung suggested a specific age cap of 70: “That’s the general thought. Though we are thinking that an exploration by the state party is the way to go. But 70 is an age that other jurisdictions have adopted for judges and the like.”

This all, of course, is a predictable reaction to Joe Biden’s inept debate performance widely believed to have cost the Democrats the White House. It is also something of what we might call a “best seller-list solution,” in this case a follow-up to the success of “Original Sin,” the account of the Biden decline in his White House years that immediately hit the top of the New York Times non-fiction list. This book comes close on the heels of “Abundance,” the best-seller pro-growth manifesto also touted by centrist members as the cure for what ails the Democrats. .

Perhaps the quickest refutation of the age-limit solution is Senator Bernie Sanders, currently traveling about the country conducting (often in the company of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) the largest anti-Trump Administration rallies to be found anywhere, while also sponsoring the (unfortunately unsuccessful) U.S. Senate resolutions to block weapons shipments for Israel’s use in further devastating Gaza. Sanders is 83, a year older than Joe Biden. Would we really want to silence the principal challenger to the Trump agenda in the currently trendy cause of fighting gerontocracy? Well, actually the people behind the convention resolution just might.

What is the new leadership of the San Francisco Democratic Party all about? As they say, just follow the money. In winning control of the Central Committee, the SF Democrats for Change slate raised over $2.2 million, more than tripling the amount raised in support of the Labor and Working Families slate of incumbent members and allies.

The source of that overwhelming financial edge was predominantly high tech capital. Backers included billionaire Chris Larsen of Ripple cryptocurrency, once estimated to be the fifth richest person in the world, now down to #407; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; and Zack Rosen, CEO of the venture-backed software company Pantheon. But the group’s most prominent and infamous supporter is self described “centimillionaire” Garry Tan, CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator (I’ll leave you to do your own research on the exact meaning of that), and also an early employee of Palantir Technologies, the data analysis and technology firm that has received over $113 million in federal funding from the Trump administration for the implementation of the executive order for federal government cross-agency data sharing.

Tan, who is estimated to have spent something like $400,000 on SF politics in the past few years, achieved his moment of maximum fame with a wee hours X post directed at a majority of the then members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors: “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.” When someone responded suggesting that he was drunk when he posted what was apparently a reference to a Tupac Shakur song, Tan responded, “You are right and motherfuck our enemies.” (The posts were subsequently deleted.) Tan describes himself as a “moderate.”

While all of the big bucks backers of SF Democrats for Change may not be as crude as Tan, one trait we can be certain that they do share is disinterest in any campaign to radically shift the status quo in America. Do they share their proteges’ interest in a political age cap? Who knows, but it’s nothing that’s going to make them start asking for their money back. Whereas, if they were to hear that the recipients of their campaign funding were calling for an end to the corporate domination of politics, we can be pretty sure they’d let us know what they thought about that.

That the party needs to find a way to recapture the hearts and minds of the working class has become a truism in Democratic circles. And that doing so will require advocating clawing back some of the wealth and power that the nation’s corporate elite have amassed in recent years is obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through. But you ain’t going to keep the support of the people whose cash put SF Democrats for Change in power by talking that kind of talk.

This is a scenario we can expect to see repeated in every state over the next couple of years. Age limits! Deregulation! Strong defense! Cut bureaucracy! Patriotism! Less political correctness! It’ll all be rolled out as party “moderates” try to achieve the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire and centimillionaire financiers. Beware!

During an NBC interview on November 6, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was cleaning up his lifelong anti-vaccination act as he lobbied to become Health and Human Services secretary in the Trump administration.

“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” he said. “People ought to have choice…”

Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for all of us.

What Happened

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) report to Kennedy. As with flu shots, the agencies have approved and recommended Covid-19 vaccines as they have been adjusted annually to deal with the evolving virus.

On May 20, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced a new obstacle to FDA approval of any Covid-19 vaccine. For healthy Americans under 65, it must be subjected to large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That data will replace the prior requirement of evidence showing only an immune response, which was the basis for approving the initial “Project Warp Speed” vaccines and all subsequent boosters.

Makary and Prasad asserted that they’re merely requiring “gold-standard data on persons at low risk.” But by not requiring such randomized, placebo-controlled trials for the elderly and other high-risk groups, they’re conceding that the vaccine prevents infection.

Even trying to follow the new requirement poses problems. It’s unethical to perform a clinical study that would give some people a worthless placebo instead of a vaccine, according to Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the University of Pennsylvania:

[W]e have a vaccine that works, given that we know that SARS-CoV2 continues to circulate and cause hospitalizations and death, and there’s no group that has no risk.What Should Have Happened

Every year, the Advisory Committee on Immunizaton Practices to the CDC—a nonpartisan group of medical and scientific experts—considers the latest studies, data, and possible side effects of both old and new vaccines. It develops recommendations that the CDC’s director can accept, modify, or reject.

The transparent process culminates in a schedule that pediatricians throughout the country use to decide the safest and most effective ages at which to vaccinate children. Insurance companies use the CDC schedule to determine the vaccines they will cover.

Kennedy didn’t wait for the Advisory Committee. Three days after the FDA’s announcement of its new approval requirement, Kennedy posted a video on X, with Commissioner Makary at his side:

I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today the Covid-19 vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule.

The blowback from the medical community was immediate. Every week in the United States, Covid-19 still kills 300 people and hundreds more are hospitalized. It’s the fourth leading cause of death overall and in the top 10 among children. And a new strain surging in Asia has now arrived here.

On May 30, the CDC walked back Kennedy’s proclamation with an update: For children between six months and 17 years old, the CDC now recommends “shared decision-making” between the physician and the patient or patient and guardian in determining whether to get the vaccine.

Healthy adults are still off the CDC’s list. And for pregnant women—all of whom are at greater risk of Covid-19 complications—the CDC’s positions are internally contradictory. Its new schedule no longer recommends that they get vaccinated. But the CDC continues to recommend the vaccine to anyone with “underlying conditions”—one of which is pregnancy. Meanwhile newborns who depend on their vaccinated mothers for immunity have the same likelihood of hospitalization and death from Covid-19 as someone who is 70 years old.

What Happens When Republicans Fear Trump More Than Endangering Public Health

Exhaustive studies have demonstrated that the vaccine is effective across all age groups. According to data published by the National Institutes of Health—another agency that Kennedy supervises—it has prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved millions of lives.

During Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked Kennedy to acknowledge that the Covid-19 vaccine had saved millions of people.

“I don’t think anybody can say that,” Kennedy replied.

Now, as with many Trump policies, the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine will hit hardest those adults who can least afford it. But when they don’t get vaccinated, the public at large will bear the consequences.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, expressed concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. But he overcame those reservations, perhaps because Republican primary challengers on the right were already telling Louisiana voters in the upcoming election that Cassidy was insufficiently loyal to Trump. After voting to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection, the Louisiana Republican Party’s executive committee censured him.

Cassidy said that he voted to confirm Kennedy only after “intense conversations” that included Kennedy’s promise to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes.”

Until Kennedy broke that promise, the decision to get a Covid-19 vaccine was an individual choice. To promote public health, the vaccine’s presence on the CDC’s guidance schedule assured that it would be free to those who wanted it.

