As J.D. Vance pointed out, the United States has poured billions of dollars into building Israel into the world’s neediest welfare state. But, as David Bowie used to say on MTV, too much is never enough for them.

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• For decades, the idea that Iran’s regime represented the worst of the world’s worst stood as a pillar of Republican foreign policy. A different perspective is taking hold in the American Right: Iran as a pragmatic country that the United States can, and must, learn to live with.

• Back-to-back major earthquakes strike Venezuela, destroying buildings in the capital Caracas and killing an unknown number of people in the economically-devastates nation.

• New York Attorney General Letitia James expresses frustration with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for endorsing a group of democratic socialists for statewide races, saying some don’t understand race and class. “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done,” James said.

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• A U.N. report says Israeli security forces target, abuse and deliberately kill Palestinian children as part of the genocide. One Palestinian kid has been killed on average every day since the start of the cease-fire 8 months ago, UNICEF finds. “They were killed in their homes, in their schools, playing football, fishing. They were shot, bombed and hit by airstrikes.”

• The leader of a group of protesters accused of being members of “Antifa” is sentenced to 100 years for an armed assault last summer against an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. Six other defendants were sentenced to between 50 and 70 years. Another, who was not even present, was given 30 years in prison. A final defendant is scheduled to be sentenced next month. The remarkably stiff penalties were much longer than those handed down for the 1,500 rioters prosecuted — and then given clemency — for Jan. 6, 2021.

• Leftists and democratic socialists win all three New York City congressional races, as angry populist voters deliver a harsh rebuke to the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party.

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While the IDF was ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, razing 80% of its buildings and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of its people in an internationally condemned genocide, the Israeli people were calm and happy. Now that Trump is forcing Israel to stop attacking Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli warmongers are furious. This society has screwed-up priorities.

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During the pandemic, I did something stupid: I published a book. Bookstores were closed, so authors obviously could not promote their books by going on tour. Like a lot of other titles that came out in 2021, “The Stringer”—a graphic novel written by me and drawn by Pablo Callejo—got lost in the shuffle.

Too bad, and not just for my bottom line. It was a good read about an important topic: deepfakes. What would happen, I wondered after considering the intersection of underemployed reporters in an age of decline with their deep connections to the dangerous places some of them cover, if a rogue journalist were to manipulate global politics—and even start wars—by creating fake imagery and audio of world leaders insulting one another?

Behind that question lies a deeper philosophical and psychological concern. What do human beings do after they come to accept that they cannot believe anything they read, hear, or see? What if there is no reliable way to tell the difference between reality and artifice? What happens?

Learned helplessness?

Revolution?

Nothing?

Americans have always lived in an era when politicians lied and news organizations misled, typically through sins of omission. Democratic-aligned news orgs ignore Benghazi and Biden’s mental decline; Republican ones neglect to follow up MIA WMDs and promises of $2-a-gallon gas.

There used to be ways to triangulate the truth. A myriad of news sources from a wide range of ideological viewpoints and formats, all financially incentivized to check and criticize one another, competed within metro areas and across the nation. The decline of print as a profit model, corporate consolidation, and legacy journalists succumbing to the race for clicks in a highly polarized political landscape have since reduced both the frequency and the reliability of verification and debunking between rivals.

Until a few years ago, stories were almost never made up of whole cloth. Bias manifested itself through which aspects of a story were emphasized or ignored in order to decontextualize events. Now, if you are a reasonably savvy news consumer, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: Is this real? Did this really happen?

Ninety-four percent of U.S. social media users told a recent CNET poll that they encounter AI-created or altered content, but only 44% of adults feel confident that they can tell real photos and videos from fakes. I’ve been fooled. Now, when I watch a video, I tell myself: Wait a minute. This might be BS.

Eighty-four percent of respondents to an international March Malwarebytes survey say that video evidence no longer feels like proof.