Now, as with many Trump policies, the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine will hit hardest those adults who can least afford it. But when they don’t get vaccinated, the public at large will bear the consequences: More Americans will be hospitalized with Covid-19 and more will die.

Blame Kennedy, of course, but he is who he always has been. Trump and Senate Republicans—especially Sen. Cassidy—knew it when they gave him the job that is killing us.

Throughout its long history of ethnic cleansing and occupation, Israel has remained consistent in its tactics: lie, deny, and distort the truth—often with the backing, or at least the indulgence, of Western powers. Lying has become an Israeli art form, refined over decades, practiced with impunity, and amplified by a complicit global media that not only tolerates but actively legitimizes these falsehoods.

The latest massacre at the food distribution in Gaza offers yet another stark and sickening reminder of this pattern. At dawn on Sunday, June 1st, more than 30 Palestinians were murdered while waiting for food aid in Rafah. As usual, Israel swiftly denied responsibility, claiming its army was unaware of any shooting near the American-led distribution center. But eyewitnesses, survivors, humanitarian organizations, and hospitals told a contradictory story.

Israel is not only getting away with war crimes—it’s getting away with lying about them.

Israel’s denial was immediately echoed—and defended by American officials. The U.S. ambassador—better described as Israel’s emissary within the State Department—dismissed reports of the massacre as “fake news.” This grotesque inversion of truth is a familiar maneuver, reminiscent of the Flour Massacre on February 29, 2024, when Israeli forces opened fire on civilians collecting flour, killing 112 and injuring over 760.

Again, Israel denied responsibility, claiming the deaths resulted from “stampedes” and civilians being run over by aid trucks. Yet even after the United Nations and media outlets like Al Jazeera challenged the Israeli disinformation and presented video footage clearly showing Israeli forces firing on unarmed civilians, no accountability followed.

In Gaza, it is not just food aid sites have become death traps. Ambulances are targets. First responders, doctors, and even their children have become “legitimate” military objectives.

Last week, Israel targeted the home of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, killing nine of her ten children—Yahya (12), Eve (9), Rival (5), Sadeen (3), Rakan (10), Ruslan (7), Jibran (8), Luqman (2), and Sedar, not yet one year old. Her husband, Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, succumbed to his injuries days later. Their tenth child, 11-year-old Adma, sustained a critical head injury and is unlikely to survive due to Gaza’s medical blockade.

Israel’s standard, callous response followed, explaining that its aircraft had struck “a number of suspects” in Khan Younis.

In March, the Israeli army murdered eight medics, six civil defense workers, and a United Nations employee—then buried them in the sand. The military later blamed the “suspicious behavior” of an ambulance for the attack. When confronted with video evidence disproving the claim, the army reverted to its usual script: “a mistake,” “a wrong decision,” “disciplinary action taken.” Fifteen lives erased with a bureaucratic shrug.

When Israel murdered seven humanitarian workers from the World Central Kitchen in April 2024, the Biden administration initially expressed outrage. Twenty-four hours later, that outrage was mollified by Israeli firsters in Washington. White House spokesperson John Kirby reversed course, claiming there was no evidence of deliberate targeting—absolving Israel in the same breath that had condemned it. A mass killing became a footnote.

This is nothing new.

In October 2023, nearly 500 civilians were killed in a blast at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. Israel immediately blamed a misfired Palestinian rocket. Just hours after landing in Tel Aviv, President Joe Biden publicly parroted the Israeli narrative—despite overwhelming eyewitness accounts, growing evidence, and skepticism from independent observers.

And then there is the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist gunned down in 2022. Israel initially claimed she was killed by Palestinian crossfire and released a video that was quickly discredited. Yet Western media gave more airtime to Israeli claims than to eyewitness testimony. Months later, under the weight of irrefutable evidence, Israel admitted responsibility—calling it, once again, a “mistake.”

The soldier who murdered a “lesser” U.S. citizen, like other killers of journalists, never faced justice. In fact he was promoted to Captain and went on killing with impunity—until reports emerged of his death during a battle in Jenin.

Just like the murdered children of Gaza, truth itself has become another collateral damage in Israel's war of disinformation. And those tasked with defending it—the media and democratic institutions—have too often served instead as marketers and conveyors of Israeli lies and propaganda.

The people of Gaza are not only being starved, bombed, and murdered. They are being erased from global consciousness by a wall of deception. And until the world begins to value Palestinian lives as much as it values Israeli (proven false) narratives, the Israeli theater of blood and deceit will continue.

Israel is not only getting away with war crimes—it’s getting away with lying about them. The impunity is not only military; it is moral, political, and informational. Israel has long mastered the art of the lie, dating back to the creation of political Zionism. The West, and its managed media, has normalized these falsehoods—just as it has normalized the starvation and siege of Gaza.

Israel lies with impunity because the world—especially the United States and much of the West—not only permits it, but promotes it. Western governments and media have built an echo chamber where Israeli narratives always take precedence—not due to credibility, but to avoid the reckoning that truth would demand. In choosing falsehood over fact, they evade moral accountability and sidestep the need to reconcile their professed values with the genocide they enable.

This is no longer just about Israeli lies. It’s about a global system complicit in sustaining Israel’s habitual lies and systematic deceit to cover up a starvation and a livestreamed genocide.

Metaphors kill. Not with bullets or bombs, but with confusion. They blur what demands clarity. They sentimentalize what should horrify. They distract.

Susan Sontag wrote that the most honest way to understand illness is to strip it of metaphor. To stop saying cancer is an invasion, or tuberculosis is romantic, or AIDS is punishment. Disease is not a morality play. It is a condition of the body. What burdens the sick is not just the illness itself, but the stories society tells about it.

So too with nations. So too with Palestine.

Palestine is not just a land or a people. It has been made into a metaphor. For resistance. For loss. For stubbornness. For martyrdom. For chaos. For terrorism. For hope. For grief. It is everything except what it is: a place where people live, suffer, starve, and die.

Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced.

Turning Palestine into a symbol allows the powerful to avoid the facts. You don’t need to look at checkpoints if you’re talking about “conflict.” You don’t have to name apartheid if you’re debating “disputed territories.” You don’t have to say stolen if you say contested. You don’t have to say killed if you say clash. Metaphor is how power talks about violence without taking responsibility for it.

Palestine becomes intolerable not because of what Palestinians do, but because of what they represent: an open wound that refuses to close, a people who will not disappear. This is why their story must be constantly reframed, misnamed, wrapped in euphemism and myth. Their existence disrupts the fantasy that liberal democracies are just, that settler states are stable, that history is over. And so, the metaphor persists. It buries reality. It protects the liar.

We must refuse to speak in code, refuse to let metaphor do the work of silence. Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.

Palestine resists. That much is true. But once you say it like that—without detail, without names, without time or place—it becomes a slogan. And slogans consume clarity. The world loves the idea of resistance more than the reality. It loves the photo of the boy with the slingshot. It loves the keffiyeh, the flag, the tear gas. It loves the spectacle of defiance. What it does not love is the cost.

It does not love a broken spine from a checkpoint beating. It does not love a family digging their daughter from rubble. It does not love the dull terror of drones. That kind of resistance is not romantic. It’s not metaphor. It’s not poster-ready.