Nor does lack of evidence. When Trump’s ballyhooed $16 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., turned sour—with algae blooms turning the water green and the newly installed blue bottom disintegrating—the president quickly blamed unidentified vandals for using some sort of box cutter to create a 350-foot-long slash a foot and a half below the water line. No one, not even Trump-affiliated media outlets like Fox News, presented visual evidence. Right-wing influencers spread Trump’s ridiculous lie. Those are the people I worry about most—those who believe everything they see and hear, as long as it originates from a source they’ve decided to trust because they agree with its politics or some other cultural signifier.

Evolution did not prepare us for this tsunami of digital slop. Human cognition evolved for smaller-scale, lower-volume information environments. AI deepfakes flood us with hyper-realistic, unverifiable content, overwhelming our common sense and prompting us to check out in order to stay sane. They also feed into the “liar’s dividend” paradox, where the existence of deepfakes allows politicians and other liars to dismiss inconvenient facts: “That’s a deepfake! Fake news!”

Polls show that Americans (and citizens of other countries) are tuning out the news and social media because they do not know what to believe. Only 25% of Americans trust what they see on the news, a record low.

Our situation is not without precedent. Soviet citizens consumed sports scores, the weather, and other apolitical content readily, but when it came to politics, they relied on rumors, personal networks, foreign and opposition broadcasts, and samizdat. Soviet citizens were not passive dupes. They were active interpreters navigating a polluted information environment, and they knew it.

What can we do? In a global news environment riddled with deepfakes, there is no alternative to the lies—we need a relatively objective extraterrestrial broadcaster with no stake in Terran affairs. Deepfake technology is improving by the day; soon that telltale “AI sheen” will disappear altogether.

Human beings are highly adaptable and require accurate, reliable information in order to conduct business and live their lives. So we will eventually figure this out.

Independent fact-checkers have largely proven ineffective in discouraging misinformation. Some that purported to be unbiased turned out to be tainted, and partisans reflexively reject truths that run against their narratives. Watermarking, cryptographic signatures, and mandatory disclosures for AI-generated content, however, are already emerging as warning signs that you are being exposed to artificial material. Public funding for nonpartisan journalism would help, but ironically that would require bipartisan congressional approval. We should all adopt a tone of epistemic humility. It is okay to admit that you know that you do not know, and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude before reacting to an outrage that may or may not have really occurred.

Until we unravel the deepfake mess, politics in particular—and the public square in general—is going to get a lot rougher, stupider, and less responsive to our wants and needs. The first step, after all, is admitting we have a problem, and we’re not there yet.

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

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• Incumbents beware: The left-wing public is pissed off, too. As voters express frustration with the corporatist establishment, democratic-socialist congressional candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani have the potential to score upsets in New York’s primary elections today.

• The Senate passes, 85-5, a major housing bill with a goal of cutting housing prices by stopping Wall Street investors from buying up more than 350 single-family homes, among other things. The House will pass, Trump will sign, it will have no effect.

• A judge bans Trump’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements,(SAVE) because the national database of aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data could result in voters being wrongly purged.

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After killing 3,500 Iranians and 13 Americans, while costing billions of dollars and America’s global credibility, Donald Trump settled his joint war with Israel against Iran with an arrangement that left Iran infinitely stronger and the United States with, at most, exactly what it had before: an open Strait of Hormuz.

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In the same way that Nixon kept telling the American people that the end of the Vietnam War was right around the corner, Trump has told us at least 36 times that a peace deal with Iran and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz—critical to the global economy—were imminent.

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• The U.S. and Iran have remotely signed their memorandum of understanding to end the war and open the Strait of Hormuz, and the agreement is now in effect.

• Israel’s prime minister has been silent. His silence echoes against growing demands from across Israel’s political spectrum that he defy Donald Trump and keep fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. Netanyahu has staked his political future on the war with Iran and is still insisting that campaign has been a success, even as his critics list the ways Iran has emerged stronger from this conflict.

• Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announces that he is halting all contact with European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas for reportedly comparing Israel to South Africa’s apartheid regime. Officials and diplomats said that Kallas compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to the apartheid system that existed in South Africa until the early 1990s. The reported remarks sparked criticism from a number of European representatives.

• A proposal to tax the wealth of billionaires in California has officially gathered enough signatures to appear on the November ballot. Proponents have until June 25 to decide if they want to proceed. The initiative would place a one-time, 5 percent tax on the assets of California residents with at least $1.1 billion and would dedicate most of the revenue to health care. (Those with between $1 billion and $1.1 billion would pay a lesser percentage.)

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Every person who has either participated in or witnessed a fight understands the doctrine of “he started it.” The fight begins with a provocation followed by a response. That same reasoning extends to politics and war. What has gotten lost between third grade and the septuagenarians who determine our fates however is an equally common-sense ethical norm: proportionality.

A verbal insult rarely justifies a physical attack. Even when the provocation takes the form of violence, retaliation must be proportional. Getting punched in the face once certainly justifies punching your assailant once in the face—maybe twice or three times—but not fifteen times nor stabbing or shooting them.

Victimhood is not a blank check. Being wronged does not give you license to do anything you want in response. Action provokes reaction; action never justifies overreaction.

This doctrine is codified in the laws of all 50 states. If you are assaulted, you can only use the amount of force that a reasonable person in the same situation would believe is necessary to defend against an imminent threat. Your response must match the level and nature of the danger.

Limitations based on proportionality also apply—at least when the law is adjudicated correctly—to crimes committed by individuals and punished by the state.

Punishment, we learn at an early age, should “fit the crime.” Excessive sentences undermine justice fairness and the legitimacy of the legal system whether under retributive (“just deserts”) or utilitarian (deterrence) judicial theories. In the United States, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Eighth Amendment (“excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted”) to prohibit grossly disproportionate sentences. Jaywalkers shouldn’t go to prison; robbers shouldn’t be executed.

Similarly, international law as affirmed by the International Court of Justice dictates that defensive force must be roughly commensurate in scale, scope and effects with the initial armed attack and the ongoing threat it poses. It cannot go beyond what is necessary to repel the attack neutralize the immediate threat and prevent further attacks in the reasonably near future. A nation that uses excessive force to retaliate loses its status as a victim and becomes an aggressor.

“The State of Israel has a full right to self-defense,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said recently. Israeli officials and their supporters say this so often that it has become a cliché. Then, however, he adds: “We are exercising it to the extent necessary.” That is certainly not true. And it is why most of the American people have turned against the Jewish state. Even President Trump, arguably the most strident supporter of Israel since its founding with U.S. backing in 1948, has begun to openly question Netanyahu’s government’s total disregard for the principle of proportionality—and is at the brink of a possible previously unthinkable breaking point prompted by his desire to make peace with Iran.

Another political cliché is the impossibility of determining who is acting and who is reacting, in a conflict that both Palestinians and Israelis say is provoked by the other side. Even if you accept the Israeli narrative at face value, however, their refusal to acknowledge the existence of legal and ethical strictures against escalation has turned what was once touted as the only democracy in the Middle East into an international pariah.

On October 7, 2023 Hamas raided southern Israel and killed about 1200 people, mostly Israelis. Casting themselves as innocent victims of an unprovoked attack—without acknowledging its brutal 16-year-long blockade and repeated bombing campaigns against the Gaza Strip—Israeli officials quickly announced plans to inflict bloody vengeance on the long-suffering civilian population.

Frequently turning to the Holocaust to try to justify their own genocide, Israeli leaders announced that Hamas’ terrorist attack gave them carte blanche to kill every Palestinian and seize every square inch of their land.

“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. Dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza “is one option,” said Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu. “This [bombing wave] is not enough. There should be more. There should be no limits to the response… until we see hundreds of thousands fleeing Gaza,” added an education minister.