Palestine is trapped in a paradox. Its resistance is admired as long as it stays symbolic—noble suffering, poetic dignity, children throwing rocks at tanks. But when resistance becomes material—when it demands rights, when it takes up arms, when it names its oppressor—it is immediately recast. Now it is extremism. Now it is terrorism. Now the metaphor turns toxic. This is the trap of metaphor: It flatters, and it criminalizes, depending on what power needs.

The powerful don’t fear Palestine because of its military strength. They fear the idea of it. The persistence of it. The fact that something so small, so wounded, so systematically crushed still refuses to submit. Palestine is proof that domination is never total. That’s what makes it dangerous.

And so, the metaphor must be managed. Contained. You can wear the keffiyeh but not name the Occupation. You can say “Free Palestine” on Instagram but not mention Gaza. You can quote Darwish but not talk about bulldozed olive groves. You can mourn the dead but not accuse the killers. In this way, metaphor becomes a leash. It lets you gesture toward justice without ever touching it.

But Palestine doesn’t need symbols. It needs liberation. Not metaphors, no myths needed, only land, water, safety, and return from exile. These are not poetic demands. They are concrete, measurable, and deliberately denied. To really see Palestinian resistance, you must stop calling it resistance. Call it what it is: survival under siege. Organizing under surveillance. Memory under erasure. It’s not metaphor. It’s real life.

Once you frame a people as pathology, you don’t need to justify what you do to them. You only need to call it medicine. And when treatment fails to sterilize the threat, the language escalates. Now the body must be purged. Now the neighborhood is a target. The entire population becomes suspect.

They say Hamas “hides among the population.” But what does that mean in a fenced in strip of land 40 kilometers long, where there is no army base, no safe zone, no separation between life and resistance? The phrase is not a statement of fact—it is a metaphor. And like most metaphors in war, it serves a purpose: to erase the line between fighter and civilian, to turn every man, woman, and child into a potential target. If you can’t see your enemy, then everyone becomes your enemy. The home is now a military site. The hospital, a command center. The school, a shield. “Among the population” doesn’t describe a tactic, it justifies indiscriminate killing. It is how the language of war collapses into the logic of extermination.

But what if the patient isn’t sick? What if the disease is the system choking him? What if the diagnosis is projection? There is no vaccine for settler colonialism. No cure for apartheid—except dismantling it. But if Palestine is spoken of like a disease, its survival will always be framed as a threat.

Power never calls itself by name. It prefers neutral terms. Clinical. Procedural. Empty terms. Palestinians aren’t starved—they face a humanitarian crisis. Their homes aren’t stolen—they’re part of a property dispute. They’re not imprisoned—they’re under security lockdown. Their lives aren’t ended—they’re neutralized. This is not just bad language. It’s policy disguised as grammar.

Words like conflict, clash, cycle of violence—these are metaphors of balance. They suggest symmetry, as if this is a fair fight, as if both sides are equally armed, equally culpable, equally free. But this is not a clash. It is not a cycle. It is a colonizer and the colonized. An occupier and the occupied. The difference is moral. The difference is material. The metaphor erases both.

The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored.

Sontag wrote that when people described cancer as an “invasion,” they were borrowing the language of war to make sense of something terrifying. But when the war is real, and the invasion is actual, language flips. War becomes operation. Invasion becomes security measure. You speak of it like infrastructure. This is how you sanitize occupation.

The wall isn’t a scar across the land—it’s a barrier fence. Settlements aren’t illegal—they’re new neighborhoods. Checkpoints aren’t instruments of control—they’re points of coordination. And Gaza isn’t under siege—it’s self-governed, as if a prison becomes free the moment the guards move outside its walls. Metaphor in this context does not reveal. It anesthetizes.

It allows liberal democracies to wash their hands with language. You don’t need to condemn apartheid if you can call it a complex situation. You don’t have to intervene in ethnic cleansing if you can label it a tragic escalation. You don’t have to listen to the grieving if you describe their pain as incitement. This is not metaphor as poetry. It is metaphor as smokescreen.

The media uses it. Diplomats use it. NGOs use it. Even well-meaning activists get trapped in it, calling for dialogue, for both sides to come together, for peaceful resolution, without ever naming the violence that blocks peace at every turn. But clarity is not extremism and precision is not incitement. To describe things as they are is not radical—it is necessary. There is no symmetry between the boot and the neck. And any language that suggests otherwise is complicity with the boot.

Palestine is not a wound in the Western psyche. It is a mirror of that psyche. And what it reflects is unbearable. The reason the world can’t look at Palestine directly is not because it is too foreign, but because it is too familiar. It shows the West everything it claims to have outgrown: apartheid, racial hierarchy, empire, extermination. Not in the past tense, but right now. Daily. Live-streamed.

Palestine is where the myth of Western moral authority collapses on itself. It’s easy to denounce the crimes of the past: slavery, fascism, genocide, so long as they stay in museums or textbooks. But Palestine breaks the frame. It puts the vocabulary of historical evil in the present tense. It makes Holocaust-committed Europe complicit in a same kind of ethnic cleansing. It makes the U.S., champion of “rules-based order,” the primary funder of impunity. It makes liberalism look like a mask, not a principle.

This is what makes Palestine dangerous—not its resistance, but its clarity.

Palestine exposes the real function of international law: who gets to break it, and who must obey. It exposes journalism’s quiet racism: who gets names and childhood photos, and who becomes “a number.” It exposes the limits of identity politics: how many doors are slammed shut when the oppressed are inconvenient. The metaphor of Palestine-as-problem allows Western institutions to avoid seeing the problem in themselves.

To look clearly at Palestine is to confront questions most people would rather leave buried. What does it mean that the state born from the ashes of the Holocaust has become a jailer? What does it mean that human rights groups whisper what Palestinians scream? What does it mean that the most surveilled, bombed, and besieged population on Earth is asked to behave peacefully, while their occupier is praised for restraint?

Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced. Because if you face it directly—without metaphor, without euphemism—you must admit that the world is not post-colonial. That we live in a global system where some lives are sacred, and others are collateral. Where entire populations can be punished for existing. Where the worst crime is not violence but remembering.

Palestine remembers.

The time for symbols is over. Palestine is not a metaphor. It is not the universal struggle. It is not the world’s conscience. It is not an allegory for Brown resistance, or the dream of return, or the poetry of loss. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not a stand-in for every injustice on Earth. It is a place, with borders and people, a colonial regime, a military occupation, a blockade and a death toll. It is a place where a child drinks from a bomb-cracked pipe. Where a mother sleeps in a school because her house is dust. Where a man counts the names of his dead before checking if his leg is still attached.

To speak of Palestine clearly, we must break the habit of metaphor. We must stop treating it as a narrative arc, a tragedy to be admired from a safe distance. It is not art. It is not history. It is the present, and it is now, as we ourselves live and breathe. We must reject the language of soft avoidance: Say occupation, not “conflict.” Say apartheid, not “dispute.” Say siege, not “border closure.” Say massacre, not “escalation.” Say starvation not “hunger.” Say Palestinian, not “Hamas.”

The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored. This is not metaphor. This is what justice looks like; anything less is a performance.

Sontag understood that metaphor, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. It doesn’t soften violence—it smuggles it in. It doesn’t reveal truth—it repackages it in palatable form. She wrote against metaphor to rescue the ill from stigma. We must resist metaphor to stop the disappearance of Palestine.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

It’s a wild episode of “The TMI Show with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan,” as we break down the explosive verbal meltdown between Elon Musk and Donald Trump! Everyone knew this bromance had to end—but the breakup is even uglier than anyone would have guessed, and it’s impacting tech, finance and the national budget. Musk, the tech titan behind X and Tesla, escalated their feud by claiming Trump would have lost the 2024 election without him, calling him ungrateful and implying the president was implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia. And he’s still slamming Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” as a “disgusting abomination”—giving cover to Republican Senators who are having second thoughts.

Trump claims he fired Musk from his role at DOGE—unlikely considering all the praise a week ago—saying Musk was “wearing thin” and “went crazy” after Trump removed an EV mandate, accusing him of being upset over lost subsidies and H1B visas. He threatened to terminate billions in Musk’s government contracts and subsidies, calling it the “easiest way” to save money, and suggested Musk had “Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The feud’s roots go back to Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy clashing against populist MAGA GOPers over immigration. This schism has it all—betrayal, power plays, and a fractured GOP coalition teetering on the edge.

TMI unpacks how this brawl could reshape alliances, policies, and the political landscape.

Plus:

Has tipping culture gone too far? From 30% tips to iPad prompts at every counter, Americans are fed up with “tip creep.” “The TMI Show” tackles why tipping’s spiraling out of control, who’s profiting, and what it means for workers and consumers. Tune in for a serious look at a system pushing wallets—and patience—to the limit.

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It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.

This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.

Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”

But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it.

When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

Let’s not forget:

— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.

— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour.”

— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.

— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily churn.

— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them.

— When Trump praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded fast.

— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it any more.

— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”

This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence... and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it).

“To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” Mayer wrote, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without engaging in politics.

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. …
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

Sound familiar?

Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead, it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicles in The New York Times:

“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.
“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”

When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

But there is a path forward.

The antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”

We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say “that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say “That’s fascist rhetoric.”

When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize.

When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of vengeance, we don’t wait and see; we fight back now.

If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

When armed federal agents hide their identification and their faces the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off our streets, we call them out.

History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.

This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.

If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

Don’t get used to fascism.

Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.

Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.

That was a lie, and it was a deadly one.

Like so much of what came out of Reagan’s mouth, this clever quip provided a folksy façade for a brutal attack on the most vulnerable Americans. Before Reagan’s election in 1980, homeless shelters and evictions were rare. Then Reagan and a compliant Congress laid waste to our nation’s safety net, including cutting investment in affordable housing by nearly 80%.

As many of our clinic clients can attest, well-trained, dedicated experts who answer to the people instead of some wealthy donors are the gold standard for housing inspection and code enforcement.

The U.S. commitment to affordable housing has never fully recovered. Urban policy scholar Peter Dreier lays the blame where it belongs: “Every park bench in America—everywhere a homeless person sleeps—should have Ronald Reagan’s name on it.”

This vicious Reagan legacy is important to remember as President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans trot out the same anti-government talking points to support a legislative agenda that would gut healthcare and food programs.

The government-harms shtick is just as false today as in Reagan’s time. Study after study shows that government assistance with food, healthcare, and housing makes tangible, positive impacts on people’s lives, from newborns to the elderly. And government programs deliver these essential services more efficiently and inexpensively than private charity programs, not to mention at a scale that even the most ambitious billionaire philanthropy can only dream of.

Our law school clinic’s work representing people facing eviction and living in unsafe and unhealthy rental housing provides us with a very specific example of government working well.

In our community as in many others, a local government agency is tasked with ensuring the safety of housing, including rental housing. Here, the agency is called the Marion County Public Health Department. (Indianapolis is located within Marion County.)

From the Government, and Here to Help

Our clients can simply call the agency’s phone number for housing inspections and describe the situation in their rented home, a situation that far too often includes mold, infestation with bugs or rodents, no heat during the winter, gas leaks, and more. A trained inspector will then come out to the home within days and issue a formal report and notice to the landlord soon after. This article includes a sample of those reports. As you can see, it includes the threat of substantial fines.

The inspectors’ reports often spur landlords to fix the problems. When they don’t, the agency can and does file a lawsuit against the landlord. Tenants can also file a claim of their own asking for rent offset or other damages due to the unsafe, unhealthy conditions.

Low-income tenants face a power imbalance: Landlords are far more wealthy than tenants, have access to attorneys that tenants rarely do, and of course control continued access to the very roof over tenants’ heads. But when this government agency intervenes, it flips the script, putting pressure on landlords to bring the housing up to code.

The agency is not perfect, of course. Our clinic and other advocates have joined with City County councilors to advocate for the agency to reverse their policy of dropping inspections and enforcement after tenants move out. But one of the defining characteristics of government programs is a benefit that no nonprofit agency can ever match: They are accountable to the community. Ultimately, that accountability is exercised at the ballot box for the agency leaders or those who appoint them.

So the advocacy here has borne fruit and the agency now continues to do its important scrutiny even after tenants move out.

The current revival of anti-government sentiment has impacted this local public health agency, with the Republican-controlled state legislature cutting its funding by more than 70%. More of the playbook from the president who asked in 1982, “Wouldn’t it be better for the human spirit and for the soul of this nation to encourage people to accept more responsibility to care for one another, rather than leaving those tasks to paid bureaucrats?”

Nope. As many of our clinic clients can attest, well-trained, dedicated experts who answer to the people instead of some wealthy donors are the gold standard for housing inspection and code enforcement. Those inspectors are from the government, and they are here to help.

Artificial Intelligence—especially Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an AI system capable of understanding, learning, and making decisions with human-like awareness and autonomy—poses an existential threat to humanity, not only in terms of replacing humans on the job but in a possible SkyNet-like scenario in which robots choose their own targets and decide to start killing us. That’s not sci-fi paranoia. A Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer warned of a 10-20% chance of human extinction from AI within decades. Tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Wozniak, have sounded the alarm, estimating a 20% chance of AI-driven “annihilation” and asked Congress to regulate the industry. If the history of disruptive innovations like cigarettes, automatic weapons, automobiles, nuclear weapons, and drones serves as any guide, however, we probably won’t act until it’s too late.

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June 4, 2025 Alan M. Garber President Office of the President
Harvard University Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 Re: Final Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias Dear President Garber: We are appalled at the procedural and substantive deficiencies that discredit the above-referenced Final Report’s finding of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias…

After 20 months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5th?

On May 30th, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.

“We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”

If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for," so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”

Fletcher called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”

Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?

This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?

If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.

Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19th, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate,” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.

The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17th-20th, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Emmanuel Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.

A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.

The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones, and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.

Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.

Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17th at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.

Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid, and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and the nation's largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them from sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.

These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms, and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.

In turn, all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,

“These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”

Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.

But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs, and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.

Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.

Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.

Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.

The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans—between 6% and 16% in each country—find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.

For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.

Democrats constantly accuse Donald Trump of constantly lying. Journalistic factcheckers, who work for Democratic-aligned media companies, back their claims with statistics. But it’s the Democratic Party that’s facing historically low approval ratings. In poll after poll about one issue after another, voters say they trust Republicans more.