Eighty-one percent of Gaza has been destroyed. At least 73,000 Gazans have been killed and 173,000 wounded—a very conservative estimate.

Wildly disproportionate casualty figures are nothing new to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Between 1948 and 2023, roughly ten Palestinians were killed for every Israeli. While the disparity of bloodshed is itself disturbing, news outlets and political activists should also hold themselves to account for failing to emphasize the fact that even in war there are rules—and that proportional response is an important one.

The world did not buy Israel’s anything-goes “response.”

Perhaps many of us in the West turn a blind eye to disproportionate violence because we ourselves embrace it when it suits us. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda killed about 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” President George W. Bush told a gathering of religious leaders on September 20th. So far, the U.S. has killed at least 4.5 million people—a retaliation ratio that puts even genocidal Israel to shame—in its “Global War on Terror” against Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.

Adhering to the doctrine of proportionality requires something exceedingly difficult. A society that views itself as an innocent victim of violence must, even while mourning its dead, calm itself, tamp down its emotions, consider a long-term historical perspective and how it will be judged—all while ignoring or overruling those among them screaming for vengeance.

When Argentina invaded and occupied the British Falkland Islands in 1982, the U.K. deployed a naval task force, recaptured the colony through targeted military operations and withdrew. It did not invade Argentina, bomb Buenos Aires, or try to overthrow the Argentine government—which might have led to a self-defeating quagmire.

Restraint is hard. But it’s worth it. Those who temper their responses earn the respect of other nations as well as their sympathy. (Who today still feels sorry for America’s losses on 9/11, or Israel’s on October 7th?) Those who keep calm are preparing for the future. Someday, after all, they themselves may find themselves targeted for retribution. As the Bible says, those who have been merciful are far more likely to receive it themselves.

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

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• Iran could have access to up to $300 billion in reconstruction funds if it adheres to a peace agreement it recently struck with the U.S. It will be funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition, and is designed ​to trigger postwar investment into Iran.

• The G7 pledged to “accelerate humanitarian and reconstruction efforts” and implement “relevant political and security measures” in Gaza, and “for ending violence in the West Bank.” the G7 leaders said. In their most recent terrorist attack, Israeli colonists vandalized a mosque and set it ablaze in the Palestinian village of Jaljilya. Pictures show the damage inside the building with Hebrew graffiti on the walls.

• Americans who recently received proof of Canadian citizenship are being asked to surrender their certificates, sparking confusion and disappointment. The letters were sent to an unknown number of people who obtained citizenship via an ancestral tie to Canada under a “Lost Canadians” law enacted in December.

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Between the destruction of the East Wing and the construction of the octagon for a UFC cage match on the White House lawn, Trump has turned the nation’s presidential mansion into a hideous eyesore representative of his presidency. It’s ironic, considering his obsession with national monuments.

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• If you can protest in New York, New York, you can protest anywhere! The liberal state’s corporatist governor creates buffer zones that restricts demonstrations around houses of worship. Last year, she banned protesters who wear masks. And now, activists who recently staged sit-ins at the state Capitol are hit with misdemeanor charges — higher than the traditional disorderly conduct tickets.

• Gavin Newsom says he and his wife are under investigation by Trump’s Justice Department. The California Governor says federal agents want to speak to his family, friends and former employees, demand records and are digging through years of documents. He accuses the Justice Department of “abusing the grand jury process.”

• The 2026 Iran War peace agreement is due to be signed Friday in Geneva. But Iran’s foreign minister said Israeli forces remaining in southern Lebanon, or any Israeli strikes on the country, would constitute a violation of the U.S.-Iran deal—while Israeli officials say their invasion troops would stay in Lebanon, as “Trump’s agreement does not bind us.” Netanyahu: “We have our own interests.”