A major contributing factor to the diminishment of the public’s trust in the Democratic Party is the stream of revelations that Joe Biden spent much if not all of his presidency mentally incapacitated. 72% of voters told the May 21st Rasmussen poll that “it’s a serious scandal that White House staffers were aware of Biden’s declining mental condition but worked to conceal his condition from the public and members of Congress, including 48% who consider the scandal very serious.” Another Rasmussen survey, conducted May 27th, indicates that Americans think Democrats have also been covering up the truth about the former president’s physical health: “63%…believe it’s likely that Biden has been suffering from prostate cancer since at least 2021, including 43% who consider it very likely.”

We’re waiting for more data about the Biden effect. But you don’t have to be a political genius to suss out that the public doesn’t like being lied to, really doesn’t like being lied to day after day for years, and really really really doesn’t like knowing they’re being lied to. Having your intelligence insulted is more infuriating than being deceived.

When asked about their cover-up of Biden, Democratic pols answer that they’re “looking forward.” Which is exactly the opposite of what crisis management experts—and this is definitely a crisis for Democrats—recommend.

True, refusing to comment is sometimes an organization’s least-bad move. When facts are unclear, it’s smarter to announce an investigation (a “holding statement”) rather than to say something that further erodes trust when that statement later proves incorrect. That’s not the case here, though. To those who paid attention, Biden’s dementia was evident when he ran in 2020.

Candidly admitting fault can increase legal exposure—anything you say will be used against you. Though congressional Republicans are threatening to investigate what Dems knew about Biden’s brain and when, the real risk to Biden’s enablers is political embarrassment, not prison time.

In most crises, it’s best to come clean. Stonewalling makes things worse. Studies of crisis communication strategies, such as those based on Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) by Timothy Coombs, show that refusing to talk about an issue or blowing it off as no big deal—as Democrats are doing now—increases the public’s perception that you’re guilty or irresponsible.

Democrats beware! Your silence is creating a vacuum that will allow your GOP enemies to shape a narrative you otherwise might have helped to shape in your favor. That’s what happened to BP after it deflected and downplayed the severity of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; environmentalists framed the company as an eco-criminal. United Airlines’ decision to delay its apology to the Asian passenger who was dragged off an overbooked flight made the company look racist as well as cruel. Toyota’s corporate culture of silence cost it dearly after the carmaker pretended that a series of brake problems were figments of their customers’ imaginations.

Better to come clean sooner rather than later. For Democrats, now—with the midterm elections well over a year away—is the least worst time.

The gold standard for crisis management is still the 1982 Tylenol poisoning crisis when a still-unidentified maniac killed seven people in Chicago. It must have been tempting for Johnson & Johnson to deny that it was the company’s fault. After all, it wasn’t. Instead, the company introduced tamper-proof packaging and recalled every single bottle at a cost of $100 million. Transparency and action worked. Within a year, Tylenol had recovered 90% of previous sales.

In the case of the Democratic Party and their media allies, on the other hand, the Biden cover-up is their fault. The smart move would be to emulate what the KFC UK did in 2018, when it foolishly switched to a delivery partner that couldn’t supply enough chickens to hundreds of the company’s restaurants. The company posted updates to social media and ran a funny “FCK” apology ad in newspapers that won PR awards. Share prices and sales bounced back within weeks. Like the Democrats, Southwest Airlines was caught dead to rights, its sin being cheaping out on overdue upgrades to IT infrastructure. When the antiquated system crashed, thousands of flights were canceled. CEO Bob Jordan apologized and promised to invest in upgrades right away. Customers forgave.

If Democrats want to recover their credibility any time soon, they must apologize. Party leaders—Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris—should hold an hours-long press conference where they repeat a message along these lines: “We lied to you about Joe Biden. We knew he wasn’t up to the job of president, but we covered that up. We were so desperate to beat Donald Trump, so panicked that he would turn us into a fascist country, that we lost sight of what makes American democracy great—the right of a free people to choose its leaders. That choice is only legitimate when the voters know everything they need to know. Democrats don’t win by out Republican-ing the Republicans, and we don’t win by out-lying them. We screwed up. We’ve learned from our mistake. It won’t happen again.”

Throw some people under the bus to demonstrate your party’s willingness to police itself. Pelosi is 85 and semi-retired; she could step down. Harris doesn’t seem to have much of a political future anyway, not least because she had to have known all about what was going on with Biden and abdicated her 25th Amendment duty to move for his removal. Consider pushing out some of the oldest members of Congress, like Steny Hoyer (85) and Jim Clyburn (84), and definitely get rid of those whose mental acuity is seriously in question, like John Fetterman, to avoid repeats of the awkward spectacle that marked Dianne Feinstein’s final years in the Senate.

Most importantly, take action. Don’t merely cooperate with a Republican investigation, lead one of your own. Establishing the precedent that a president who suffers from dementia should be kicked out could be useful in the near future, considering Trump’s own advancing years (78). Make the party more transparent by, for example, livestreaming all meetings of the Democratic National Committee. Make it more democratic by getting rid of superdelegates in national elections and supporting insurgent outsider candidates if and when they win primaries.

If Democrats want to look forward, they first must clean up the mess they made in the past.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s WHAT’S LEFT.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)

The post Democrats Must Apologize for Biden Cover-Up appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan cover President Trump’s bold new proclamation banning travelers and immigrants from a dozen countries while restricting entry from seven others. Citing national security, terrorism risks, inadequate vetting, and deportation issues, Trump’s decree fully bars entry from nations like Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, and Yemen, impacting both permanent immigrants and temporary visa holders like tourists. Partial suspensions hit countries like Cuba and Venezuela, with exemptions for U.S. residents, diplomats, and certain visa holders. The ban follows a recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, by an Egyptian national who overstayed his visa, fueling heated debates over security versus discrimination. Critics say Trump’s move is reactionary and xenophobic, arguing that it unfairly serves as group punishment, while Republicans claim it’s a necessary step to protect the nation. Ted and Manila unpack the facts, controversies, and global implications of this sweeping policy shift.

Plus:

• President Trump orders an investigation into whether Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was hidden by aides using an autopen to sign executive actions.
• Trump questions the legitimacy of Biden’s pardons, including commuting 37 federal death row sentences.
• A new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson exposes efforts to downplay Biden’s mental acuity during his presidency.

The post TMI Show Ep 153: “Trump’s Anti-Muslim Travel Ban” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

I grew up under Enver Hoxha’s totalitarian regime in Albania, where paranoia reigned supreme, propaganda was relentless, dissent was crushed, and concrete bunkers dotted the landscape. Now, as I witness the United States marching toward authoritarianism, I am struck by the haunting echoes of my past. The effort to reshape society through fear, intimidation, and division; the attack on independent institutions; the surveillance state; and the apocalyptic fever remind me so of the dynamics that once suffocated Albania. Beneath it all simmers a pervasive social malaise and a sense of moral decay.

Today’s crisis is not accidental. It’s a long time in the making and the result of powerful interests—Silicon Valley billionaires, MAGA ideologues, Christian nationalists, and Project 2025 architects—who have set aside their differences and coalesced to accelerate collapse, fuel division, and destroy democracy.

AI Regulatory Moratorium

A chief goal of this agenda is the race to build and deregulate artificial intelligence (AI). Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, we’ve been subjected to the largest tech experiment in history. AI evangelists promise miracles—curing intractable diseases, solving climate crisis, even eternal life—while ignoring its insatiable appetite for water and energy, much of it still sourced from fossil fuels. Revealingly, some billionaires who once called for AI regulation now fund efforts to ban states from regulating AI for the next decade.

Tucked in over 1,000 pages of the recent Republican reconciliation bill is a sweeping moratorium which would ban states and municipalities from regulating AI for 10 years. The same bill slashes hundreds of billions from Medicaid, Medicare, and food aid—an unprecedented transfer of wealth upward that will gravely harm both the most vulnerable and the working class—while pouring over a billion dollars into AI development at the Departments of Defense and Commerce.

The real risk is not that the U.S. will lose to China by regulating AI, but that it will lose the trust of its own people and the world by failing to do so.

The impact would be immediate and profound. It would preempt existing state AI laws in California, Colorado, New York, Illinois, and Utah, and block pending state bills aimed at ensuring transparency, preventing discrimination, and protecting individuals and communities from harm. The broad definition of “automated decision systems” would undermine oversight in healthcare, finance, education, consumer protection, housing, employment, civil rights, and even election integrity. In effect, it would rewrite the social contract, stripping states of the power to protect their residents.

The “End Times Fascism” Forces and the “Network State”

Make no mistake—this isn’t an isolated effort. It’s what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call “the rise of end times fascism”—an apocalyptic project of convergent factions to accelerate societal collapse and redraw sovereignty for profit. Particularly, the Silicon Valley contingent merits closer scrutiny. Its ultra-libertarian and neo-reactionary wing, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen has abandoned faith in democracy and invested in Pronomos Capital—a venture capital fund backing “network states” that can best be described as digital fiefdoms run by corporate monarchs. Existing enclaves include Próspera in Honduras and Itana in Nigeria where the wealthy bypass local regulation and often displace communities. Now, billionaires lobby for “Freedom Cities” within the U.S.—autonomous zones exempt from state and federal law, potentially enabling unregulated genetic experimentation and other risky activities.

Silicon Valley’s Ideologies

Animating this project is a bundle of techno-utopian ideologies permeating Silicon Valley’s zeitgeist—most prominently, longtermism and transhumanism. Longtermists believe our duty is to maximize the well-being of hypothetical future humans, even at today’s expense. These worldviews envision replacing humanity with AI or digital posthuman species as inevitable, even desirable. Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who publicly warn of AI extinction, stand to benefit by positioning their products as humanity’s salvation. As philosopher Émile P. Torres warns, these ideologies spring from the same poisoned well as eugenics and provide cover for dismantling democratic safeguards and social protections in pursuit of a pro-extinctionist future.

DOGE

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) exemplifies the risks. Operating as an unelected, extra legal entity, it has employed AI-driven systems to automate mass firings of federal employees, and deployed Musk’s X AI Grok chatbot to analyze sensitive government data, potentially turning millions of Americans’ personal information into training fodder for the model. Reports indicate DOGE is building a data panopticon pooling the personal information of millions of Americans to surveil immigrants and to aid the Department of Justice in investigating spurious claims of widespread voter fraud.

AI Harms and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

The perils of unregulated AI are not theoretical. Like any powerful technology, AI has enormous potential for both benefit and harm, depending on how it is developed, deployed, and regulated. Embedded within AI systems are the biases and assumptions of the training data and algorithmic choices, which—if left unchecked—can perpetuate and amplify existing social disparities at scale. AI is not merely a technical tool. Rather, it is part of a larger sociotechnical system, deeply intertwined with human institutions, infrastructure, laws, and social norms.

The states must “flip the script,” drawing on the strength of our democratic tradition and shared humanity, to build a future where people and not the “end times fascism” forces can flourish.

Documented AI harms include wrongful denial of health services; discrimination in housing, hiring, and lending; and the spread of misinformation and deepfakes, among others. Where Congress has failed to act, states have stepped in to fill the regulatory void. If they are now prevented from addressing these harms, without a federal framework to take their place, the consequences will likely be severe. Not only will known harms worsen, but new risks will emerge, including the specter of mass unemployment. Some tech CEOs, anxious on making good on their massive AI investments, boast about automating away people’s jobs and another warns of mass job losses, regardless of whether AI is up to the job.

The Purported China Threat

Supporters of the moratorium claim that state-level regulation impedes America’s ability to compete with China. But flooding the market with unregulated, potentially harmful AI risks eroding public trust and creating instability. Contrary to the perennial argument propounded by Big Tech, targeted regulation does not slow innovation. Rather, it creates the stability, predictability, and safety that allow American companies to thrive and lead globally. The real risk is not that the U.S. will lose to China by regulating AI, but that it will lose the trust of its own people and the world by failing to do so.

The Public Opinion Is for AI Regulation

The American public is not fooled. Polls show overwhelming bipartisan support for strong AI oversight. State attorneys general and civil society groups have also opposed the moratorium. In the Senate, the provision may face challenges under the Byrd Rule, which prohibits including provisions in budget reconciliation bills that are “extraneous” to fiscal policy. If enacted, the moratorium would likely be challenged as unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government. Regardless of its fate, the intent of its supporters is clear: to harness AI without guardrails, in pursuit of a monarchical dystopian agenda.

The Way Forward

Americans do not aspire to a future of despotic power and unaccountable surveillance—akin to the unfreedom I experienced in communist Albania. We know where that road leads: oppression, corruption, mass brainwashing, and eventually the breakdown of social order. But America’s story isn’t written by those who surrender to fear, fatalism, or nihilism. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Now is the time to face this challenge together. The states must “flip the script,” drawing on the strength of our democratic tradition and shared humanity, to build a future where people and not the “end times fascism” forces can flourish. Let us answer this moment not with resignation, but with courage and resolve, and ensure that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Next to the abortion pills in my medicine cabinet lies a potentially risky drug: Tylenol. Ironically, while this common pain reliever is widely accepted, safer, life-saving drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol have been under relentless attack by Republican lawmakers.

For decades, these pills, Food and Drug Administration-approved after rigorous testing and proven safe through extensive studies, have been trusted by millions of physicians and pregnant people to treat miscarriages, carry out abortions, or address various medical issues. Yet, the necessity and widespread use of abortion pills seem to elude the wisdom of lawmakers and health secretaries, and highlight a troubling disconnect between the realities faced by patients and the decisions made by lawmakers.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently directed the FDA to review regulations based on a demonstrably flawed study funded by the organization responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. This study has not undergone peer review or been published in any medical journal, highlighting its misguided methodology and analysis. For instance, it inappropriately cites bleeding and follow-up exams as adverse effects when, in reality, bleeding is an intended effect, and experts recommend follow-up exams.

The science and testimonies are clear: Abortion pills are normal, safe, and necessary.

My abortion saved my life. I am at high risk of death during pregnancy, and my sister, who shares the same medical syndromes, nearly died in childbirth. Mentally, I would have preferred to end my life rather than continue a pregnancy with my then-abusive boyfriend or pass down incurable, painful medical conditions. Emotionally, I could not handle the responsibilities of motherhood. I believe it is the most demanding and beautiful role on Earth, but it must remain a choice.

Every day that the government forces someone to remain pregnant against their will is another day the United States commits a crime against humanity, according to the United Nations. One in four people who can get pregnant will have at least one abortion in their lifetime, with nearly two-thirds of them relying on abortion pills.