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• Trump gets the 80th birthday present he wanted most: a ceasefire deal with Iran that will result in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The “peace agreement,” however, merely restores the state of affairs before he and Israel started the war four months ago, with zero gains, much less “regime change” or “unconditional surrender.” Iran, on the other hand, wins bigly. It gets $24 billion, keeps its nuclear program, and forces Israel to stop attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon.

• Netanyahu, facing a national election this fall, has every incentive to continue bombing, as Israelis across the political spectrum called the deal a disaster. If he does, however, he risks a major rupture in the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

• Trump is demanding Congress attach his SAVE America Act passport-to-vote bill to legislation renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, used to spy on Americans.

• Mitch ⁠McConnell, a US senator ⁠from Kentucky, is admitted ​to ‌the ‌hospital ‌on Sunday morning, ‌a ​spokesperson ⁠said ​in ​a statement. The 84-year-old has frozen up and become unresponsive during several press engagements in recent years.

• Britain will ban children under 16 from using a range of social media apps including Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to protect young people from harmful content and excessive screen time, Prime Minister Keir Starmer says, joining Australia, Canada, Brazil and Indonesia.

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A ceasefire means the temporary cessation of hostilities. Yet, in the current conflict involving the US, Israel, and Iran, Israel in particular continues to bomb and kill. Nevertheless, the media describes the ceasefire as still in effect. Language no longer means anything.

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• Is Donald Trump living in his personal fantasy world? For the 39th time in two months, he announces that a peace agreement is at hand in his and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran, only to have Iran deny his market-manipulating claims. Iran, he says, would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and disavow nuclear weapons—i.e., a return to the status quo ante bellum.

• U.S. Park Police, the D.C. fire department and members of the National Guard respond to large-scale etchings of the numerals “86 47” on the ‌grounds of the National ‌Mall. A spokesperson for the U.S. Interior Department described the markings as “deranged vandalism” and promised to “hold those responsible accountable.” Multiple emergency vehicles could be seen encircling the grass. A team of officers stood over brown patches in the grass, wearing gloves, and collected samples for testing from the grass with materials from a yellow case. Pedestrians were not permitted to walk on the grass, and a Park Service helicopter circled overhead.

• An man facing death by nitrogen gas is spared as the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to set aside a lower-court ruling that found the method is unconstitutionally cruel, issuing a brief order that came well after the hour Alabama originally planned to initiate Jeffery Lee’s execution, which violated the jury’s verdict.

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We all know that Trump obsesses over attendance numbers for the big national events he throws. Which is why it’s curious that he has made clear half the country — Democrats — are not invited to the nation’s big 250th birthday party this summer.

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• The Trump administration’s policy of criminalizing criticism of Israel escalates dramatically as 8 people affiliated with the University of Michigan are charged with conspiring to threaten campus leaders and others into severing ties with Israel. An indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, accused pro-Palestinian activists of crossing the line from campus protest to crimes that included threats and vandalism. The defendants face varying charges, but the indictment included federal counts of conspiracy to transmit threats, witness intimidation and destruction of property to prevent seizure.

• Rioters set houses, vehicles and a city bus ablaze in Belfast, torching neighborhoods after a video of a knife attack by a Sudanese asylum seeker went viral, igniting the latest anti-immigration violence to convulse the UK. Men in balaclavas and hoods shouted “foreigners out.” The riots spread from Belfast to towns across Northern Ireland and reached into Scotland and England by nightfall.

• The Canadian government introduces a new digital safety proposal that would require users to verify that they are at least 16 to access websites like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. A new regulator called the Digital Safety Commission of Canada would administer the proposed measures.

• U.S. airstrikes destroyed a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz. Water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby, where temperatures are above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure can constitute a war crime under international law.

• “Hopes were fading”: Unless lawmakers act by midnight Friday, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, will sunset. Democrats are angry, not at domestic spying, but that Trump named Bill Pulte, housing official without any national security experience, as acting director of national intelligence.

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