I advocate for abortion patients daily and hear their harrowing stories of reproductive and medical distress. For many of them who want to save their life, preserve their liberty, or pursue happiness, abortion pills are their only option, solely due to their address and station in life. For example, consider two women who look down at a positive pregnancy test weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. One is an Oregonian; the other is a Floridian. The Oregonian can access abortion pills or have a D&C within a day or two, well past an unreasoned “heartbeat” law. Meanwhile, the Floridian may have no choice but to rely on abortion pills to protect her life, risking a future where her children could become orphans, as the majority of people who have an abortion are already parents.

If the FDA further restricts access to abortion pills, more people, especially those in marginalized communities, will die. Victims of abuse will be forced to carry pregnancies resulting from incest and rape. More people will drop out of college, and more unwanted children will be born into neglect. These are not mere possibilities; they are certainties based on the experiences of hundreds of thousands of people.

People in blue states may mistakenly believe the FDA’s decision wouldn’t impact their rights, but they would be wrong. Revoking or restricting access to abortion pills would have a ripple effect, overwhelming health centers in blue states with patients from red states. Worse yet, it could eliminate access to abortion pills entirely, effectively reducing abortion resources by 66%. Extremist Republican lawmakers are banking on rolling back our right to abortion pills as a stepping stone to enacting a nationwide abortion ban, followed by the restriction of contraception rights and the falsification or elimination of sex education. This “review” is all part of a plan to control our reproductive rights, finances, health, education, autonomy, and destiny.

Reproductive restrictions for anyone create reproductive restrictions for everyone. The science and testimonies are clear: Abortion pills are normal, safe, and necessary. More than 7 in 10 Americans support access to medication abortion, including half of Republicans.

Just as we should have been more vocal when the Trump administration withdrew from the World Health Organization and defunded cancer research, we must be vigilant about their strategy to roll back reproductive rights. I urge you to share your opinion, call your representatives, and demand that they use their leverage, platform, and influence to speak out and pressure the Department of Health and Human Services to end its misguided review of these safe and vital medications. Together, we can push back against these unjust restrictions and protect the human rights, health, and dignity of the people.

Like many others in their early 20s, I find myself bombarded with advice about investing in myself and my future. I have family members telling me how to invest my money in order to secure financial freedom in the future. I see influencers selling self-care products that are supposedly an investment in my well-being. Peers at the gym tell me to push myself harder, purchase private training sessions and protein powders to invest in my long-term fitness. All of these seem to offer the tantalizing promise of a better life.

But there is a feeling of overwhelm that comes with trying to incorporate all of these habits into my life—to find the time and means to invest in my well-being. While I do my best to prioritize my health, there is often a discouraging thought lingering in my mind: Even if I do all of these things, so much of my fate is in the hands of my elected officials and powerful leaders around the world. I can pour hours of time and thousands of dollars into my wellness. But what use is it if the broader environment and climate is not being protected?

Despite what so many of us are being sold on Instagram and TikTok these days, no amount of wellness rituals can compensate for a government that refuses to protect clean air and water for the American public.

Gen Zers like me might be making personal wellness our number one priority, but those efforts are in vain if we cannot couple investments in personal well-being with structural changes to our planet’s environment and climate. That’s why it is essential that our leaders here in New York State commit to enacting a cap and invest program. This program is essential for cutting emissions at the source and beginning to rectify decades of environmental injustice. As the name suggests, the program seeks to set a cap on emissions polluters, fine them for excessive pollution, and use the resulting funds to support climate mitigation and adaptation projects across New York State. Cap and invest prioritizes the health of all New Yorkers and is projected to secure $6-10 billion for the climate fund.

Purchasing an exclusive gym membership cannot prevent lung damage from unregulated greenhouse gas emissions. The latest eye serum will not build a barrier when the next “once in a century storm” barrels through our city. But by holding polluters accountable, cap and invest would create the resources needed to support those communities in our state who have suffered most directly from the climate crisis.

According to the Department of Environmental Conservation and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the cap and invest program would prevent almost 50 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent from being emitted by 2030. This is not only essential for helping us reach law-binding targets outlined in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, but it will also provide relief to environmental justice communities experiencing immediate impacts on their health.

In a world where we feel as though our voices aren’t heard and our environment isn’t protected, we must take our fate into our own hands. Despite what so many of us are being sold on Instagram and TikTok these days, no amount of wellness rituals can compensate for a government that refuses to protect clean air and water for the American public.

As an environmental advocate with Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, I organize letter writing events to demand that Gov. Kathy Hochul take action. Separately, I’ve also built a career in the clean energy sector. I have seen, firsthand, the influence that the New York State government has on the world. That’s why we need our representatives to demonstrate their commitment to their community’s well-being. We are holding ourselves accountable for our individual environmental impacts by taking public transit, avoiding single-use plastics, and purchasing more energy efficient tech. But those individual actions will be for naught if they are not complemented with state action to hold big polluters to account.

I hold tight to the wisdom from the generations before me. But I’ve learned from their shortcomings, as well. For decades in American politics, we put profits over people. The results were deadly—and unjust. To reverse that legacy now means that we must begin instituting systems that can account for this past injustice, and provide the material resources to our government and our communities to move towards healthier, more sustainable, and more livable futures. It is imperative that Gov. Hochul now act without delay toward such ends by immediately implementing the cap and invest program.

I was privileged to be in Catania over the past week to see the Madleen embark on its mission to deliver vital humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.

The Madleen is one of the boats of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which hopes to bring about an end to Israel’s blockade of Gaza. The boat departed Sicily on Sunday carrying a dozen activists along with food, medicine and other supplies.

Two million Gazans have suffered under siege by Israel for many months now. I arrived at the port and was met with a feeling of hope, care and bravery. There is no freedom without solidarity, and the Freedom Flotilla is solidarity.

The mission represents the very best of our shared humanity, and the fact that, despite the intimidation we are subjected to and the attempts to silence and deceive by the aggressor and their allies, the arc of the moral universe will always bend towards justice.

The delivery of humanitarian aid is vital, but so too is the message that the Madleen carries with it — that this genocide in Gaza must be brought to an end, and the foundations laid for the ultimate liberation of the Palestinian people from their oppressor.

Liberation is not merely an academic thought exercise, it is an active living and breathing thing inside the people of the world, especially the Irish people, who long endured an occupation of their own. It is unconscionable what is happening in Gaza, and the Freedom Flotilla is a lighthouse in a very dark time for our humanity.

The mission represents the very best of our shared humanity, and the fact that, despite the intimidation we are subjected to and the attempts to silence and deceive by the aggressor and their allies, the arc of the moral universe will always bend towards justice.

When international law is routinely undermined, and where the multilateral fora responsible for promoting peace, equality and human rights around the world fail to hold nation states to account for war crimes, activists and organisers are left with little choice but to place themselves in harm’s way in the pursuit of justice.

Here in Ireland, we must add to their chances of breaking the siege by adding our voice and solidarity to their mission, so they and the world know we continue to watch and will not stand for the destruction and interception of humanitarian missions.

Danger on the seas

It is highly likely that the Israeli authorities will attempt to obstruct or intercept this critical humanitarian mission. Just four weeks ago, the ship Conscience was subject to drone attacks by Israel shortly before the commencement of its humanitarian mission to Gaza from Malta.

Despite these attacks occurring just outside of Maltese territorial waters, the European Union has done nothing to hold the perpetrator to account.

In 2010, another humanitarian mission by the Freedom Flotilla was violently intercepted by the Israeli authorities on its approach to Gaza, with 10 activists and crew members being killed. Israel was never held to account. For as long as the international community fails to uphold international law, the Israeli authorities will continue to act with the impunity they have been empowered with.

We know that Israel, with the support of the United States, is currently seeking to privatise the delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza, sidelining the United Nations and the World Food Programme.

Despite the risks, the activists on the Madleen are undertaking too critical a mission not to continue; to deliver vital humanitarian aid to a suffering people now at risk of enforced famine by their oppressor. Where humanity fails, human rights defenders will always defy, and the Irish Government must now publicly call for safe passage; silence is not an option.

I have heard government leaders say that nobody has a monopoly over concern or compassion for the Palestinian people, but what Governments and media need to realise is that they have a monopoly over resources, power and political relationships and therefore what they do on an international stage matters.

Where is the international community?

It is absolutely imperative that Western governments and international and multilateral organisations now pull every lever at their disposal to bring this genocide of historic proportions to an end.

Governments should use the remaining diplomatic channels to implore Israel to end the blockade and siege of Gaza and to facilitate the safe and unobstructed passage of critical humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. A business-as-usual approach to relations with Israel cannot continue — we must impose sanctions, sever trade ties, and prevent the transfer of munitions of war, which are fuelling the genocide.

If we do not act now, our fingerprints will mark the annihilation of the Palestinian people through our complicity. The freedom flotilla is a peaceful act of civil resistance, and should not be met with hostility by the Israeli authorities, and our attention on it can help to ensure it arrives in Gaza safely.

The activists are trained in non-violence and are motivated only by the principles of human rights and global justice. In circumstances where the vessel is met with hostility, it is incumbent on the rules-based order to defend the activists and their expression of humanity and solidarity for the Palestinian people.

I do not believe there is a time, not even a second, when Ireland does not support what is right. We have demonstrated that time and time again with the consistent commitment of the Irish people to the people of Gaza.

Just today, we have heard reports from the United Nations that aid from the US and Israeli-backed Humanitarian Foundation is to be suspended following a day of open fire on Palestinians seeking aid, killing at least 27 people.

With that in mind, what can one boat of people do against the might of the Israeli army, you might ask? Well, the act of non-violent resistance has always had a place in conflicts throughout history. Martin Luther King Jr said, “Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals”. When everything has gone dark and humanity feels powerless against the brutality of a regime, the deliberate highlighting of that brutality in a non-violent way can be a powerful thing.

The activists of the Madleen are risking their own lives to highlight the horrific cruelty of the Israeli government against the Palestinians in Gaza. If those seeking aid are targets, then so too are those seeking to bring that aid, so all eyes must be firmly on the Freedom Flotilla; their lives depend on it.

This article first appeared in Ireland's The Journal.

For nearly seven years, I’ve clocked in and out at a Walmart in Memphis, Tennessee, where I stock shelves, help customers, and push myself through double shifts to make ends meet. Like so many of my colleagues, I’ve poured my time and energy into this company, and also like so many of them, that hard work has gone unnoticed.

I have more than 15 years of managerial retail experience, but I still find it extremely difficult to advance at Walmart. As a Black woman, this is unfortunately not a unique experience, especially at Walmart. Even though I’ve been working for the company for years, people who look like me are rarely given opportunities for growth. Management will keep you at the cash register for decades, with little hope for a raise or a promotion.

So when Walmart announced it was joining the wave of corporations that are rolling back their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, it felt like a punch to the gut, and makes me question if I still belong here.

While Walmart executives are granting themselves multi-million dollar raises, the Black and brown workers who make their company successful are struggling.

Walmart is the single largest private employer of Black workers in the United States, and as the biggest retailer in the country, Walmart is granted the opportunity to set the standard for other retailers across the nation. Their policies don’t just influence what happens inside its stores — they shape the lives of millions of working families across this country.

Nationwide, more than half of Walmart associates are women and people of color, yet the majority of leadership roles still go to white men.

But it’s not just limited opportunities for growth that are stifling Black Walmart employees. I can tell you from my experience, and the conversations I’ve had with colleagues, that inequities are taking place at stores across the country. We see who gets promoted and who doesn’t. Which employees get steady work hours, and which get sent home early by their managers. We see who gets ignored, and who gets a voice.

These discrepancies in how Walmart associates are treated too often seem to fall along racial and gender lines.

DEI initiatives were created to address these very problems by helping to promote fair treatment and put an end to racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. These are policies created to ensure everyone has a fair shot, and that every worker is treated with respect and dignity.

This common sense framework benefits not just workers, but also a company’s long-term success. A diverse and inclusive workplace is a stronger workplace. When employees feel valued and see opportunities for growth, regardless of their race or background, they are much more engaged, productive, and loyal.

With DEI now cast aside, Walmart workers are feeling the opposite. We feel left behind, jaded, and betrayed.

But shareholders have a powerful opportunity to step up and support Walmart's workforce. In June, I’ll be presenting a shareholder proposal, alongside United for Respect Education Fund, calling for a third-party independent racial equity audit at Walmart.

This proposal is not about pointing fingers. Instead it’s about seeking truth, accountability, and transparency so that we can begin to actually change the culture at Walmart.

For years, Walmart has stated its commitment to diversity and inclusion, and an audit would provide an objective assessment of whether these commitments translate into real equity within the company.

We cannot sit by as Walmart makes hollow promises, and we cannot roll back the clock on workplace equality. While Walmart executives are granting themselves multi-million dollar raises, the Black and brown workers who make their company successful are struggling. Walmart has the ability to level the playing field by setting the gold standard for employee treatment. This is a company that not only can afford to do better, but has a moral obligation to do better.

The proposal sends a clear message: we need transparency, accountability, and a genuine commitment to racial equity that goes beyond words. As someone who has dedicated years to this company, I urge shareholders to stand with the workers who make them profitable, and ensure that accountability isn’t lost with Walmart's abandonment of DEI.

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As always, “DeProgram” with CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and political cartoonist Ted Rall digs into today’s issues with depth and insight. First, John and Ted break down the Trump-Musk feud, sparked when Elon Musk blasted Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” as a “disgusting abomination” for adding $2.5 trillion to the national debt, clashing with Trump’s promises and splitting the GOP. Next, we examine the bill itself, which extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, ends taxes on tips and overtime, and imposes strict SNAP and Medicaid work requirements. House Republicans like Mike Flood and Ashley Hinson now regret their votes, facing boos at town halls in Nebraska and Iowa.

Then, we turn to the Tom Girardi fraud sentencing, where the 86-year-old disgraced lawyer is sent to federal prison for seven years. This hits close for Ted Rall, as Girardi once represented him in a 2015 defamation lawsuit against the LA Times, a case tainted by Girardi’s later-revealed corruption, leaving Rall entangled in a legal mess. John provides insight into what Girardi faces next.

Finally, we tackle the Iran nuclear talks. On the DeProgram show with political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, expect razor-sharp analysis of these pivotal stories. Join us today at 5 pm ET LIVE and streaming all day 24-7 on YouTube and Rumble for a fearless take on the headlines!

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